Martha Kegel thought she’d seen it all —
the horror of the flooding of New Orleans, the callousness and incompetence
of George W. Bush’s response, the scandal of people still left
homeless three years after the storm. Then she learned something that truly
shocked her.
Kegel heads a nonprofit group called Unity of Greater
New Orleans, striving on a meager budget to help the displaced set up
households. So she was stunned to hear that Bush’s Federal Emergency
Management Agency had recently given away $85 million worth of bedding,
kitchen equipment, clothing, mops and brooms, cleansers, first-aid kits,
and other family necessities. “These are exactly the items that we
are desperately seeking donations of right now — basic kitchen [and]
household supplies,” says an exasperated Kegel.
It turns out that FEMA had such essentials sitting in
warehouses for the past two years. But astonishingly, the perpetually
clueless officials at FEMA decided this year that the supplies were no
longer needed in the storm-racked area.
One hundred twenty-one truckloads of FEMA’s
“excess” inventory, so desperately needed by hard-hit families
in the Crescent City, have been doled out instead to the Homeland Security
Department, the Air Force, and other agencies. As for the people of New
Orleans, FEMA claims ignorance, saying that its officials simply
didn’t know that there was still a need there.
Excuse me, but this is our nation’s emergency
agency. It has an $8.2 billion annual budget. Aren’t these officials
supposed to know? Besides, Kegel says that FEMA did know, because her group
told the agency’s officials again and again that it was in urgent
need of such supplies — but no one mentioned that tons of them were
stored away uselessly in a FEMA warehouse.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2008.
