Outsourcing FEMA To CNN

Outsourcing FEMA To CNN

By Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Friday, September 09, 2005

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." ------- President George W. Bush to FEMA Director Mike Brown on 9/2/05 while crowds of flood victims swell to 30,000 at the New Orleans Superdome and 25,000 at the Convention Center.

The surreal images begged the question. The criminal incompetence of our government's response added the exclamation mark. How could this be happening in America?!

That's the question hundreds of my constituents throughout our entire Congressional District have been asking me over the past week.

We are a nation of first responders to international disasters. Famines, floods, tsunamis and, yes, even hurricanes. We are often the first to arrive in other nations with the immediate aid, personnel and ingenuity needed to save lives.

So where was our government when it happened to our own flesh and blood? In post 9/11 America, have our leaders in the White House and Congress convinced themselves that if they confront the war on natural disasters abroad they won't have to fight hurricanes on our own soil?

Though he was given a four-day warning, FEMA Director Mike Brown waited until five hours after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast to dispatch 1,000 relief workers. His own memo now reveals that he then gave his employees two days to arrive in New Orleans and told them that their duty was to "convey a positive image."

Brown's focus on image should come as no surprise to a White House who appointed him without any emergency response credentials. His prior job was a rules enforcer for an Arabian horse association and his ticket into FEMA was being the former director's schoolmate. His Chief of Staff is a former advance man for the President, responsible for staging photo opportunity backdrops similar to the president's now famous "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing and speech. His deputy Chief of Staff produced TV commercials for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign.

While Brown and his team were spinning, the true human tragedy of Katrina would begin to unfold as hundreds of offers to provide victims with immediate assistance were rejected by FEMA bureaucrats. My desk is covered with reports of private companies and public organizations who rushed to provide help only to be turned away by our federal government. One hundred Maryland volunteer firefighters were turned away because the Department of Homeland Security said they lacked proper federal background checks. Nevada law enforcement officers were assembled and ready to help but told to stay put. The City of Chicago offered to send hundreds of police, firefighters and rescue equipment only to be rejected by FEMA and asked to supply only a single tank truck.

The grandest evidence of government malpractice was the decision not to immediately use the USS Bataan, an 844 ft. Marine vessel that was already sitting in the Gulf with medical supplies, six operating rooms, 600 beds and the ability to make 100,000 gallons of fresh water per day.

We don't need a blue ribbon commission to tell us what we already know. America appears unprepared to respond to a catastrophic attack on a major city.

Our nation stood stunned as Brown and Chertoff defended their delays by charging that their staff could not gain access to victims while news crews seemed to be having little trouble finding thousands who were trapped in buildings and marooned on highway overpasses waiting for government boats that never came. Perhaps we should outsource FEMA to CNN.

A more responsible approach would be to reevaluate our national priorities. We have become a nation with elected leaders who wake up in the middle of the night to force-feed a comatose woman but sleepwalk through repeated funding cuts that prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from building basic public safeguards against disaster. We allow the national debate to be led by a runaway bride rather than reports warning that our poverty rate has increased at an alarming 12% this year. And most concerning, we have become a nation that has allowed the word "accountability" to somehow be stolen and replaced with an Orwellian chorus of invincibility and charges of blame game politics.

CIA Director George Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Honor for his role in using bad intelligence to get us into a war. If Congress and our nation fail to change our priorities before the flood waters recede, none of us should be surprised if there is another Rose Garden medal ceremony for FEMA Director Mike Brown after they subside.

A federal disaster report issued in the spring of 2001, before 9/11, warned that the three likeliest and most catastrophic disasters facing America were a major flood in New Orleans, a terrorist attack in New York City and a catastrophic earthquake in California's Bay Area. Earthquakes don't provide four-day warnings. The time to change our priorities is now while the anger is still overflowing.

http://mikethompson.house.gov/newsroom/index.asp?ID=54