WP: Lack of Cohesion Bedevils Recovery

[Pirate Smile]

Lack of Cohesion Bedevils Recovery
Red Tape, Lapses in Planning Stall Relief

By Shankar Vedantam and Dean Starkman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 18, 2005; Page A01

Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, red tape and poor planning have left thousands of evacuees without basic services, according to local and state officials, public policy experts and survivors themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of people from New Orleans and Gulf Coast communities have fled, sometimes to neighboring states and beyond, moving in with friends and family or into shelters, public housing and hotels funded by the Red Cross. With little guidance from federal and state governments -- and no single person or entity in charge of the overall operation -- cities and counties have been left on their own to find survivors homes, schools, jobs and health care. A patchwork of policies has resulted, causing relief agencies to sometimes work at cross-purposes.

President Bush has promised a range of new initiatives to help the evacuees, including $5,000 grants to help the unemployed find jobs, a voucher program for students and more money for state Medicaid programs. But while Bush's promises of additional help have been welcomed, the initial efforts to provide for the evacuees has sometimes been disjointed, confusing and ineffective, local officials said:

-snip-
In an e-mail, Murray, who is director of the University of Houston's Center for Public Policy, wrote: "Couple a multi-state disaster of Katrina's magnitude, (including some of the poorer and less well-governed states in the union), add on a dysfunctional federal bureaucracy that had deteriorated in recent years, and a chief executive whose motto seemed to be, until yesterday, the buck stops there, and we get a helluva mess."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/17/AR2005091701392.html

[Pirate Smile]

1. Whaaat? I figured Mississippi with a Republican Governor was going

wonderfully (not according to the reporters on the ground, of course).

"· In Mississippi, people waiting for promised housing in the form of mobile homes or trailers found themselves in a Catch-22 situation: Even as local officials said they were waiting for FEMA to provide the shelters, officials at the federal agency said they were waiting for local officials to provide the right locations."

[Carolab]

2. No help from the Feds. None.

Lacourt, the mechanic, said he has used up two tanks of gas driving around the region looking for housing assistance. A rumor of help in Laplace, La., turned out to be false. In Ocean Springs, Miss., FEMA officials working out of a former Kmart gave him FEMA's toll-free number again.

"That's completely useless," he said he told them.

"That's all we can do," he said he was told.

{snip}

"When Congress approves $12 billion in two to three days of the hurricane, and two weeks later, none of the communities whose population has swollen by 25,000 has received any of that money, you have to wonder what is going on," she said. "Is it a bureaucratic problem? It sounds like it is."

{snip}

"The federal government really hasn't provided much of anything," he said.

[Toots]

3. (including some of the poorer and less well-governed states in the union)

Less well governed, do they mean Republican governed? It would seem so as they are the poorer states.