FEMA still failing months after Katrina

Besides a desire for normalcy for New Orleans residents, nothing about this year’s Mardi Gras celebrations, marked amid an ongoing failure of settling hurricane victims is normal.

Less than half of the city’s residents have returned, half of the city does not have electricity, few businesses are open, most of the debris has not been cleared and the people, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, are stuck in a web of government bureaucracy and red tape that it would almost be a miracle if they attended the annual parade in the first place.

In the midst of the Mardi Gras parties, smiles and the colorful beads, lies the reality of a sad situation compounded with a new bureaucratic frustration for more than 135,000 people who have applied to get trailers.

Slightly more than half have been approved more than six months after the disaster according to The New York Times. The rest are still doing the only thing they can—wait.

This failure of embarrassing world-class proportion can only be blamed on the terrible organization of FEMA and the local government.

FEMA just doesn’t seem capable of doing anything right. The bungling during the hurricanes’ devastation, where they failed to rescue almost half of the city, seems to have stuck with the organization months after floods receded.

According to a Feb. 10 article in the Los Angeles Times, more than 10,000 FEMA trailers, lie empty at an Airport in Arkansas, 75 percent of them in cow pasture, while residents affected by the hurricanes are stuck behind a quagmire of federal and city bureaucracy.

There are no immediate plans to move the trailers to the affected regions anytime soon; reports indicate that FEMA intends to spend about $6 million to lay a 290-acre gravel bed to prevent the empty trailers from sinking in the mud during the rainy season.

FEMA blames Louisiana for the mishap; they say the brand-new furnished trailers, which cost more than $400 million to purchase, have only been welcomed in eight out of 64 parishes in Louisiana. That sounds like a communication problem that should not take six months to resolve.

While FEMA may be able to come up with all kinds of excuses to explain away its incompetence, thousands of people who have endured the winter living in tents and destroyed homes with leaking roofs are still waiting for the approval of their trailer applications.

New Orleans and the Gulf States can use some laughs, but the laughs will never last as long as FEMA keeps messing up.

And with Gov. Schwarzenegger declaring California levees insufficient to withstand flooding, it is not consoling to know that FEMA is watching our backs.

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