The criminally negligent mis-handling of the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina hasn't just caused suffering and frustration in the Gulf-coast, now it's harming communities far and wide...
At the request of the Federal Government, local officials in the Research Triangle Park region of central North Carolina brought together more than 250 emergency medical workers, over 50 ambulances and other medical support assets and put 22 local hospitals on alert to receive multiple planeloads of Gulf coast evacuees.
Those valuable emergency workers, pulled away from their regular duties of serving the emergency needs of the Raleigh-Durham area, sat idle for nearly 6 hours before being dismissed by local officials, who were unable to obtain a straight answer from Federal officials.
Wake's emergency management staff... said the lengthy delay taxed the resources of the many small-town ambulance services that contributed trucks to the effort.
None of this is news to central North Carolina, of course, as local journalists noted FEMA's decay (and Mike Brown's nepotism)
nearly a year ago.
More below the fold...
According to
an article in the Durham Herald-Sun, yesterday,
six days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Federal officials alerted local emergency service officials in central North Carolina to the imminent arrival of planeloads of Gulf-coast evacuees who would likely require the advanced medical capabilities of Duke, UNC and other regional hospitals.
The effort diverted critical medical and emergency response assets to establish a triage center at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, portable emergency medical and hygiene facilities, prepare emergency shelters throughout the region and place 22 local hospitals on high-alert in anticipation of the arrival of more than 110 critically-ill evacuees and at least 500 evacuees not requiring immediate medical attention.
Local officials, emergency workers and healthcare providers rushed into action... and then waited more than 5 hours without any communication from the Federal Government.
Just another example of how poorly the new-look, leaner, meaner FEMA is equipped to handle it's core mission of disaster response:
Disaster in the Making
The Independent Weekly (Durham, N.C.)
September 22, 2004
...Under the administration's plan, 22 government agencies, FEMA among them, would be merged into the DHS. Analysts in and out of government warned against subsuming the emergency agency's vital functions in a new super-department. "There are concerns of FEMA losing its identity as an agency that is quick to respond to all hazards and disasters," the agency's inspector general noted in a memo to Allbaugh. Congress' Government Accountability Office judged the merger to be a "high-risk" endeavor for FEMA, and the Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think-tank, cautioned in a report that such a move could hobble the agency's natural disaster programs. "While a merged FEMA might become highly adept at preparing for and responding to terrorism, it would likely become less effective in performing its current mission in case of natural disasters as time, effort and attention are inevitably diverted to other tasks within the larger organization."
But Bush's proposal won out, and a shift in priorities from natural disasters to counter-terrorism immediately took hold. In its 2002 budget, the White House doubled FEMA's budget to $6.6 billion, but of that sum, $3.5 billion was earmarked for equipment and training to help states and localities respond to terrorist attacks.
Michael Brown, a college friend of Allbaugh's who had served as FEMA's general counsel, was recruited to head the agency, which would now be part of the DHS's Emergency and Response Directorate. When the reorganization took effect on March 1, 2003, Brown assured skeptics that under the new arrangement, the country would be served by "FEMA on steroids"--a faster, more effective disaster agency.
But the merger into DHS has compounded the agency's problems, says FEMA employee and union president Pleasant Mann. "Before, we reported straight to the White House, and now we've got this elaborate bureaucracy on top of us, and a lot of this bureaucracy doesn't think what we're doing is that important, because terrorism isn't our number one," he said. "The biggest frustration here is that we at FEMA have responded to disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11, and here are people who haven't responded to a kitchen fire telling us how to deal with terrorism. You know, there were a lot of people who fell down on the job on 9/11, but it wasn't us."...
Now, I wonder, if a small, free weekly tabloid paper in Durham, N.C. could predict that these kinds of massive problems would occur in the wake of FEMA being demoted from a Cabinet-Level agency and folded into the Department of Homeland Security, why couldn't the national media?
And how many other small-town communities have, in attempting to aid evacuees from the Gulf coast, have had key resources wasted by the Federal Government's incompetence and criminal negligence?
