Shortly after 9/11, Christine Whitman lied to emergency workers about the air quality around the smoking remains of the World Trade Center. Political pressure, the kind that forces Surgeon Generals to mention Bush three times on every page of every speech, demanded that the EPA make the situation sound good even if it was not. Maybe some day we can count how many heroic Americans sickened and died from crippling respiratory ailments because of bogus EPA reassurances.
Really, I have no idea why anybody would expect Michael “heckuva job” Brown’s old department, FEMA, to do a better job than Whitman’s EPA.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said today.
At a hearing this morning of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers.
No doubt unemployed, uninsured Katrina refugees will appreciate FEMA’s asscovering when parents, spouses and kids die from lack of access to treatments they can’t afford.
Dreggas
Motherfuckers…
Jake
But those people didn’t have much to begin with. They’re really doing quite well. [/Iron Babs]
Yes, of course. Plausible Deniability is high art, religion, a fucking raison d’etre for this gang. Why ask a question if you might not like the answer? Much better to stick your head further up your arse so you can say you had no idea. If someone drags you out of your safe place bleat: “No one could have possible foreseen [whatever it is this time],” dive back in and stay there ’til the president gives you that MedaloHonor (TM).
Call me cynical but I think this shAttitude is the same reason I know two people who’ve both lost relatives to FEMA trailers that blew up for no fucking reason.
RSA
“Are there no
prisonsemergency rooms? Are there noworkhousestax cuts for the poor?”Good God, the Bush administration makes me reconsider my ideas about perpetual motion machines: Every time I think they’ve ground to a halt due to the massive friction of veniality and incompetence, they just keep on going.
BFR
Good God, the Bush administration makes me reconsider my ideas about perpetual motion machines: Every time I think they’ve ground to a halt due to the massive friction of veniality and incompetence, they just keep on going.
Aren’t these careerists as opposed to political appointees? Just maybe it isn’t 100% fair to lay this all at the doorsteps of Bush & friends.
Bubblegum Tate
Amazing, isn’t it? Just trying to catalog the instances in which politics trumped rationality is enough to make the mind boggle, and that’s not even getting into all the other areas in which this administration has redefined “incompetence” or “fucking over everybody else in order to help their buddies.”
Tim F.
Through both passive and active means an organization eventually adopts the characteristics of its leaders. So yes and no. From stem to stern this is not the functional FEMA that Clinton handed off in 2001.
RSA
I have two thoughts about BFR’s comment. First, the director of FEMA is of course a political appointment, and leaders are responsible for establishing an appropriate organizational culture. Given FEMA’s recent history, we should have been able to expect improvement, if only from an effort to avoid further embarrassment. Second, I think that it’s significant that FEMA lawyers were consulted in the first place, prior to the testing that should have been going on. Does FEMA take any action without asking its legal staff about their potential exposure? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s a good policy in general. As for the decision that the lawyers made, I think it’s wrong in a moral sense, but based on my interactions with a legal department in my organization, it sounds like something that could be expected given their perspective.
RSA
Oops, I should have refreshed to see Tim F.’s more concise statement of what I think.
BFR
From stem to stern this isn’t the functional FEMA that Clinton handed off in 2001.
Yeah, I can see that. I just don’t see this as anything more than an indictment of organizational competence. Normal world, legal dept would press for caution on something like this & would get overruled by higher ups. Of course that doesn’t happen if said higher ups don’t care about good governance or are clueless about their responsibilities.
BFR
I have two thoughts about BFR’s comment. First, the director of FEMA is of course a political appointment, and leaders are responsible for establishing an appropriate organizational culture. Given FEMA’s recent history, we should have been able to expect improvement, if only from an effort to avoid further embarrassment.
You’re both right – it is fair to lay this at Bush’s doorsteps.
Tim F.
I think that is a useful point, and RSA makes it as well. The legal department gave the opinion that any responsible legal team would give; it is not their responsibility to make the choice, just to delineate what the risks are. The borderline criminality came when someone higher up read the opinion and decided that lawsuit vulnerability was FEMA’s solitary and paramount concern.
Corporations behave like that because they don’t serve the public interest, they serve their shareholders. If the public interest demands that corporations take something into account then it’s their responsibility, via Congress, to pass laws which mandate it. The system works fine as long as corporations act like corporations and government acts like government.
When government starts to behave like a corporation, well, the shit on display above is pretty much guaranteed.
caustics
Yeah, well. Most of those entrenched quasi-socialist “careerists” that wingnuts love to fret about actually skedaddled once it became clear that FEMA was being re-tasked as a dumping ground for the Republican Youth Brigade and other less than talented, yet still worthy of reward FOBs.
Because, you know, they had integrity to worry about.
So yes, I’m quite comfortable laying 100% of this at the doorstep of Bush & friends.
Tom Hilton
Hey, let’s test that hypothesis. If it’s all about the ‘careerists’ rather than the political leadership, then we can expect to find that FEMA’s response was just as catastrophically bad when Clinton was president.
Why don’t you go check on that. I’ll wait.
jake
Amended.
I think we need to start taking bp medication now. In a few years time we won’t be able to read the papers without blowing an artery.
And again.
I have no way of proving this but I strongly suspect that many career FEMA-ites got the fuck out of there when they saw Chertoff was going to be their new boss. Top that off with the appointment of Stud-Book Brown and you’ve got a recipe for a stampede.
caustics
From Frontline: the storm: a short history of FEMA:
And so on. The interviews from this piece were heartbreaking.
Bob In Pacifica
But she’s a LIBERAL Republican, right?
Bubblegum Tate
That Frontline episode about FEMA was excellent. Heartbreaking and enraging, but excellent. FEMA is a microcosm of how the Bush administration takes formerly competent government agencies and utterly ruins them.
BIRDZILLA
A few years ago some GREENPEACE jerks wanted them to name hurricanes for that various industries they claim were cuasing this GLOBAL WARMING poppycock. Just proves how rediclous and stupid GREENPEACE is