Monday, September 19, 2005
Whatever Happened to FEMA's Prepositioned Assets?
I posted about this in a comment on Phoenix Woman's post below; then I decided it deserves a post of its own. It's a scandal and a shame that FEMA didn't deliver emergency supplies to New Orleans as soon as the wind and rain slacked off enough to permit transportation. It's also a mystery. The Associated Press reported on August 29 (you remember, the day the hurricane made landfall):
As the Category 4 the storm surged ashore just east of New Orleans on Monday, FEMA had medical teams, rescue squads and groups prepared to supply food and water poised in a semicircle around the city, its director, Michael Brown, said. Speaking from Baton Rouge, just upriver from New Orleans, Brown told NBC's Today show that his agency had "planned for this kind of disaster for many years because we've always known about New Orleans' situation."So by the time the hurricane hit New Orleans, FEMA had people close by, ready to go in. Why didn't they? Where did they go? Where are they now? Why is nobody in the media asking about this? Even the Associated Press seems unaware of its own report, which according to a Google News search, appeared in a minimum of 211 newspapers. (It does occur to me that a possible reason FEMA didn't have a presence in the city after the hurricane was because the "medical teams, rescue squads and groups prepared to supply food and water poised in a semicircle around the city" existed only in a press release.)
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