Word: fema
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...people came to me and said, 'Why haven't they taken care of us? Why did they forget us?'" The food supply was down to beans and a few raw vegetables; candy vending machines had long since been emptied. "One of the guys here has been trying to call FEMA, and all he gets is a busy signal or voice mail," Gupta said. The stress was so overwhelming that perhaps half a dozen hospital staff members had to be treated in the psychiatric ward. The basement morgue was flooded, so the growing numbers of bodies were stacked in body bags...
...chain of command, missed every opportunity. And an angry debate opened about how much the demands of the Iraq war, on both the budget and the National Guard, were eating into the country's ability to protect itself at home. Louisiana Republican Congressman Jim McCrery--working the phones with FEMA, the Army, the White House, state officials--argues that Katrina revealed how much doesn't work. "Clearly, with all the money we've spent, all the focus we have put on homeland security, we are not prepared for a disaster of this proportion whether it's induced by nature...
Soon afterward, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was demoted, subsumed by the new Department of Homeland Security. That was a mistake, says William Massey, who spent 24 years as FEMA's hurricane-program manager for the southeast U.S. before retiring last year. "The emphasis on terrorism has really hurt FEMA's efforts." When Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University (L.S.U.) Hurricane Center, suggested a year ago that the agency stockpile tents for when houses blow down, "this woman from FEMA said, 'Americans don't live in tents,'" van Heerden recalls. "I said to her, people...
...real deal," New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said at a news conference ordering city residents to evacuate on Saturday. "Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas. Treat this one differently because it is pointed towards New Orleans." At FEMA's urging, on the same day, the President declared an emergency in the state of Louisiana, allowing water, food and ice to be stockpiled at bases around the state. The system appeared to be working...
...untold thousands. The next morning, with the storm less than 24 hours away, the team talked to federal health officials about the potential for disease from the rising waters. At midday Sunday, according to TIME's Cathy Booth Thomas, the L.S.U. team informed a roomful of disaster officialsfrom FEMA and the Red Cross to the military and National Guardthat they were looking at a "significant event" with waves washing over the levees in central New Orleans. By 8 p.m. Monday, the first bad news came into the Operations Center. Staff from a nursing home reported that water had been rising...