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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (107993)	9/4/2005 12:20:03 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

There USED to be a task force for relief, but lately FEMA has been conscripted into the war on terror. It looks like they were unable to do such a swell job so far, and a lot of people are suffering horribly because of it: No argument about the horrible suffering. But I was talking to a former senior executive for FEMA, and she made the emphatic point that FEAM was never designed nor intended to be a first responder. That their planning was to be in a disaster area three or four days after the disaster, helping the recovery. The Seattle Times had (and other papers might have, too) an article on the red tape involved in getting military units involved. It's lengthy. Even our "rapid response" forces define rapid in terms of days, not hours. The assumption has always been that the nrmal first responders in a community -- fire, police, EMTs, hospital emergency rooms, reserve deputies, and the like -- will be capable, once a storm passes, of going in and providing the first level of care needed to rescue those needing rescuing and treat the seriously injured. That agencies like the Red Cross and Salvation Army will be there with food, water, and other emergency supplies for the first day or two, for the power and phone companies to be able to get in and start restoring power and phones as soon as the storm ends. That's what hurricane, tornado, and other storm planning has always been based on. Then FEMA comes in and helps the community rebuild. Nobody has ever, I believe, planned for an entire city to be inaccessible, for virtually all services (water, sewer, phones, electricity) to be out of service and unrepariable for weeks or months, for an entire city to need to be abandoned. Some things you just don't plan for, and that's one of them.