Firefighter's Wife Details Nightmare of FEMA Ineptitude in NOLA

From the Columbia Tribune (Oct 4th):

When former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown started pointing the fingers of blame for mishandling the Hurricane Katrina response, he surely was right about one thing.

FEMA was not alone in bungling its portion of relief efforts.

That being said, there are plenty of firefighters across the country clamoring for FEMA to point the finger directly at itself. Part of the emergency agency’s response to the disaster included calling up 1,000 professional firefighters from all over the nation to serve as community service representatives going from town to town in devastated areas representing FEMA. Firefighters were quick to respond to such a request. It’s what they do. It’s why they got into the business. They’re not heroes, and most of them don’t like that word. They’re paid to do a job that on most days involves helping people.

The problem is, many of the firefighters who were sent to the Gulf Coast - this is a program separate from the FEMA search-and-rescue teams such as Missouri Task Force 1 - never got an opportunity to do the one thing they wanted to do: a real job.

So say many of the firefighters who wanted FEMA to put them to work and instead feel like they wasted taxpayers’ money. One of them, a Missouri firefighter who used to ply his trade in Boone County, kept his wife informed of his exploits, and she kept a diary of his so-called work. It ought to be required reading for every federal official, bureaucrat or politician who becomes involved in the business of studying what went wrong with Hurricane Katrina. Mostly, it’s a diary showing the frustration of a citizen whose government got in the way of his job.

Nods to Buzzflash for the link.