Are you pleased? (Ike Related)

[geomon666]

Are You Pleased?

By Matt Lane
Editor

A word to the wise: Make sure your emergency supply kit is stocked and at the ready — it should be able to sustain you and your family for five days, according to some experts. Don’t delay; get it ready, because should disaster strike you will most assuredly need it.

Why? The answer is painfully simple: Your federal government is incapable of responding to emergencies. It happened with Hurricane Katrina and it’s happening again with Hurricane Ike.

On Monday, according to the Houston Chronicle, hundreds of empty trucks are idling away the hours at Reliant Field, called there by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, slurping up your tax dollars at up to $1,000 per day per truck with nowhere to go. A FEMA spokesperson said this is a good thing; after all, the trucks are here, right? I guess the spokesperson wasn’t thinking much about “there,” where the trucks cargoes of ice, food and water are desperately needed.

FEMA, now a part of the Orwellian-sounding Department of Homeland Security, is an impotent monster, unable to do what is required to help Americans in dire need during emergencies. You didn’t see Anderson Cooper begging for help on the Bolivar Peninsula or on Galveston Island or in the neighborhoods of Houston, but even so, FEMA was not ready and was not helping these people in the days following Ike’s landfall. The national media all but ignored the FEMA fiasco, but local television and newspapers did not. Via the Internet, I watched KHOU-TV as their reporters told stories of suffering people doing without as Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, assured them help was on the way. It wasn’t.

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[Igel]

1. He's clueless.

Then again, he's probably proud of it.

[intheflow]

2. I voted this a "must read".

Sadly, in this microsecond attention span nation we live in, only people living (or who have lived) on the Gulf Coast seem to give a shit about Ike or any other hurricane/disaster recovery disaster.

[geomon666]

3. Thanks for the vote.

And I agree with you about the nation's attention span. Apparently these disasters are now just a local problem.