Simply put, FEMA sucks!!

[SmootSmack]

Originally Posted by That Guy

right, but appoint your engineering friends to head things like FEMA and your idiot friends to jobs like head ambassador to uganda.

I'm a quarter Ugandan and your lack of respect is downright insulting...ok I'm really not a quarter Ugandan

Anyway, I thought that Bush had hired someone else to be Director of FEMA, I forget who, and that man hired his best friend Mike Brown to be his Deputy. And eventually he just moved to director. Then Bush made it official.

[FRPLG]

That Guy.

In this thread about FEMA you have said:

I'd say the drastic mismanagement that got a lot of people killed unnecessarily was pretty extreme too, since, you know, their entire job is to prevent that.

This was a direct response to a statement about FEMA. FEMA had nothing to do with the evacuation or the deaths of "millions" of people. They just didn't as several others point out without rebuttal.

or that they should have a civil engineer or logistics guy in charge of FEMA instead of some clueless crony.

This goes along the path of blaming FEMA for the actual deaths associated with the Hurricane. Unless of course you meant an engineer would have helped somehow manage the money doling out. I think you weren't meaning that though.

FEMA needed to step in an over rule the idiot mayor who also had a huge hand in making a bad situation much worse

As stated by others and myself they have no legal authority to do this. This again shows that you thought FEMA should have tried to get people out when in fact they simply have no legal way to do so.

someone qualified could have done better... like with 2 weeks of info from the local experts (levy workers and meteorologists) at least try to organize a real evacuation.

In the context of the converstaion I am pretty sure you were again referring to FEMA.

then i said:

As cpayne said. If you have an opinion know ALL the facts and facets as best you can. Uninformed debate is worthless. The world runs on opinions so it is our job to have the right info to form them correctly. To me your statement shows a general lack of respect for Bush(understood given many OTHER issues) and a lack of knowledge on the subject. Blaming Bush or FEMA for the evacuation situation is like blaming Bush for the pothole in front of your house.

Which was meant to say that your statements blaming things on FEMA and/or Bush for the lack of a solid evacuation showed a lack of understanding towards what the responsibilties of the various parties being discussed were. It also was meant to say that lack of knowledge on this one issue works subversively towards your point since it really undermines it greatly. Yes i did not specifically point out that I felt you had a lack of knowledge on this one point but I think when you have one huge gap of understanding on an issue it works to invalidate your entire opinion. How this was uncivil is completely beyond me. Sorry for thinking that you making statements that have no solid basis shows a lack of knowledge. It wasn't meant to infer you have no "f***ing clue" what you are talking about. In fact I am pretty sure I never said that.

Your response to this statement was out of line. It was immature and IT was the uncivil part of this thread. For someone with a long posting history here and a very good standing you should be able to see where you have gone down the wrong path in this thread.

[dmek25]

in other words fema is a government agency with absolutely no power? come on, if pres bush and fema wanted new orleans evacuated, it would have happened. im surprised that wewhite hasnt chimed in yet because i think if the same thing was going to occur in w's hometown, it probably would have been handled alittle differently

[cpayne5]

Originally Posted by dmek25

in other words fema is a government agency with absolutely no power? come on, if pres bush and fema wanted new orleans evacuated, it would have happened. im surprised that wewhite hasnt chimed in yet because i think if the same thing was going to occur in w's hometown, it probably would have been handled alittle differently

If the federal governement had evacuated New Orleans (against the wishes of both the mayor and the governor) and nothing catostrophic happened I can probably guarantee you that right we would be in the middle of the biggest Supreme Court battle this country has ever seen.

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by dmek25

in other words fema is a government agency with absolutely no power? come on, if pres bush and fema wanted new orleans evacuated, it would have happened. im surprised that wewhite hasnt chimed in yet because i think if the same thing was going to occur in w's hometown, it probably would have been handled alittle differently

We have laws in this country that democrats love to scream and yell about when Bush does something that amounts to the same thing. When he and the administration start collecting phone call information (to protect us they say) it isn't ok but when NO and the local/state government won't evacuate a below sea-level city in the face of a catastrophic hurricane he is then uppose to break the law then? Sure Bush could have pulled some federal authority out of his ass and made it happened and then what? From now on it is the job of federal government to protect us from oursleves and our unwillingness to take care of ourselves? People died because they local governemt and state government didn't do THEIR JOB. Not because Bush didn't illegally do their job for them.

[That Guy]

FRPLG:

you went point for point, and except for one issue, every single one contains you making (wrong) assumptions about what i actually said. thus when you're trying to call me out on things i didn't say but you think i did, it's a bit hard to take.

and if you read about the charter they actually do cover civil defense and disaster preparedness, which you've been vehement in denoucing:


wikipedia:

September 11th, 2001, President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to better coordinate among the different federal agencies that deal with law enforcement, disaster preparedness and recovery, border protection and civil defense. FEMA was absorbed into DHS as of 2003. As a result, FEMA became part of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate of DHS, and employs more than 2,600 full time employees. In September 2003, Michael D. Brown, FEMA's director and DHS Undersecretary, warned that the shift would make a mockery of FEMA's new motto, "A Nation Prepared,"...

[firstdown]

Again its not FFEMA's job to evacuate the city. Bush spoke to the mayoer and the governer. THey both knew that the city needed to be evacuated. By the time FEMA or Bush would have known that alot of people where not evacuating it would have been to late. Millions did evacuate remember the long line of trafic where people waited for up to 10 hours to get out of town and they and the gas stations where all running out of gas. If they knew to evacuate why didn't everyone know to evacuate? Or did they and they just refused to leave? I posted back some that they found a poll a year or two old and about 75% of the people in Olins said they would not evacuate. To top it all off they voted the mayor back into office and he screwed most of the stuff up. Goverment is the worse thing to rely on. I had to get a permit to build a garage. I started back on 05/11/06 and finaly got the permit today.

[warriorzpath]

I think first off - it's about not having a leader to take responsibility. All of the leaders in this case were thinking about themselves; they didn't care enough to say: "what's done is done, I'll take responsibility for all of this- what's important now is trying to resolve all of this." No one stepped up.

And second - there are the abuses in these cases that should lead to criminal charges.

The sad part of all of this was: there was an entire nation of people willing to donate their time, money, and energy to help - but what leadership did was: blame others and abuse the powers and resources given to them.

And of course bush didn't cause all of this - but I can compare this to a good samaritan or just a passive bystander (doing nothing) when someone needs help. Did bush need to help ? no. Should he have tried to do more in this case and take some more responsibility on, to help in this situation ? I say yes.

[cpayne5]

TG -
No where does anything out there say that FEMA is responsible for preemptive preparedness; Everything refers to response. ie, after something has happened, not before.

[That Guy]

Originally Posted by cpayne5

TG -
No where does anything out there say that FEMA is responsible for preemptive preparedness; Everything refers to response. ie, after something has happened, not before.

except for things like this (which i already quoted):
FEMA became part of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate of DHS, and employs more than 2,600 full time employees.

and if you go to fema's website, they have a very large "plan ahead" section, with articles like "how to prepare for a hurricane", including evacutation info (http://www.fema.gov/plan/prepare/evacuation.shtm).


but apparently everyone missed that.

[cpayne5]

Originally Posted by That Guy

except for things like this (which i already quoted):
FEMA became part of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate of DHS, and employs more than 2,600 full time employees.

and if you go to fema's website, they have a very large "plan ahead" section, with articles like "how to prepare for a hurricane", including evacutation info (http://www.fema.gov/plan/prepare/evacuation.shtm).


but apparently everyone missed that.

Show me where it says that the agency will take "preemtive action".

FEMA looks at what *might* happen, then reacts to it when it *does* happen. It does not act on what might happen. That is the local authorities job. It has been since day one.

[Monkeydad]

Originally Posted by cpayne5

Show me where it says that the agency will take "preemtive action".

FEMA looks at what *might* happen, then reacts to it when it *does* happen. It does not act on what might happen. That is the local authorities job. It has been since day one.

EXACTLY!

If FEMA's job was to babysit everyone and make sure they're ready for any possible disasters that might happen someday, they'd need a branch office in EVERY town in the nation. Could you imagine how much money that would waste?

Their job is to help after disasters occur. It's the responsibility of each local government to prepare for emergencies.

Think of FEMA as an ambulance. You can't blame an ambulance driver for not arriving in time for a heart attack victim when the person who died sat around drinking beer and eating cheese-in-a-can on everything. They're an emergency response agency, not a babysitter.

[warriorzpath]

Originally Posted by Buster

EXACTLY!

If FEMA's job was to babysit everyone and make sure they're ready for any possible disasters that might happen someday, they'd need a branch office in EVERY town in the nation. Could you imagine how much money that would waste?

Their job is to help after disasters occur. It's the responsibility of each local government to prepare for emergencies.

Think of FEMA as an ambulance. You can't blame an ambulance driver for not arriving in time for a heart attack victim when the person who died sat around drinking beer and eating cheese-in-a-can on everything. They're an emergency response agency, not a babysitter.

Wait a minute. Are you guys actually defending FEMA ? Did you read the article ? And are you actually asking how much money that it would waste to "babysit" ? How about not wasting or defrauding taxpayers' money ? to the count of 1.4 billion dollars. How about that for wasting a little money ?

[That Guy]

Originally Posted by cpayne5

Show me where it says that the agency will take "preemtive action".

FEMA looks at what *might* happen, then reacts to it when it *does* happen. It does not act on what might happen. That is the local authorities job. It has been since day one.

you said they don't do preparation and that it's not mentioned anywhere, even though it's been in their job description for 3 years. I didn't say anything about pre-emptive action in that post you were replying to. When its pointed out that they do do prepartory work, you decide to throw up some weird strawman instead.

and yes, I do think someone should have tried harder to convince the locals or the people that an evacuation was necessary instead of staring at an oncoming train and throwing their hands up. It would have been in everyone's best economic interests.

[dmek25]

for the sake of arguement, femas job is to react to any and all diasters within the united states. well , then what the hell took so long to get to those people? it took w almost a full week to make an appearance in new orleans, and look whats going on with the funding. this is a case of gross mis management starting at the top the whole way to the bottom. everyone, including one george w bush shares the blame. how mayor nagens got re elected is beyond belief. but then again, one marion berry also won after smoking crack. so as the saying goes, only in america