A New Orleans house flattened but for a concrete staircase on a crumbling facade was among many storm-ravaged structures that federal officials deemed fit for occupancy by Katrina victims now living in Houston, Mayor Bill White said Friday.
Man, just when I begin to think that there is nothing else that FEMA could possibly do to demonstrate a complete lack of competence, never mind compassion, something else comes out, something that makes me wonder if a complete lack of humanity is a requirement for working at FEMA.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most everyone wants New Orleans to be able to get back on it’s feet, and I think that most decent people want New Orleans natives to be able to go home if that’s what they want. No decent person, though, certainly not one with the barest shred of humanity, would expect a native of the Crescent City to go home to a concret slab and a few sticks of shredded wood. Yet this is exactly what FEMA seems to be doing. By certifying structures as habitable, FEMA is able to justify ending assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Of course, it would appear that their definition of “habitable” is much more flexible that what you or I might come up with.
Of course, I’m hardly an expert in such matters, but I would think that a minimum, and certainly reasonable definition of “habitable” would be a structure with a shell and a mostly intact roof. How can any reasonable and compassionate person define a concret slab and a largely destroyed structure as “habitable”? The answer, of course, is that you cannot, but then again, as FEMA has demonstrated since 8.29.05, reason and compassion have never been part of their equation. It once again seems that this is all about meeting bureaucratic expectations and arbitrary targets that really have nothing to do with the reality on the ground. Someone ought to remind these bureacratic trolls that we’re talking about real people here, not numbers on a spreadsheet.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has notified about 8,900 heads of households in Houston, representing more than 20,000 Katrina evacuees, that they will be ineligible for the cash assistance intended to replace a massive city voucher program that has paid their rent.
A common reason was that the evacuees’ former homes were now habitable.
A team from Houston’s Hurricane Housing Task Force, however, conducted a spot check of 43 New Orleans homes deemed “habitable” by FEMA and found 70 percent unfit for occupancy, White said Friday after a briefing by the team.
“Some of our worst fears were realized,” White said. “Many of these notices were simply in error. The vast majority of the structures we inspected were not habitable by any standard.”
The Houston team found 13 homes habitable and 30 uninhabitable, White said.
The city released photographs showing apartments and houses, including the one with little standing but the stairway, in severe disrepair. One apartment building, surrounded by a chain link fence, had been condemned, White said.
This sort of thing really makes me wonder what the motivation of those FEMA employees making these judgements is. Are they under some sort of deadline to certify a certain number of houses as habitable? Are they having to cope with budgetary pressures? Are they simply monsters comletely devoid of judgement and compassion driven by the need to meet expectations set by FEMA management?
When even a layman can look at a picture of a dwelling and determine that it’s not fit for habitation, what does it say when a professional comes to the exact opposite decision? That this decision also means the end of federal assistance makes this whole charade seem like a cruel hoax.
FEMA spokesman Frank Mansell said the agency could not immediately respond to White’s comments because its senior officials were still discussing the issues he raised. On Thursday, Mancell had said the agency was reviewing the list of evacuees denied further aid to ensure that it was accurate.
White said that FEMA reversed a small number of ineligibility determinations after learning about the city team’s New Orleans visit. FEMA could not confirm that on Friday….
FEMA’s eligibility decisions illustrate a general problem with the federal government’s response to Katrina, White said.
Letters informing evacuees that they had been deemed ineligible for further aid were confusing, White said, and city officials had to do considerable research to determine the reasons why evacuees had been denied.
“We think there ought to be an orderly process,” White said. “(Evacuees) shouldn’t be treated as code numbers on a spreadsheet.”
FEMA is transitioning evacuees from the city’s voucher program, which has provided free apartments for almost 35,000 evacuees, to its individual assistance program, which provides cash payments good for three months of rent.
And FEMA will be able to clear a few more code numbers off it’s spreadsheets, which is ultimately what this seems to be about. It’s not about the people. It’s not about the suffering. It’s about meeting quotas, meeting budgets, and getting people off the rolls so FEMA management can thump it’s collective breast and trumpet the agency’s “accomplishments” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
This is a huge issue here in the Houston area, because, outside of New Orleans, Houston was hit the hardest by Katrina. With the FEMA assistance center on the South Loop closing just yesterday, this area has been dealing with Katrina virtually since Day One. No, we weren’t hit by the hurricane, but we certainly have been heavily impacted. Just look around town and see how many Louisiana license plates you come across. Listen to how many New Orleans accents you hear in the grocery store or at the movie theater. These are all people who came here looking for help. It would have been nice if FEMA had done with they are chraged with doing in an efficient and compassionate manner. It’s not that FEMA hasn’t done anything to assist those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, but this latest example is but one example of a system gone haywire. WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CAT LITTER, already…people are suffering, and FEMA seems to be doing little but exacerbating that suffering. We’re from the government, and…oh, don’t get me started….
What’s most frustrating and saddening about this latest clusterf—k is that it’s yet another example of how FEMA simply isn’t up to the task it is charged with completing. No one has ever expected perfection. In a situation of the scope and complexity of Hurricane Katrina and it’s aftermath, perfection is unattainable. No government agency could handle this sort of situation without dropping the ball somewhere along the line. When you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of displaced residents, things will go wrong somewhere along the line. This latest situation, though, is a clearly unacceptable example of just how thoroughly inept, incompetent, and insensitve that FEMA is to the plight of those who, seven-plus months later, still cannot go home.
These are our tax dollars at work?
WE DESERVE BETTER.
