FEMA's Website has a small (Alaska-sized) problem

[The Witch]

EDIT: Because I'm posting this for someone else I am hoping it gets some play around here... I'd hate for him to think he's being ignored

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From the Copyeditors-offlist mailing list comes this gem from Bill Blinn (reprinted with his permission):

I stopped by the FEMA website this evening. The site has warnings about Wilma and also offers to tell me about "active" disasters and emergencies. The map (see the screen capture below) shows DC, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland in orange. (Why?) Vermont, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Alaska are white. (Why?) The other states (all orange) are not identified on the map. That's probably because Americans are so good when it comes to knowing geography.

I've offset the map a bit to the right in the image below because the first thing I did was open the drop-down menu to see if the list was a list of areas with active problems or the full list. Doing that covered the map.

But I was mainly interested in the list. It was the full list -- except that it wasn't the full list. I noticed that Hawaii was missing. Then I noticed Alaska was missing. Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands aren't on the list, either, even though they're on the map. DC is on the list, but the full list of states has just 48 entries, so besides Alaska and Hawaii, FEMA has misplaced one of the contiguous 48.

Which one? Here's the list of states according to FEMA (left) and the states that the US Postal Service knows about (right):





Now I can sort of understand how FEMA might overlook several thousand poor people who hadn't had food or water for several days and were trapped at the Convention Center in downtown New Orleans on a street that was open to traffic. I can even forgive misplacing Vermont because it's such a small state. (But they did keep track of tiny Rhode Island.) And Hawaii? It's a long way out in the Pacific. When you can't find a big building in New Orleans even after people spend a lot of time telling you where to look, finding a bunch of islands out in the Pacific probably isn't too likely.

And maybe FEMA's not responsible for Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. (If so, why are they on the map?)

But it seems difficult to misplace the entire state of Alaska. It's huge -- the largest state in the union -- and the Bush administration plans to drill for oil there, so you'd think it would be on their list.

Here's the website page (http://www.fema.gov/):



Followup posted later to the same mailing list:

Or at least I tried. My messages was rejected by the server:

Your message
To: Femaopa; Femawebmaster
did not reach the following recipient(s):
FEMAOPA on Thu, 20 Oct 2005 06:15:08 -0400

The recipient was unavailable to take delivery of the message
The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=us;a=
;p=organization;l=MWEXM050510201020VD3KCQ44
MSEXCH:MSExchangeMTA:FEMAUS:HQEXM04

<sigh> This used to be such a proud, efficient agency. Now it's become
an operation managed by the Marx Brothers and overseen by the Three
Stooges.

:hug: Poor Bill. Poor us. :grouphug:

[NJCher]

1. Incredible. Absolutely mind-boggling.

And after all that abuse, they still can't get it right.

What do you think--good story for Olberman?




Cher