FEMA failures ongoing

By Libby

Via John Cole, I see FEMA's failures on Hurricane Katrina are still playing out. After spending two million tax dollars in storage costs, they finally gave away some $85 million worth of stockpiled relief supplies. Only they didn't go to Katrina victims.

The material, from basic kitchen goods to sleeping necessities, sat in warehouses for two years before the Federal Emergency Management Agency's giveaway to federal and state agencies this year. [...]

"Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA's needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA's inventory," McIntyre wrote in an e-mail.

That's bad enough but the truly tragic aspect of this negligence is that those supplies are still needed by the victims, many of whom remain homeless to this day.

Martha Kegel, the head of a New Orleans nonprofit agency that helps find homes for those still displaced by the storm, said she was shocked to learn about the existence of the goods and the government giveaway.

"These are exactly the items that we are desperately seeking donations of right now: basic kitchen household supplies," said Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans. "These are the very things that we are seeking right now. FEMA, in fact, refers homeless clients to us to house them. How can we house them if we don't have basic supplies?"

On a slightly cheerier note, The New Orleans Saints took a day off from practice to go to a New Orleans neighborhood and help clean up some Katrina destruction. In an especially classy move, the work day was unpublicized and was over before the media got wind of it and could turn it into a circus. That speaks to the American spirit I remember growing up. Neighbors helping each other, not for recognition, but simply because they could.

Of course this all raises the question of why, almost three years later, the clean up in NOLA is still uncompleted and its restoration is a sorry joke. Why are the NOLA victims either still homeless or housed in toxic trailers deemed too dangerous for FEMA workers to enter?

I recall when I complained at the time they were passing out huge no-bid contracts to mega-corporations and suspending workers' protection regulations, being lectured by Bush administration apologists about how this was necessary in order to speed up the cleaning and restoration of the city. We gave these corporations billions for their alleged speed and efficiency. For their alleged expertise in major project management. So why isn't the work done yet? Instead what I've seen is too many stories out of the Gulf coast like this one.

They sold their homes. They said goodbye to their families. After paying recruiters $20,000 for visas to take part in this nation's H-2B guest worker program, they traveled from India to Pascagoula, Miss. There, the Indian welders and pipe fitters were promised good jobs at the Signal International shipyard and the chance to bring their families here.

Like many of our relatives, they came to the United States in search of the American Dream.

Yet, what they found was modern-day forced labor. They were forced to live in a cramped space with two dozen other workers�and pay more than $1,000 per month for the privilege. Toilet and shower facilities were few, and they were not allowed off-site to purchase groceries to replace the company's intolerable food.

I don't know that this particular case is related to Katrina reconstruction in any way, however I recall similar stories about Latino workers during the initial stages of the clean up. I feel certain the permissive attitude of the federal government about worker abuse that arose at that time surely has had an effect on these men's situation today. In fact, it reminds me of the kind of worker abuse company owners were guilty of a century ago that gave ultimately gave rise to worker protection laws in the first place. It's just sad to see how far basic humanity has been rolled back under this regime.