As Disaster Beckons Once More

I read this quote in the Bucks County Courier Times yesterday, and I thought it deserved a mention:

“There are a lot of things that are different between now and what we faced in 2005 when Katrina came ashore. We’ve had three years to put together a plan that never existed before.”

And if you guessed that that came from Mike (“City of Louisiana”) Chertoff in response to the question about FEMA’s preparation for Gustav versus Katrina, you win a free ticket for an Arabian horse courtesy of former FEMA head Mike Brown (he used to be commissioner for the Arabian Horse Association, you see, just to jog our memories).

Well, here is a New York Times editorial that tells a very different story…

Three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, residents there are nervously watching the progress of Tropical Storm-threatening-to-be-Hurricane Gustav. No less nerve-wracking is the knowledge that federal emergency planners have failed to come up with a new strategy for providing housing to disaster victims.

In July — a full year after Congress’s mandated deadline — the Federal Emergency Management Agency produced a skimpy draft proposal. Most of its required topic specialties — including how to house the poor and the disabled, how to house victims close to their jobs and how to manage large camps for evacuees — were left blank. Instead, the proposal called for handing those plans off to a task force of experts. And, oh yes, that task force has yet to be formed.

FEMA officials told Congress that the draft was not a plan “but a precursor to a plan.” In other words, procrastination is still the definitive disaster strategy of the Bush administration’s heckuva-job FEMA.

FEMA executives insist there’s no intent at all to punt the problem to the next administration. “We go beyond the point of just kicking this down the road,” one official declared in defending the proposed task force. Taxpayers should be outraged that this is all the administration can manage to come up with, three years down the road and as another hurricane season is under way.

Even those pages in the plan that weren’t left blank offer little comfort. FEMA officials had vowed in an earlier bout of scandal that trailers would no longer be used as housing. Far too many of Katrina’s victims ended up stranded in FEMA trailers contaminated with high levels of formaldehyde, a suspected carcinogen that can cause breathing problems even in healthy people.

Nevertheless, the proposal allows FEMA to house victims in trailers as a last resort “if we had a Katrina again.” Officials stress that that last resort would be limited to six months and the trailers would have to meet safety standards for formaldehyde. Five times the normal levels were measured in the Katrina trailers.

FEMA’s draft has been two years in the making, yet state emergency managers complain that they were never consulted for their on-the-ground expertise. The agency promises a finished and effective plan sometime this fall, well after Gustav makes his move.

Ugh…

Here is a link if you can help out in the event of landfall in the Gulf Region (that’s anticipated as of now, according to this story).

And God willing, we’ll never see scenes like this again.