🚀 go-pugleaf

Why FEMA turned away help
by Ducktape
Mon Sep 5th, 2005 at 07:55:38 PDT

For days after the disaster, help and volunteers of all
sorts headed for New Orleans with relief supplies and
expertise, only to be stopped and turned away by FEMA.

Last night, one of my friends joined our regular Sunday
chat. He had just come home from New Orleans with his
group of volunteer firefighters from Houston, after
they had waited outside New Orleans for since Tuesday
for FEMA to let them help in New Orleans, or use them
somewhere else in the stricken region.

FEMA's "reason" -- they wouldn't let anyone in "until
the National Guard has secured the city." The details
of his experience are below the fold.

    * Ducktape's diary :: ::
*

Bill is a member of a volunteer firefighter team in the
Houston area. He and his team have a lot of experience
helping after hurricanes. And they also have special
expertise -- a lot of them work for a living on oil
infrastructure and repairs. Bill is a professional
logistics expert whose assignments have included
getting a client's tsunami-flattened distribution
facility back operating within a couple of weeks, and
pre-invasion logistics work in Kuwait.

On Monday night, his group assembled their rescue
equipment and tools, and packed them into their boats
along with all the emergency supplies they could carry.
By Tuesday morning, they were almost to New Orleans.
"We were stopped at gunpoint by FEMA and told to turn
back," he told me. When I asked, he clarified that they
did not point the guns at them, but they were carrying
and displaying their weapons.

FEMA told him that no one was allowed to enter the city
to help "until it was secured by the National Guard."
The Houston team asked if they could wait. The FEMA
staff told them yes, but that they shouldn't expect
anything to change.

So they set up camp in the parking area where they had
been stopped, and they waited. By Thursday night, when
they were still waiting in the same place, some of the
team returned to Houston. The rest decided to wait
longer. And still nothing changed, so the remaining
team members returned to Houston on Saturday night.

Needless to say, Bill is livid about this. I asked him
why they had not been sent to some of the other
communities in the hurricane-stricken area where
security was not as much of an issue.

"We asked," he told me, "but they said that our
expertise was more needed in the New Orleans area." The
fucking catch-22 -- they were needed in New Orleans, so
they weren't allowed to go elsewhere, but they weren't
allowed to go into New Orleans, so the upshot was that
they did nothing except sit and wait, and then go home
in frustration.

What had him frosted more than anything else is that
they also have very specific expertise, as individual
professionals as well as a firefighter team, in dealing
with damage to oil infrastructure in the aftermath of a
natural disaster. "We've been doing this more than 10
years," he told me. "We are not amateurs, and we have
an enormous amount of experience with areas which have
been hit by hurricanes."

"A lot of the damaged oil facilities aren't even in the
city of New Orleans itself," he told me, "so they
weren't in an area that you would think would have
looters or security problems that were different from
any hurricane we've worked in. We're used to arriving
and immediately going to work."

They didn't just sit and wait -- they kept going back
to the FEMA people who were holding them up and making
suggestions about how and where they could be useful.
But FEMA had no interest in listening, and the line
never changed. "You can wait if you wish, but don't
expect any change anytime soon. Or you can go home."

You know all that "help is on the way" BS that was
spouted? A lot of it wasn't just "on the way" -- it was
already there, but blocked from doing anything because
of FEMA.

We've heard so much of this over this past week, of
help and supplies arriving and not being allowed in, of
the USS Bataan cruising off the city with helicopters,
medical facilities, and supplies, but doing nothing
because they hadn't been asked to help.

I thought my outrage meter was already off the dial,
but I discovered it had new levels when I heard the
first-hand account from a friend who had left work for
a week to bring specific expertise to the disaster, and
who was among the thousands of such people blocked by
FEMA and their incompetent bureaucracy from doing
anything at all.

Another Kos Diary with a story of Carolina doctors
turned away 
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  Liars share with those they deceive 
  the desire not to be deceived.
                        --Sissela Bok
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