We keep hearing how FEMA is messing things up, failing, etc etc.

Okay. How?
I can easily believe their resources were swallowed whole by Katrina, give the large area and population that was effected.  Are folks just mad that FEMA isn't everywhere and omnipresent, and wasn't in place 10 minutes after the storm eye passed over head?

Sounds like FEMA is big enough to deal with 80% of the disasters, and Katrina was in the 20% that was too big for them...

Okay, its been 4 days. Anyone?

42....

Its easy for people to be frustrated and angry and pointing fingers, especially with the media stirring the pot.  FEMA is doing its job as it intended, but with the local infrastructure completely wiped out, they are having to clean up someone else's mess along with help the evacuees.  However, I can tell you with 100% certainty that the federal .gov is working its collective ass off to clean up this mess.  

The finger pointing and blame casting is sensationalized news.  I refuse to belive that FEMA today, the same one that Brown headed up last year is any less effective.  They did respond to the 4 hurricanes that hit Florida within two weeks last year, ya know.  

People always want things to go right. They think they can control everything. So people think when something goes wrong, something must not have gone right or someone fucked something up.

Quoted: People always want things to go right. They think they can control everything. So people think when something goes wrong, something must not have gone right or someone fucked something up.

+1

The SEP Field (Somebody Else's Problem) generator is in full effect...

So far, the only Stupid FEMA Trick (tm), that I've heard was the group of firemen that came to help, and were kept in Atlanta. One report said they got assigned to hand out FEMA flyers, the other (MSNBC) said they were put into public relations and sexual harrassment awareness training.

Quoted: So far, the only Stupid FEMA Trick (tm), that I've heard was the group of firemen that came to help, and were kept in Atlanta. One report said they got assigned to hand out FEMA flyers, the other (MSNBC) said they were put into public relations and sexual harrassment awareness training.

The Firemen were told that was what they would be doing BEFORE the left for Atlanta.

You cannot really blame the public for what they think. I watched a 5 min. piece on NBC today in which New Orleans and Louisiana State official after State official bitched about the Federal response and how FEMA was responsible because people did not get food or water at the Superdome and Convention Center… that people had died because the FEMA did not get food or water there…

Not one word was mentioned by NBC that the reason there was little food or water was the State of Louisiana and NOT FEMA had kept the Red Cross and Salvation Army out of New Orleans. That the Red Cross and Salvation Army were ready to feed these people and the State of Lousiana stopped them from doing it.

It was surreal… NBC has to know the State kept the Red Cross and Salvation Army out this information has been on the Red Cross web site for over a week. The only conclusion one can draw is NBC is willfully misleading people and out right lying.

And before somebody chimes in and say this is not true here it is from the Red Cross web site.

www.redcross.org/faq/0,1096,0_682_4524,00.html

Disaster FAQs Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans? * Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders. * The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city. * The Red Cross has been meeting the needs of thousands of New Orleans residents in some 90 shelters throughout the state of Louisiana and elsewhere since before landfall. All told, the Red Cross is today operating 149 shelters for almost 93,000 residents. * The Red Cross shares the nation’s anguish over the worsening situation inside the city. We will continue to work under the direction of the military, state and local authorities and to focus all our efforts on our lifesaving mission of feeding and sheltering. * The Red Cross does not conduct search and rescue operations. We are an organization of civilian volunteers and cannot get relief aid into any location until the local authorities say it is safe and provide us with security and access. * The original plan was to evacuate all the residents of New Orleans to safe places outside the city. With the hurricane bearing down, the city government decided to open a shelter of last resort in the Superdome downtown. We applaud this decision and believe it saved a significant number of lives. * As the remaining people are evacuated from New Orleans, the most appropriate role for the Red Cross is to provide a safe place for people to stay and to see that their emergency needs are met. We are fully staffed and equipped to handle these individuals once they are evacuated.

Friday, Sept. 9, 2005 10:53 a.m. EDT
Red Cross Blocked Before Levee Break
Red Cross workers arrived in New Orleans with enough food, water and blankets for thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims the night before levees broke and flooded the city, but were prevented from delivering the aid to stranded citizens by state officials.
"I'm told that they were ready as soon as the winds died down and the roads were passable, which means before the levees broke," Fox News Channel's Major Garrett reported Thursday.
"They were there, they were ready ... when there clearly were lots of people already at the Superdome, because that's where they were told to go," Garrett told ABC Radio's Sean Hannity.
Though democrats have insisted that the Bush administration was responsible for delays in getting relief to flood victims, Red Cross officials told Garrett it was the state who blocked their aid convoy.
"The state of Louisiana said, 'Look, our plans call for those people to be moved out. We want them to be moved out. And if [the Red Cross] comes in, they won't move out. So we're not letting you in.'"
Appearing an hour later on Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume," Red Cross President Marty Evans confirmed the stunning development, saying, "We were ready from literally the time the storm blew through. We were ready to go. We just were not given permission to go in."



September 9, 2005
Political Issues Snarled Plans for Troop Aid
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT
and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.
The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.
While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.
"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.
"I need everything you have got," Ms. Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last Monday, after the storm hit.
In an interview, she acknowledged that she did not specify what sorts of soldiers. "Nobody told me that I had to request that," Ms. Blanco said. "I thought that I had requested everything they had. We were living in a war zone by then."
By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.
In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the Guard.
By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours, could not arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties.
In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states.
"I was there. I saw what needed to be done," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. "They were the fastest, best-capable, most appropriate force to get there in the time allowed. And that's what it's all about."
But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.
The call never came, administration officials said, in part because military officials believed Guard troops would get to the stricken region faster and because administration civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot looters.
Louisiana officials were furious that there was not more of a show of force, in terms of relief supplies and troops, from the federal government in the middle of last week. As the water was rising in New Orleans, the governor repeatedly questioned whether Washington had started its promised surge of federal resources.
"We needed equipment," Ms. Blanco said in an interview. "Helicopters. We got isolated."
Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.
In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also rejected a more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana National Guard.
Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon in August streamlined a rigid, decades-old system of deployment orders to allow the military's Northern Command to dispatch liaisons to work with local officials before an approaching hurricane.
The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time Hurricane Katrina reached full strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later when Mr. Bush ordered 7,200 active-duty soldiers and marines to the scene.
After the hurricane passed New Orleans and the levees broke, flooding the city, it became increasingly evident that disaster-response efforts were badly bogged down.
Justice Department lawyers, who were receiving harrowing reports from the area, considered whether active-duty military units could be brought into relief operations even if state authorities gave their consent - or even if they refused.
The issue of federalizing the response was one of several legal issues considered in a flurry of meetings at the Justice Department, the White House and other agencies, administration officials said.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice Department lawyers to interpret the federal law creatively to help local authorities, those officials said. For example, federal prosecutors prepared to expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like anti-carjacking laws that can be prosecuted by either state or federal authorities.
On the issue of whether the military could be deployed without the invitation of state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit within the Justice Department that provides legal advice to federal agencies, concluded that the federal government had authority to move in even over the objection of local officials.
This act was last invoked in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots, but at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson of California, and has not been invoked over a governor's objections since the civil rights era - and before that, to the time of the Civil War, administration officials said. Bush administration, Pentagon and senior military officials warned that such an extreme measure would have serious legal and political implications.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said deployment of National Guard soldiers to Iraq, including a brigade from Louisiana, did not affect the relief mission, but Ms. Blanco disagreed.
"Over the last year, we have had about 5,000 out, at one time," she said. "They are on active duty, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That certainly is a factor."
By Friday, National Guard reinforcements had arrived, and a truck convoy of 1,000 Guard soldiers brought relief supplies - and order - to the convention center area.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security say the experience with Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated flaws in the nation's plans to handle disaster.
"This event has exposed, perhaps ultimately to our benefit, a deficiency in terms of replacing first responders who tragically may be the first casualties," Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for domestic security, said.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has suggested that active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if front-line emergency personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon's leadership remains unconvinced that this plan is sound, suggesting instead that the national emergency response plans be revised to draw reinforcements initially from civilian police, firefighters, medical personnel and hazardous-waste experts in other states not affected by a disaster.
The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage any crisis in its opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local "first responders," including civilian police and the National Guard.
At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said, "The unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe.""
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this article, and Eric Lipton from Baton Rouge, La. David Johnston contributed reporting.

So, the question remains.

How did FEMA, in reality, screw up?

We are still in Atlanta... waiting... waiting...

FEMA is a temporay quick fix for life sustaining needs, not an insurance company. Lots of people think FEMA will rebuild their $200,000 home or give them the funding to do so if they are not insured. That is where the SBA comes into play. The problem is that people don't know what FEMA is or what their job is until after a disaster.