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Originally Posted by richlevy
FEMA is a soup-to-nuts agency. While it does not get involved with every landslide, it is supposed to handle the big disasters that cities and states can't handle alone.
I agree that in the first six hours the city should have had an effective evacuation plan. After that, it was FEMA's show. 4 days for food and water? Turning away corporate shipments of food and water?
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The first six hours? When a climatic meat grinder the size of Texas is heading in your general direction at speeds that would piss off an old lady driving to church on Sunday you have more than 6 hours notice.
I guess my point is that there is nothing that FEMA could have done in advance of the storm that NO could not have done and done better. FEMA would have had to start from scratch whereas NO knew everything and everyone they needed to know to empty the city. NO's failure was not due to a lack of resources and, in advance of a storm, resources are all FEMa can offer. And its not like FEMA knew something that NO didn't know - they were both looking at the same radar images.
FEMA's role, imho, didn't begin until the day after and I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around regarding its completely disorganized and bumbling response. But as far as I'm concerned, they are largely blameless for the mistakes that occured prior to the storm's arrival. If the folks in the crosshairs couldn't get it done then it certainly isn't reasonable to expect that a bunch of buffoons inside the Beltway could have done better.
When a storm that big hits a city in what amounts to a topological salad bowl, then the results shouldn't be that surprising. To my knowlege, FEMA barely got involved when Iniki leveled Kuai'i. They sent money but that was about it. They didn't put anyone in hotels, they didn't feed anyone, they didn't fly in pallettes of Evian, they didn't distribute ATM cards and I don't remember anyone making a big deal about it. I didn't have a problem with FEMA then and I don't have a problem with FEMA now - other than the specific issues you raised about the delay in distributing needed resources.
I'm not defending FEMA or Brown. But I think FEMA is being made a convenient scapegoat for the scale of the destruction and for the complete lack of any effort by those suffering from it to mitigate it.