Project Katrina

Things are grim for many Hurricane Katrina evacuees, as funds are either drying up or are tangled in bureaucracy and never ending red tap. Trailer parks provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are closing, and contracts for workers are expiring. “I know we’re behind the eight ball,” Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, told The New York Times. “People talk about recovery, but on one level, we’re still responding.”

So where is the available money going? The Times reports that of the $11.5 billion in federal community-development block grants allocated for housing in Louisiana, $25 million has gone for homelessness prevention and $72 million for the supportive housing-voucher program.

A chunk of $100 million out of a $220 million block grant for social services went to the state Department of Health and Hospitals for medical and mental healthcare. An additional $260,000 of that grant was given to the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit group that works closely with the state recovery authority. The group plans to use those funds for people ineligible for FEMA rental payments, reports The Times.

Folks just can’t seem to catch much of a break:

With the closure of another FEMA trailer park where Hurricane Katrina victims had been living, there are new concerns over a lack of available housing.

While some of the people who were living in FEMA trailers have found rental apartments, or been able to renovate their storm-ravaged homes and move back into them, many people have not found another place to live. Some of them have moved to motels, but many disabled people are in danger of becoming homeless, local charities officials say.

Some of the problem was caused when FEMA had to close some trailer parks earlier than it had planned, after dangerously high levels of formaldehyde were found.

But other problems came because FEMA hasn’t provided adequate support to victims.

That lack of support included an early, and continuing, failure to distribute supplies to Katrina victims. Instead, the agency paid to store cleaning supplies, blankets and home furnishings in warehouses for years before selling them as surplus.

After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) purchased more than $85M worth of basic supplies for storm victims. For more than two years, until last month FEMA let the supplies sit in warehouses at a cost of $1M/year.

During that two year period local government officials and non-profit relief organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi made repeated public pleas for donations of the exact sort of items FEMA had already purchased and were even stored locally.

That these supplies people have needed for years just sat in warehouses until mid-June of this year is bad enough, but FEMA was able to find a way to make this story even more sad and depressing the way only George Bush’s administration can.

The supplies (GSA now says it is only $18.5M—we can’t count) called Living Kits included towels, shirts, pants, shoes, coffee makers, pillowcases, dinnerware, blankets, pots and pans, buckets, and cleaning supplies. You know the stuff people need to live when they have lost everything and are living in trailers.

So FEMA kept all its stuff under lock and key because as a spokesperson told CNN:

We were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property.

Really, no great need! You have got to be fucking joking. I guess somebody needed to put together a Bush-style post-Katrina DVD for our national emergency agency so they were aware close to 250,000 folks are still living in FEMA provided trailers and housing.

So in June of this year with a single stroke of a pen, FEMA officials declared all the goods purchased for Katrina victims surplus and developed a plan to distribute them to other federal and state government agencies (including prisons).

But before they shipped off all the supplies (121 truckloads) they of course sent a representative out to state and local agencies, non-profit aid organizations, and churches just to double check that there wasn’t a need.

Well not really, I just made that up! That would be logical. Not only didn’t they sent anybody out for a face-to-face meeting, they didn’t even place one phone call or send a single e-mail on this topic.

When the Congressional delegations from Louisiana and Mississippi found out this shocking information from a CNN investigative story they went ballistic (video of the story here). Of course FEMA officials expressed, as you might expect, outrage, cause after nearly three years of rank incompetence and untold billions in waste and fraud how could something like this happen on their watch?

And since the Bush Administration officials have fake outrage down to an art form they of course promised a full investigation, meaning they will wait until the scandal disappears from the headlines before throwing some low-level bureaucrat under the bus.

But that was not enough for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. They requested FEMA:

Come and tell the committee how such a debacle could occur, and in the process, what are they going to do to assure Congress and the taxpaying public that it will never happen again.

Last Thursday in a pretty rare joint congressional hearing of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees officials from FEMA and the General Services Administration (GSA) got it from both sides of the aisle (some of the audio is here).

During the hearing Eric Smith, FEMA’s assistant administrator for logistics management kept to the same tired talking points when pressed on why the supplies were not distributed to folks that needed them:

They were returned to us after they were not used from different areas—Mississippi, Louisiana.

Landrieu said to Smith:

FEMA never told state officials or relief agencies involved in recovery efforts that the Living Kits meant to resettle hurricane survivors were still available. How can people ask for something they don’t know exists?

Smith’s response was mind-numbing:

They have to have a need. If they have bona fide need, it’s their responsibility to pass that need on.

Where have we heard this before? Maybe on Monday, August 29th 2005 when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called Bush, as more than 1,100 Americans were literally starting to drown and said:

Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got!

But days, weeks, and even months later she’d be blamed by the White House cause she didn’t say exactly what she wanted/needed. I guess in almost three years we still have not got this not so little problem figured out.

You see Mr. Smith when you have pictures like the above, and there are hundreds more like it, even one where a family wrote in duct tape on their roof:

We are Americans, please help, some can’t swim.

When you endure something like what happened as the lead agency that is supposed to ensure it doesn’t in fact happen, more fucking lame excuses almost three years after the fact just don’t cut it.

But thankfully Landrieu also would have none of his BS:

It’s like if a house was on fire. If the fire department operated the same way FEMA does, we would have to call the fire department and specifically request the hose, the pressurized water, the truck, the firefighters and the ladder, all before FEMA would acknowledge that they should send this equipment to help.

After the Congressional hearing a CNN reporter caught up with Smith and asked what mistakes were made? His response:

We did not really make any mistakes. Could things have been done better? Yes of course, but we followed our procedures.

To date only a couple truck loads of the supplies have been returned to Louisiana. None to Mississippi. But rest assured, FEMA told the committee they are still cataloguing what supplies it has left and they’ll report back to the committee. But they do admit at least 90,000 of the Living Kits have already been distributed (they don’t like to say, “given away”).

I’ve already used enough words and I just don’t really know what else to say other than I am ashamed as an America this has all happened as I was a taxpaying adult. What have we become?

I just want to end with a little quote from a BBC show I love called Top Gear. I’ve been watching it since 2005 and I can’t ever recall them ever making a single political statement. They just drive the fastest cars in the world really, really fast.

They’ve only been to the US for one show. A challenge to drive from Miami to New Orleans. They got off the road right before they hit New Orleans in 2006 and had this to say (extended video here):

Finally though we made it. And my word were we in for a shock. We’d seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done. But seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

Every house, I’ve been driving now for what 15 miles, and there isn’t a pavement there isn’t a building there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It is such a vast scale of destruction.

It had been a year since Katrina had blown through and we sort of assumed that the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it.

But we were wrong.

How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing this is here?

Some nights I don’t sleep well. I just wonder what they’d say today almost three years later!

You got to be joking. First you were late in responding to the “Federal Flooding” of New Orleans. You spent millions to deliver ice that never arrived. You kept hundreds of relief works in hotels in Atlanta while you briefed them on god knows what.

You let contractors sell you tarps for thousands of dollars each and generally wasted millions, and millions because of lack of oversight. And you gave freaking residents trailers contaimed with formaldehyde. Oh and you held fake press conferences in an attempt to bolster what little creditability you had left (that would be none actually).

And with all of that you are now asking for immunity from lawsuits related to the formaldehyde trailers, even though internal EPA documents show you were telling residents there were no problems while you were sending emails telling employees not to enter them cause they were toxic.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is requesting immunity from lawsuits filed on behalf of Gulf Coast hurricane victims who claim they were exposed to dangerous fumes while living in government-issued trailers.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt is scheduled to hear FEMA’s bid to be dismissed from a series of consolidated cases filed against the federal government and the companies that supplied FEMA with tens of thousands of trailers after Katrina and then Rita in 2005.

Lawyers for Gulf Coast storm victims accuse FEMA of negligence for sheltering them in trailers with elevated levels of formaldehyde, a preservative used in construction materials that can induce breathing problems and is believed to cause cancer.

In court papers, FEMA’s lawyers told the judge the agency is entitled to immunity from such claims challenging its response to disasters such as Katrina.

It is about freaking time somebody tried to get to the bottom of this. Via ABC News.

On Wednesday, California Democrat Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said his investigation found that the government’s leading supplier of the trailers, Gulf Stream Coach Inc., knew about the public health dangers and did nothing about them.

Waxman’s investigation also found that four of the 11 occupied trailers tested by the trailer manufacturer had formaldehyde present at a level that is sufficient for medical monitoring.

Formaldehyde, a chemical widely used in building materials, can cause a variety of adverse health effects at high levels, such as watery eyes, burning in the eyes, nose and throat, nausea, coughing, wheezing and rashes, as well as triggering asthma attacks.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director David Paulison has now placed blamed on Louisiana officials for turning down $85 million of emergency supplies that that agency recently gave away, after they had “lingered on storage shelves while hurricane victims suffered without the items they needed.” “We did ask Louisiana, ‘Do you want these?’ They said, ‘No, we don’t need them.’ So we offered them to the other states,” Paulison said.

Weeks after the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) attempted to confiscate the rest of their trailers used by victims of Hurricane Katrina, a CNN investigation found around $85 million in goods meant for those misplaced victims sat in warehouses for two years before being sent to other federal and state agencies. FEMA said some of the items were donations from companies after Katrina, but most were purchased in the field as “starter kits” for people living in trailers provided by the agency. The items ranged from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities. Your government and taxpayer dollars at work.

A reporter at U.S. News & World Report recently became Facebook friends with former FEMA director Michael Brown. According to reporter, Brownie is also using his Facebook account to attempt to rewrite the history of his time with the Bush administration:

Fact is, his is an interesting comeback story, and his Facebook page, which you have to sign up for to see, tells it. He’s a long way from President Bush’s disaster plaudit, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job,” but he remembers it well, dubbing it his least favorite quote. He follows that up with this advice: “Don’t always believe what you read. Ask me instead.” Apparently, many are. He had about 85 friends two weeks ago, and with some active marketing, he’s nearly topped 225.

Greg Anrig over at TMPCafe takes McCain (R-AZ) apart:

While touring New Orleans yesterday, John McCain declared the government’s response to the Katrina disaster “terrible and disgraceful” and pledged that it would never happen again. But McCain also demonstrated precisely the mindset that caused FEMA to revert from what both Republicans and Democrats in the 1990s had called a model agency back into the turkey farm it had been before the Clinton administration. He said: “Too often, government has its own peculiar way of doing things, following practices that in the private sector would invite financial ruin or worse.” McCain reiterated the talking point of Newt Gingrich and every other purveyor of right-wing sound bites that UPS, FedEx, and Wal-Mart can tell you where packages are in real time, but FEMA couldn’t even locate its own assets or people.

In the liberal blogsphere Wal-Mart doesn’t get a lot of love. But this post isn’t about if Wal-Mart is generally either “good” or “bad.” That question is far more complex than a simple yes or no (as you’ll see in a few seconds). Instead, as more and more detailed research is released from the academic community we’re finding out a lot of interesting things and as the National Post has reported, some might surprise you.

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer—and remembered as American business’s answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

“A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level,” was Scott’s message to his people. “Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing.”

This extraordinary delegation of authority—essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year— saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. The results are recounted in a new paper on the disaster written by Steven Horwitz, an Austrian-school economist at St. Lawrence University in New York. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency fumbled about, doing almost as much to prevent essential supplies from reaching Louisiana and Mississippi as it could to facilitate it, Wal-Mart managers performed feats of heroism. In Kenner, La., an employee crashed a forklift through a warehouse door to get water for a nursing home. A Marrero, La., store served as a barracks for cops whose homes had been submerged. In Waveland, Miss., an assistant manager who could not reach her superiors had a bulldozer driven through the store to retrieve disaster necessities for community use, and broke into a locked pharmacy closet to obtain medicine for the local hospital.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart trucks pre-loaded with emergency supplies at regional depots were among the first on the scene wherever refugees were being gathered by officialdom. Their main challenge, in many cases, was running a gauntlet of FEMA officials who didn’t want to let them through. As the president of the brutalized Jefferson Parish put it in a Sept. 4 Meet the Press interview, speaking at the height of nationwide despair over FEMA’s confused response: “If [the U.S.] government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.”

Now if only the executives at Wal-Mart would have shown the intelligence to handle the Deborah Shank affair in a similar manner they could have avoided a ton of bad press.

Update: Steven Horwitz’s report is entitled, Making Hurricane Response More Effective: Lessons From the Private Sector & The Coast Guard During Katrina. You can download it here.