triple-oh-six wrote:Brandon wrote:. Here is a fun fact, even though we filed FEMA and everything less than a week after we finally got all our disaster money 2 weeks ago.
Ask my people what we think about FEMA
Totally off topic:
I was at a FEMA meeting about a month and a half ago.
I left the meeting learning two very important things from FEMA about disaster (and for our area hurricane) preparedness:
1) FEMA won't be to do much of anything for 3-4 weeks, and then it will prioritize on critical services first - plan on taking care of your self for at least that long if your local community and local government is incapable of the task.
2) If your local municipality does not have agreements in place with critical non-governmental service providers (they call them MOA - Memorandum of Agreement) prior to the emergency, things will take much longer to get done than if they are already in place. FEMA will have an even longer drawn out process processing reimbursements today because of the large scale fraud that occurred in LA post Katrina. I know it is shocking to hear, but Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular has quite a bit of fraud and corruption within their city and state governments.
It's easy to blame things on a distant, massive, bureaucracy - but the root of the problem may be in your local, not the national, bureaucracy.
I was on one of the first commercial flights to Kauai post Iniki less than a week after that category 5 hurricane and slept in a tent for several weeks as I waited near the harbor for re-construction materials and tools to arrive that I had loaded up on Maui and we were shipping in. They were supplies we had purchased with our own money which is much faster than waiting for a grant. The spray painted doors and walls with insurance company codes I saw on the videos in LA (and in MS and AL) were just the same as I saw on Kauai 13 years before - it was eerie. Florida had 4 or 5 major other hurricanes that season as well from what I remember, but as most of Florida's major cities don't have major population areas below sea level, the post storm surge damage was much less than in NO.
I was working on Kauai prior to Iniki and was part of the re-building efforts as well and saw how that unfolded and things returned to normal and what folks did with the insurance money. There is also an element of personal responsibility one must take post disaster. Some wisely used money to repair their homes and others spent the money on a year and a half long party and still did not have a home when the party came to an end.
p.s. I have not listened to the show for about a month now, so I only recall the two Alonzo calls from the first time I remember him calling in. Is his microphone worse than Blobber's now?
