Allocating resources

Via TPM, this is truly astonishing.

A firefighter from California said he feels ill prepared to even carry out the job FEMA has assigned him. In the field, Hurricane Katrina victims will approach him with questions about everything from insurance claims to financial assistance.

"My only answer to them is, '1-800-621-FEMA,' " he said. "I'm not used to not being in the know."

Roy Fire Chief Jon Ritchie said his crews would be a "little frustrated" if they were assigned to hand out phone numbers at an evacuee center in Texas rather than find and treat victims of the disaster.

Also of concern to some of the firefighters is the cost borne by their municipalities in the wake of their absence. Cities are picking up the tab to fill the firefighters' vacancies while they work 30 days for the federal government.

"There are all of these guys with all of this training and we're sending them out to hand out a phone number," an Oregon firefighter said. "They [the hurricane victims] are screaming for help and this day [of FEMA training] was a waste."

Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.

FEMA, after forcing them to spend a day in Atlanta being trained on things like sexual harrassment, are using firefighters from other municipalities to act as "community relations" representatives for FEMA?

What a waste.

But here's the best part.

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

In moments of crisis like these, there is no higher calling than to serve as a prop in presidential photo ops.

On a more uplifting note, the NYCPD seems to have avoided FEMA altogether and is working directly under an agreement with New Orleans and Louisiana.

The New York police volunteers arrived in caravans only a few days before the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack and set out, often without sleep, on search-and-rescue, security, evacuation and patrol missions. To exhausted police and emergency crews in Louisiana, they are an army of relief, their numbers and discipline providing steady hands in a challenging situation.

By Tuesday afternoon, there were 303 New York officers, the largest deployment outside the city in the department's history, said Thomas Reppetto, a police historian who helped write "NYPD: A City and Its Police," (Henry Holt, 2000).

The FEMA acronym does not appear in the article.

But what does appear is something that has been gnawing at me since the extent of the disaster became apparent -- the utter speciousness of comparisons between what has happened in New Orleans and the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Those who remember the 2001 attacks said the devastation they faced this time was much different.

"We were in a 16-acre disaster zone that went for 10 or 12 blocks," said Inspector Thomas Graham, a 33-year veteran who commands the Disorder Control Unit, based in the Bronx.

"Here, there is no water," Inspector Graham said. "There is no electricity. I've got my people housed in a nursing home. There's not enough water pressure to take a shower. And the death toll, I think, is going to be more severe.

"We had a toxic stew because of the fires and the dust," he continued. "Their toxic stew is you cannot drink any water from the tap, because of the pollution, because of the dead bodies in the canals."

This isn't meant to lessen the horror of September 11. It is merely meant to put to rest arguments that if only New Orleans had a Great Man like Rudolph Giuliani, that everything would have gone smoothly and there'd be no need for liburols to viciously attack George Bush for the incompetence of his administration and the incompleteness of his response.