FEMA: still dragging ass

Apparantly for all Bush's tirades, FEMA still cant get it's shit together:

"Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day."

Among the problems FEMA is having/causing:

• "The president of St. Tammany Parish, Kevin Davis, is praying that it does not rain in his sweltering corner of Louisiana, because three weeks after the storm severely damaged his drainage system, FEMA has yet to give him approval to even start the repairs."

• "Up north in the poor parish of Washington, residents are sleeping in houses that were chopped in half by oak trees. The promised wave of government inspectors have not shown up to assist them."

• "In Tangipahoa Parish, the parish president, Gordon Burgess, said he called FEMA officials daily to ask when they would arrive to assist residents with housing. Mr. Burgess said the federal workers say, " 'I'll get to you next week,' and then the next week and then you'd never hear from them again."

• "'FEMA don't communicate with you very well,' said Tommy Nelson, as he cleaned out the home of his girlfriend's mother in Waveland, a Gulf Coast town now more of a memory than a place. 'You got to learn things second-hand. We just happened to be in a post office line and we just happened to learn you got to register down here for a trailer. I was talking to a FEMA representative about trailers yesterday and she didn't have a clue.'"

Yes, a lot of the blame goes to the sheer scale of the disaster, which is beyond anything we'd expect to happen to an American city short of a nuclear bomb going off. And I'm sure that FEMA is full of good-hearted people honestly trying to do their best in terrible circumstances.

However, it's also full of political hacks like it's former boss, who don't have the slightest experience with disaster relief and didn't even know how to begin preparing for the disaster that would follow Katrina. That's Bush's fault. It also suffers from the need to trim the budget dramatically, as a result of the huge deficit created by massive tax cuts. That's Bush's fault. And it suffers in general from the belief among Republicans that the federal government simply doesn't exist to handle major disasters unless they happen to have been brought about by terrorists. That's Bush's fault too. Don't let him off the hook for it.