Blame the Locals!!!

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kellyahern said:


Oh yes, I know. I just didn't want to be accused of "Bush bashing" again.

Also part of FEMA's responsibility in pre-storm preparation is to work with the local goverment on prevention measures. There was an article wondering how much FEMA's budget cuts affected this program. I wish I could find it. It was an interview with Jane Brown (I'm not sure on the name :reject: ), a former FEMA official.



but don't you see: any questioning of our Dear Leader is treasonous!



the way i understand it, the local response was inadequate; the FEMA response was disasterous. this was posted on a blog, and all of these stories are linked on said blog:

1000 folks from the Lafayette area with 500 boats head to NO to aid the rescue get turned back by FEMA.

Wal-Mart trucks with food and water get turned back by FEMA. More here

The USS Bataan off the coast of LA ready to help, but underused by FEMA. See also here

Shipments of diesel fuel being turned back by FEMA

firemen from Houston turned away by FEMA

More fire fighters turned away.

Angel Flight South Central seaplanes getting a run around from FEMA

DMAT Teams available but still on call.

Red Cross kept out of New Orleans. Note: this is actually attibuted to the state Homeland Security department. More information on who is responsible for this decision would be helpful. See also here

Northcom ready to act, but not given needed orders.

Mobile medical lab stalled in Mississippi. Doctors and hospitals offering aid but not getting response. This article is a bit confusing as to whether the problem is at the state or federal level or both.

NYT article discusses the controversy and provides additional claims of FEMA interfering generally and some specific examples.

Florida airboaters stalled by FEMA.

Water tanker aircraft for fire fighting and Amtrack trains for evacuation. See here.

Morticians turned away.

Maryland fire fighters blocked by FEMA.

Generators turned away by FEMA in Slidel.

Nevada law enforcement volunteers put on hold.

Wisconsin busses turned back by red tape at several levels

Michigan buses

Aid from Chicago

500 search/rescuers in Dallas hotels waiting

Fire fighters in Dallas. This could be another story about the same previous group. If anyone knows, I'll adjust the post accordingly.

CA cautioned by FEMA to go slow in accepting survivors or it might loose funds.

Long list of foreign aid refused by the federal government. I don't have a reference for this, so if anyone has it, please let me know.

American authorities "to busy" to respond to Canadian offers of aid

http://constructiveinterference.blogspot.com/2005/09/local-failure-caused-by-fema.html
 
I think this is it:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm

(her name is Jane Bullock, not Jane Brown, sorry :reject: )

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...a5sep05,0,685581.story?coll=la-home-headlines


Under the law, Chertoff said, state and local officials must direct initial emergency operations. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials," he said.

Chertoff's remarks, which echoed earlier statements by President Bush, prompted withering rebukes both from former senior FEMA staffers and outside experts.

"They can't do that," former agency chief of staff Jane Bullock said of Bush administration efforts to shift responsibility away from Washington. "The moment the president declared a federal disaster, it became a federal responsibility…. The federal government took ownership over the response," she said. Bush declared a disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi when the storm hit a week ago.
 
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There is an excellent article on salon.com discussing this, but you have to watch a commercial or be a member in order to view it. So I am going to post most of it...apologies for the length. :huh:

...

Daley wasn't the only generous donor to be rebuffed. Throughout last week, various local and state governments, corporations and nonprofit organizations across the nation attempted to help in the relief effort, only to be snubbed by federal officials -- officials who were themselves providing precious little aid to those in need. Citing security concerns, the Department of Homeland Security barred the American Red Cross from entering New Orleans with food. Five hundred Floridian airboaters were ready to rescue people stranded in inundated homes, but FEMA turned them down. Twenty sheriff's deputies from Loudoun County, Va., suffered a similar fate. And Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, La., said on "Meet the Press" on Sunday that FEMA declined to let him accept three tanker trucks of water donated by Wal-Mart, as well as 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in a Coast Guard vessel docked in his district.

During the 1990s, FEMA was routinely praised as one of the best-functioning federal agencies. Its response to the Midwestern floods of 1993, the Northridge earthquake of 1994, and 1995's Oklahoma City terrorist attack are considered models of emergency response. By contrast, its performance during Katrina is almost universally acknowledged to have been abysmally poor. At first, FEMA's post-Katrina failure appears baffling: What happened to the once-great FEMA? But George Haddow, who served as the deputy chief of staff at FEMA under James Lee Witt, Bill Clinton's FEMA director, thinks that FEMA's current flaws are all too understandable -- and are a direct consequence of the Bush administration's decision to pull the federal government out of the natural disaster-relief business and turn over more power to state and local officials.

Indeed, the White House's new response to the political disaster prompted by Katrina -- one in which officials are attempting to blame authorities in Louisiana, rather than in Washington, for the slow aid -- underscores the Bush philosophy. According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can "attack, attack, attack."

We began to see some of these attacks over the weekend. Sunday's Washington Post cited an anonymous Bush administration official who explained that one reason that the federal government didn't intervene more quickly in Louisiana was because Kathleen Blanco, the state's Democratic governor, failed to declare a state of emergency there, a necessary step for federal help to flow. An article in Newsweek repeats the same claim.

But there's a problem with the White House's excuse: It's patently false. As Josh Marshall points out, Blanco declared a state of emergency on Aug. 26 -- a day before Bush declared a federal emergency in Louisiana. (You can see Blanco's official declaration in PDF format here; the Washington Post has corrected its article.) On Aug. 28 -- the day before Katrina made landfall -- Blanco followed her declaration with an official letter (PDF) to Bush that requested all manner of emergency supplies her state would need for the aftermath.

Haddow says that these requests should have been enough -- more than enough -- to prompt a full-scale federal response. Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."

Close coordination with state officials was key to the Clinton administration's capacity to act quickly in the heat of a disaster, Haddow says. "We had a really solid partnership, so we received solid, timely information from the ground. Then we managed that information and turned it into a mission assignment." In other words, when people on the ground needed something, they knew who in the federal government to ask, and when the federal government had extra resources at the ready -- cops from Chicago, say, or water from Wal-Mart -- it would know where to send them. Contrast that situation to what happened after Katrina, when both Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, and Michael Brown, the FEMA director, admitted to several reporters that they had no idea that people were starving at the New Orleans Convention Center, even though the grim scene there had been played and replayed on television all day.

The Bush administration's distance from local disaster-relief officials is by design. From the moment Bush stepped into office, he's been determined to move away from the coordinated state/local/federal disaster-relief approach used by Clinton. Instead, as Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first FEMA dirctor, told a congressional panel in 2001, Bush wanted to pull the federal government out of the disaster-relief business and aimed to "restore the predominant role of state and local response to most disasters." The federal government became even less involved in natural disaster relief after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when FEMA's mission was shifted toward responding to terrorist attacks. In 2002, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA -- which Clinton had elevated to a Cabinet-level agency -- was made one department in the massive bureaucracy. As a result, although George W. Bush has a nickname for FEMA director Brown ("Brownie"), Brown enjoys far less clout under Bush than Witt enjoyed under Clinton, which Haddow says is an "incalculable loss of influence" for FEMA.

State and local disaster-relief officials have been complaining about the lack of federal involvement in emergency response for some time. Trina Sheets, the executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, which represents local emergency personnel, told Salon that "since the Department of Homeland Security was established there has been a steady degradation of the capabilities." Local officials protested earlier this year, when the Department of Homeland Security proposed an internal reorganization that would officially absolve FEMA of its disaster-preparedness functions and instead hand disaster relief to a new agency. Sheets says that her group has expressed its "concern" about the move in a meeting with Chertoff. Other local disaster-relief directors have been more critical. The day after Katrina struck New Orleans, Eric Holdeman, director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post denouncing the reorganization plan as a "a death blow to an agency that was already on life support." He added: "Those of us in the business of dealing with emergencies find ourselves with no national leadership and no mentors."

Of particular concern to local officials is the administration's increasing focus on terrorism to the exclusion of natural disasters. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office showed that "almost 3 of every 4 grant dollars appropriated to the [Department of Homeland Security] for first responders in fiscal year 2005 were for 3 primary programs that had an explicit focus on terrorism." More than $2 billion in grant money is available to local governments looking to improve the way they respond to terrorist attacks, but only $180 million is available under the main grant program for natural disaster funding, Homeland Security's Emergency Management Performance Grant program. The administration had proposed cutting that amount to $170 million, even though NEMA had identified a $264 million national shortfall in natural-disaster funding.

"We have testified before Congress countless times, we have sent letters to DHS, we have met with Secretary Chertoff as recently as three weeks ago, pleading for a balanced approach between terrorism and natural disasters," Sheets said.

And balance, Haddow agrees, is what's needed. "You gotta do both," he says. "You've got to fight terrorism." But you've got to respond to hurricanes and earthquakes, too. And when Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on the Saturday before Katrina struck the Gulf, he made a promise to residents that he would respond, Haddow says. "People died because they couldn't get it right," he says. "People died because they didn't deliver on their promise."
 
Thank you sulawesigirl4. That was what I was trying to say about the FEMA budget/downsizing affecting local and state agencies.

Re: the unused buses. Yes, the mayor should have used them to evacuate people. But if the meetings were still taking place between FEMA and local officials, isn't that one of the things that would have came up.

Haddow says that these requests should have been enough -- more than enough -- to prompt a full-scale federal response. Under the Clinton administration's FEMA, with Witt as the head, a storm of Katrina's magnitude would have prompted federal and state officials to actually meet in order to coordinate their response. "You were all working together to anticipate needs," Haddow says. "You're all sitting in the same room when the things happened -- the Midwest flood, the Northridge quake, the Oklahoma City bombing and all the disasters we responded to. We were in the same room together and nobody had to point fingers."
 
Teta040 said:
Hey Dreadsox, read this one, courtesy of the ultra-conservative Salt Lake City Tribune. SOmeone posted it in another thread.

www.sltrib.com/ci_3004197

And I suppose those who choose to turn in their FEMA ID's as a result of this, refeusing to serve, will be demonized later by the Feds as having deserted the country in a time of great need. I'm sure they will alert America to the fact that they refused to "aid the victims." Remember, they can't be deployed to the area unless they do this.

Is this part of the reason why he doesn't want to focus on finding answers right now? So he can cover his ass at the local level, starting with "neutralizing" the victims themselves. And you think he does not suspect that his horse-show buddy at FEMA may not have a lot to hide.

Read those last 2 paragraphs, Dread, I dare you to.

Your link is not working.

I would like to say that having made almost all of my posts since joining in here, that I think because I am an avid reader, I do try and read everything I can on a topic.

My life and responsibilities outside of FYM have increased to the point where I am not able to do as much research as I usually do. You do not have to dare me to read something. Many times I read articles and do not post them in here, and boom within hours someone has.

Sadly I do not have the time to put into a debate what I would like. This is not me running and hiding it is a fact of getting a new job.

In looking for the LAW that I heard referenced on the radio I found this.

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans/STATE OF LOUISIANA EOP 2005.doc

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans/EOPSupplement1a.pdf

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans/EOPSheltersupplement.pdf

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050829-2.html

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans/EOPSupplement1b.pdf

http://www.fema.gov/library/stafact.shtm#sec501

http://www.ohsep.louisiana.gov/plans/frp2003.pdf


I have started doing my reading of the law and responsibilities of the State, Local, and Federal Governement.......

Unfortunately I have not the time tonight, because I am actively working through three community organizations to raise some money to help.

Happy reading....I dare you:wink:
 
From A Guy Who's Been There

Guiliani: Don't Second-Guess Storm Effort

Rudolph Giuliani, who guided New York City through the dark days after Sept. 11, said there is no place for second-guessing during an emergency, and he is not interested in criticizing the way government officials handled Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The former mayor said before a speech Tuesday that it is too soon to draw any conclusions about whether the agencies that responded took too long or who was responsible. When the situation stabilizes, Giuliani said, the nation can examine the rescue efforts.

Giuliani said he would be willing to take a role in the relief effort but was not seeking a position.

Told by a questioner after the speech that he seemed the ideal candidate to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Giuliani said: "Maybe in a few years. Right now, I'm not a candidate for anything."

Giuliani for FEMA or all of Homeland Security?
 
The State of the Rest of the Union

Dems Blast Bush Over Hurricane Response

Democrats, divided over President Bush's handling of Iraq, are coming down hard on his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Some of the harshest words are coming from 2008 presidential hopefuls. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York ridiculed relief coordinator Michael Brown's suggestions. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said the hurricane's aftermath underscores the "two Americas" theme of his presidential campaign last year.

"It's piling on time," said Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker.
 
Yes, it is a little too quick for the democratic politicians to do this. There's plenty of anger, they don't need to stir it up, it's already there. As a Democrat, I don't want them to do this right now. For once, journalists are asking the tough questions. Let them.

But I do want to mention I just saw Tom Delay on CNN giving a speech about how the primary resposibility of this rests with the local and state officials. And then they showed Anderson Cooper interviewing the Louisianna governor out in the area. I thought how we haven't seen much of her over the past several days and then I realized that's probably because she has so much to do.

I'm happy they are having a bi-partisian investigation.
 
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Re: From A Guy Who's Been There

nbcrusader said:
Guiliani: Don't Second-Guess Storm Effort



Giuliani for FEMA or all of Homeland Security?

I strongly disagree with Giuliani's fascist no-questioning thinking. I think it's been amply demonstrated that without the level of outrage and criticism, authorities would have been even slower to respond, and more people would have died.

Also, any cursory look into his business dealings and relationships reveals a lot more uncomfortable questions than answers.
 
Re: The State of the Rest of the Union

nbcrusader said:

Haha - Hillary wants to ride Katrina all the way to the White House. It's been known for a long while she's just been looking for the right time and catalyst. For the sake of the country, I personally hope to she doesn't make it and will do everything in my power to campaign against her.

Also- what we've got to realize here is that Congress is just as much in the hot seat here and is going on the defensive any way they can (even by going on the offensive). People are rightly wondering in the light of such massive failure, just where the congressional oversight has been, and its a valid question that needs answering.
 
Re: Re: The State of the Rest of the Union

elfyx said:


Also- what we've got to realize here is that Congress is just as much in the hot seat here and is going on the defensive any way they can (even by going on the offensive). People are rightly wondering in the light of such massive failure, just where the congressional oversight has been, and its a valid question that needs answering.

You're right. All of the congressmen calling for the firing of the FEMA director, they didn't make a peep when he was confirmed. So, in reality, they're just as responsible for him being in the job as Bush.
 
Irvine511 said:

Long list of foreign aid refused by the federal government. I don't have a reference for this, so if anyone has it, please let me know.

American authorities "to busy" to respond to Canadian offers of aid

http://constructiveinterference.blogspot.com/2005/09/local-failure-caused-by-fema.html

your list of FEMA turn aways was even longer than mine....

I heard a few things this eve on AirAM about International help now just sitting around and waiting......
what can i remeber {i was waiting for a friend to go to the movies, so i was out and about} I'm not sure if I've paired the counties correctlly with their offeres....

from Sweden they have a special water purification ship...

Germany might have offered special diving/search teams....

India among other things offered straight cash which we still haven't bothered to take....

damn can't remember any more but i think i heard at least 3 more int'l offerings.....
 
You're right. All of the congressmen calling for the firing of the FEMA director, they didn't make a peep when he was confirmed. So, in reality, they're just as responsible for him being in the job as Bush.

Last year everyone was singing his praises during the Florida hurricanes. Said he did an oustanding job, and many suggested he be made director of homeland security.
 
MadelynIris said:


Last year everyone was singing his praises during the Florida hurricanes. Said he did an oustanding job, and many suggested he be made director of homeland security.

I'm really, really glad no one listened then.

Did the people in Florida say that? Because there have been some articles down here about people complaing about FEMA's actions.

http://www.abcactionnews.com/stories/2005/05/050510fema3.shtml

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/sfl-fema13feb13,0,164165.story?coll=sfla-news-utility

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/sfl-brown13feb13,0,4950680.story?coll=sfla-news-utility

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050108/NEWS/501080524/1017/POLITICS
 
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Re: Re: Re: The State of the Rest of the Union

kellyahern said:


You're right. All of the congressmen calling for the firing of the FEMA director, they didn't make a peep when he was confirmed. So, in reality, they're just as responsible for him being in the job as Bush.

That's right. Congress has screwed up too. And some of these confirmations came when the Democrats controlled Congress. I do not in any way consider this partisan.
 
kellyahern said:


I'm really, really glad no one listened then.

Did the people in Florida say that? Because there have been some articles down here about people complaing about FEMA's actions.


I notice that one of the people complaining about FEMA screw-ups is Rep. Katherine Harris. Of course it's her district that got hit, but she didn't mince words.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: The State of the Rest of the Union

verte76 said:

I do not in any way consider this partisan.

To the enraged outside objective observer and constituent, its definitely not partisan. This is accountability of government by the people.
 
verte76 said:


I notice that one of the people complaining about FEMA screw-ups is Rep. Katherine Harris. Of course it's her district that got hit, but she didn't mince words.

I believe she is up for election.....
 
kellyahern said:

I'm happy they are having a bi-partisian investigation.

it will only be a bi-partisan investigation IF the Republicans let the Democratic minority ALSO have power of supenas, if not then it cna't be bi-partison.

in the last several years the R's have done stuff & thwarted the D's being able to do certain leglislative stuff-- that even when the D's were in power in the Congress they let the R's do.
The D's did do some stuff against the R's when they were in charge...but what the R's have done has taken it around the bend....and far beyond what the S's ever did to them.
 
nbcrusader said:
I say let them use torture to get all the answers! We won't rest until we have everything!!!


[/sarcasm]


Torture for all, subpoenas for some!
 
Dreadsox said:


I believe she is up for election.....

Katherine Harris is a corrupt ghoul. That said, surely partisan politics has nothing to do with this comment.
 
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