« Climate of Fear Part 28 | Main | Rome and Murder »

September 12, 2005

Katrina Relief Part 3

I think a lot of the criticism of FEMA and the Federal government’s response has been a bit off base and too unspecific over the past few weeks. This is especially true considering that the Federal government did rescue thousands of people under very difficult conditions and, as Jack Kelly notes, its response to this hurricane was much faster than its response to previous hurricanes.

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

There are some areas that I think for which FEMA can be criticized fairly, however. I have been helping some Katrina refugees (or evacuees if you do not like calling people who are seeking refuge from a storm refugees) fill out FEMA’s online aid applications and there are several problems. The applications are not well designed and for people with no experience filling out online forms or using computers they are a bit too confusing. These people tried to use the phones to do this, but the phone lines were always busy when they tried calling. FEMA also does not seem to have either enough servers or bandwidth to handle the online applications. Some people who were correctly filling out their online forms had to start all over again multiple times because the FEMA website was working so poorly. I can understand not having enough people to answer phones because people need to be trained to do that and you do not need the same number of phone operators the year round, but the automated online part should be prepared to handle a large and sudden increase in applicants.

Previous Katrtina relief post.

Posted by Pete at September 12, 2005 04:33 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.petetheelder.com/mt-tb.cgi/617

Comments

Thanks for the update. Never occured to me that you would obviously be helping evacuees in your current position. Interesting comments ...

Posted by: Sue at September 14, 2005 12:41 PM