This is about as big a boondoggle as I have seen. According to the
Dallas Morning News (subscription), 500 trained search and rescue personnel from the west coast have been cooling their heels in luxury Dallas hotels since Friday.
They have been trimming one another's hair, lounging on hotel chairs, chatting on cellphones. They've been up at dawn, exercising in front of the hotel, trying to stay busy.
What they haven't been doing is dangling from helicopters over flooded neighborhoods or going into half-collapsed buildings searching for hurricane victims to rescue.
"We've been trying like hell to get out of here," said Battalion Chief Hawkins, one of the Orange County task force leaders.
MORE BELOW THE JUMP
FEMA seems to have no valid excuse for not using resources; their story continues to be variations of the lame concept that Katrina was too much of an emergency for them to use emergency resources:
The reason for the extended holdover? Team members were told that conditions were too chaotic in New Orleans, which has been plagued by violence and reports of gunfire aimed at rescuers, and the National Guard needed more time to restore order. In addition, problems getting supplies to the rescue crews already there, as well as victims, had not been worked out.
FEMA spokeswoman Debbie Wing said teams sometimes take a few days getting to disaster areas because officials need to prepare basic infrastructure to allow them to operate safely.
"There's a strategic reason for the timing," she said. "They need incident support teams set up. They can't just go into nothing."
But apparently they can go into Dallas hotels, after coming a thousand miles?? Is this making sense? FEMA says some rescuers actually were "deployed", "to the area" whatever that lingo means...what area? San Antonio? How pathetic....
Seven teams similar to the crews benched in Dallas were deployed to the area Aug. 28, she said.
This is great, just great. They could at least have gone across the freakin steet and help with evacuees at Reunion.
Maybe they can send their hotel bills to Chertoff and Brown.