NeuroTalk Support Groups - I'm just getting more and more angry! ( RANT)

OK,

I live in Houston, have seen the goings on first hand...I also went through Cat 4 Wilma in Cozumel, Cat 2/3 Alicia in Houston, and work for a company that was intimately involved with the Katrina/Rita FEMA response. So I think I am on fairly solid ground when I talk about these things.

1) Katrina =/= Ike. They are two different situations, two different types of populations, and two different sets of complaints. After Katrina, the problem was that nobody was there trying to help except a dedicated fleet of air rescue assets and a few loyal law enforcement personnel. The city, state, parish, etc response was pathetic. The NOLA PD basically bailed out and left the city, the parish was basically worthless, and the state was too busy blaming FEMA and Bush to spend any time implementing their own plan. NOLA, the parishes, and the state had their plans, and pretty much none of them followed their plans. It was left to people from outside of those agencies to get the response going. Houston's mayor and county judge did more to help NOLA than the New Orleans city gov't did. The govt folks in LA had no business whining about FEMA, because they were unable to even do their own jobs right.

In the case of Ike, the city, county, and state had their crap together from the get go...with the exception of Galveston's mayor being late with her evacuation order. After the storm, the city and county were ready to go with assessments of who needed what, setting up distribution points, etc, and the state was bringing in critical supplies like fuel. Where the response broke down was that FEMA was TOTALLY disorganized. They had dozens of trailers of food, water, and ice ready to go, and they could not seem to get them from point A to point B and had no established way to communicate with the drivers.

A caravan of trucks would leave the assembly point, several would get lost, and none of them would show up at the POD on time, and in some cases would end up back at the assembly point. That falls directly on FEMA. The city and county would give them locations, tell them what was needed and when, and FEMA couldn't even complete the simple task of getting trucks from point A to point B.

2) Be careful reading the situation here from news reports. News stations are all looking for a sensational story, so while the thousands of stories of neighbors going next door and helping cut trees, tarp roofs, cook meals, share water, etc. won't get half the coverage of the one guy sitting on the corner wailing about how nobody is helping him. My sister lives alone and her neighbors with a generator are bringing her hot meals every night. My neighbors and I helped each other repair fences, tarp roofs, and cut up trees. What you see on the news about people whining for help is the exception, not the rule. Sure, there are big lines at the aid distribution centers, but most people are there for the ice. Most have food and water at home, but ice is something you can't do for yourself without power. They tell us to be prepared for 3 days with nothing...most everybody was prepared for longer than that...but when the city was ready to start providing aid to supplement that...FEMA is the one that dropped the ball.

Bottom line -

Here is my takeaway from watching multiple disasters unfold over the last few years up close and personal...FEMA is a government agency, and it functions just as inefficiently and clumsily as any large government bureaucracy. People keep asking "what is wrong" with FEMA and "why haven't we fixed" what is wrong with FEMA. The answer is that we can't. Government is terribly inefficient at trying to manage ANYTHING! Taking large groups of people, guaranteeing them a job until they decide to retire, and insulating them from any form of competition is guaranteed to create a bloated inefficient and sluggish organization that can't do much more than trip over itself without outside help.

Our company was responsible for "helping" FEMA setup disaster relief centers for FEMA after Katrina and Rita. We were the people who setup the centers at the Astrodome and other large centers to process the Katrina refugees being bussed into Houston. Our employees saw firsthand how inept the FEMA organization was, and it hasn't changed since then, because there is no incentive for it to change.

Our people ended up running the centers by pushing FEMA out of the way and doing most things themselves. For FEMA to change, there would have to be some fear among the employees that they would lose their job for being bad at what they do...and as government employees, they have no such fear. If we did a bad job with the centers, we would risk losing our contract and future work of that type...so our people had the incentive to improve.

One thing I ask all of you to do in the wake of these disasters is to look carefully at your government and what you expect from it. Look at agencies like FEMA, Medicare, Social Security, etc. Those agencies are the result of government trying to operate large programs involving large big responsibility and billions of dollars. All are horribly inefficient, all are fraught with billions of dollars of waste, all are riddled with corruption and fraud both inside and out, and none of them show any signs of making any improvement in how they operate. Before you look to government (or your elected officials) to create new bureaucratic nightmares (like nationalized healthcare), look carefully at FEMA and ask yourself if you would want them in charge of picking a doctor for you or deciding which medicine you should take, because that is what giving goverment control of more of our lives will look like. We have zero reason to look at government's past attempts at operating an organization and expect that any new ones will turn out any differently.