news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051...NlYwMxNjk5
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On Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that "estimates are many will die within hours."
"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical," Bahamonde wrote. "The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out."
A short time later, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes," Worthy wrote.
"Restaurants are getting busy," she said. "We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."
www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/03...index.html
choice excerpt
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On August 29, the day of the storm, Brown exchanged e-mails about his attire with Taylor, Melancon said. She told him, "You look fabulous," and Brown replied, "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?"
An hour later, Brown added: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god," according to the congressman.
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Melancon used an e-mail sent September 2, four days after the hurricane hit, to illustrate his point. On that day, Brown received a message with the subject "medical help." At the time, thousands of patients were being transported to the New Orleans airport, which had been converted to a makeshift hospital. Because of a lack of ventilators, medical personnel had to ventilate patients by hand for as long as 35 hours, according to Melancon.
The text of the e-mail reads: "Mike, Mickey and other medical equipment people have a 42-foot trailer full of beds, wheelchairs, oxygen concentrators, etc. They are wanting to take them where they can be used but need direction.
"Mickey specializes in ventilator patients so can be very helpful with acute care patients. If you could have someone contact him and let him know if he can be of service, he would appreciate it. Know you are busy but they really want to help."
Melancon said Brown didn't respond for four days (emphasis mine), when he forwarded the original e-mail to FEMA Deputy Chief of Staff Brooks Altshuler and Deputy Director of Response Michael Lowder.
The text of Brown's e-mail to them read: "Can we use these people?"
Wow. Just wow. This guy was a total incompetant schmuck. How'd he ever get to RUN a federal agency?
The dolt. I should be in the government, I'd be better for us than this waste of space.
Honestly. This is like putting a ballerina in a warzone.
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This is like putting a ballerina in a warzone.
More akin to putting a retarded clown in a disaster area, which is exactly what it is.
How'd he ever get to RUN a federal agency?
Well apparently he falsified a bunch of stuff in his resume. Oh, and he was a close personal friend of Joe Allbaugh, who also ran Bush's election campaign in 2000. Yay cronyism.
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Wow. Just wow. This guy was a total incompetant schmuck. How'd he ever get to RUN a federal agency?
Isn't it obvious? His association with Bush, king of all nepotism, got him in office. Brown had barely ANY experience with emergency services before FEMA, demonstrated by his attempt to describe himself as qualified by describing disasters that happened while he was director.
We're talking about a director who claimed repeatedly on TV interviews that FEMA didn't know the convention center had evacuees in it, AFTER 4 DAYS OF EVERY NEWS CHANNEL BLARING IT 24 HOURS PER DAY.
He also bragged to Congress that FEMA TURNED AWAY trucks full of supplies because the hurricane victims shouldn't be getting ice for their sodas on the government tab.
uspolitics.about.com/b/a/207377.htm
Also note that FEMA spent $100 million on ice that it didn't deliver.
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According to FEMA spokesman Don North, ice is important: "Ice allows people in a disaster area to preserve their food. Ice allows hospitals to preserve medicine. Ice allows nursing homes to hydrate senior citizens."
www.sptimes.com/2005/09/1...ails.shtml
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Later, he practiced law, civil cases that generally did not take him into a courtroom. He dabbled in public office, serving on one city council and lost a race for mayor in another city.
His political ambition was exceeded only by his lack of success.
In 1988, 32-year-old Brown, an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, ran as a Republican for Congress against Glenn English - a long-serving Democratic representative in a generally Republican district. English raised more than four times as much money as Brown and took 73 percent of the vote.
Brown left Oklahoma for the first time in 1991, spending almost a decade in Colorado at a job that is not mentioned on his FEMA resume.
He was hired by the International Arabian Horse Association, for a newly created position inspecting judges at the group's 300 horse shows.
Mary Anne Grimmell, a former association president, said he was often quiet and kept to himself, appearing aloof to many, but was known as "The Czar" for his enthusiastic use of power.
Brown's decisions led to several lawsuits. Although none would go anywhere, the association, not accustomed to being sued, began to raise $1-million for a legal fund. Grimmell and former board member Karl Hart say Brown collected almost $50,000 but kept it for his own legal fees even though the association had planned to defend him as well.
Grimmell and Hart say Brown was asked to leave after that incident. But others, including former association official Lorry Wagner and Brown's longtime friend and attorney Andrew Lester, say he was ready to leave after almost 10 years.
Brown, who donated $1,000 to Bush's campaign, had frequently told colleagues that he would land a job in Bush's administration if the then-Texas governor won the White House in 2000.
"He said for a couple years he was going to get a position in Washington," Hart said. "I was frankly shocked."
Brown is very Bush-like, in that he's a %$#@up who's never been even mediocre at anything but knowing powerful people who probably get their positions the same way.
You know, it's kind of hard to take these e-mails seriously when context isn't provided, ie the entire e-mail. Plus, only a few are presented...and all of them happen to be negative ones. Kind of hard to work myself up over this.
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Brown is very Bush-like, in that he's a %$#@up who's never been even mediocre at anything but knowing powerful people who probably get their positions the same way.
Brown had successfully handled 164 federally declared disasters as FEMA director, including several major hurricanes and the California wildfires. I maintain that Brown got a bad rap. He merely became a scapegoat. Nobody was complaining about Brown last year when four major hurricanes swept through Florida. Things seemed to work as planned in Mississippi and Alabama. Hurricanes are not a federal problem, especially for first response. FEMA should only be expected to come along later to write checks and coordinate other fed agencies. They are only a liason between the local authorities and the feds.
The feds cannot be expected to do what the locals refuse to do. New Orleans had a perfectly good evacuation plan (one that FEMA had made better one year before Katrina, ironically)...and you know what one of the most important things was in that plan? Evacuation, evacuation, evacuation. Then New Orleans saw a real hurricane and didn't even enact the plan.
Seeing as how Brown's e-mails are being picked at, why don't we go ahead and take a look at Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco's e-mails while we're at it?
And that said.... the failure of the feds and locals is overstated (much less so for the local government, however). It really irks me when this scapegoating is done in the face of something of the magnitude of what happened to New Orleans. On what planet to these people live where they can look at something like Katrina and expect that it was somehow supposed to go well? It's insane.
And last, but certainly not least...
One of the prime methods for evacuating people according to the NO evac-plan was to use buses. That's a lot of buses that went unused.
And not one of you realize what FEMA's role really is, and how Brown failed in THAT role. It is not FEMA's job to go into a situation and take command.
FEMA is designed as a coordinating office, to pull assets from other Federal fiefdoms in an emergency to support the Incident Commander. Brown failed in this task because Louisiana failed in this task.
FEMA does not own Blackhawk helicopters or air ambulances, not a single fire truck or C-130. FEMA has no organic assets. FEMA's job is to assist the Incident Commander, not come in and take over. Of course who was the Incident Commander in NO? Too many individual organizations set up their own incident command centers and did not centralize properly.
The real question is whether a truly competent person could have straightened out the mess in LA any better than Brown, and given the charlie foxtrot at the local and state level I don't believe that even Rudy Giuliani could have sped up the course of actual progress. He certainly would have provided more of a hands on leadership approach which would have made people feel better, but organizing an evacuation of such scale along with all the engineering tasks to accomplish and the myriad of organizations responsible was a Herculean task. Obviously Brown was not up to it, but I doubt that there are many who are.
Jimro
But, going back to that FIRST quote at the top of the page...
How stupid to respond to an email saying; "People are starving, RIGHT NOW, we need to organise a meeting so we can stop them starving"
What kind of person would reply, or get his secretary to reply; "Cant do that right now, busy attending a meal at a fancy restuarant, I'll do it when we've finished eating."
Yes, fair enough, sack the secretary but... Come on, that is idiocy.
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Nobody was complaining about Brown last year when four major hurricanes swept through Florida.
That's because they're complaining about fraud now. It turns out that FEMA was giving money to people that didn't deserve it. The total discovered so far is in the millions in terms of taxpayer money though it's possible it may go higher.
Of course, everyone saw Bush (the one in the White House) on the ground helping everyone almost immediately when the hurricanes hit Florida last year (which was also an election year). However, he didn't do that whether it was Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama until after the uproar throughout the country.
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Things seemed to work as planned in Mississippi and Alabama.
Then you didn't watch Fox News (much less MSNBC as Joe Scarborough was the person I saw covering the Mississippi neglect/issues the most). I saw too many people complaining in Mississippi, including those that had to wait over two weeks to see FEMA at all. Alabama was fine, but Alabama also had very little hurricane damage in comparison to the other two states in question--so much less that Alabama sent its National Guard to assist Mississippi. ;p
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Hurricanes are not a federal problem, especially for first response.
If hurricanes are not a federal problem, then why does FEMA exist? It exists in part because hurricanes ARE a federal problem. To say that hurricanes are not a federal problem is to basically say that nothing that happens to one part of the U.S. is the responsibility of the federal government. Why should we have a Department of Homeland Security then? Based on your logic, it is not responsible for anything either.
BTW, no one was complaining about "the first response" from FEMA. People were complaining about the "no response" from FEMA. It should not take five days after a hurricane hits to have help arrive. We were in Pakistan after it was hit by the earthquake recently faster than we got to New Orleans. That is the issue. ;p
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FEMA should only be expected to come along later to write checks and coordinate other fed agencies. They are only a liason between the local authorities and the feds.
FEMA = feds
That's where there is a disconnect I believe.
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It really irks me when this scapegoating is done in the face of something of the magnitude of what happened to New Orleans. On what planet to these people live where they can look at something like Katrina and expect that it was somehow supposed to go well?
No, people just expected the feds to have moved in before Friday when you know that there is a chance for a hurricane of the magnitude of Katrina to hit a very vulnerable area as predicted by experts for years. When people's lives are at stake, most people expect the government to act on the side of caution in terms of preparing--and it doesn't matter your political ideology is on that front. ;p
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The real question is whether a truly competent person could have straightened out the mess in LA any better than Brown, and given the charlie foxtrot at the local and state level I don't believe that even Rudy Giuliani could have sped up the course of actual progress. He certainly would have provided more of a hands on leadership approach which would have made people feel better, but organizing an evacuation of such scale along with all the engineering tasks to accomplish and the myriad of organizations responsible was a Herculean task. Obviously Brown was not up to it, but I doubt that there are many who are.
Honoree did a good enough job it seems. He should've been called in sooner.
