Most of what we're hearing in the media about responses is crappolla,
but I could certainly contribute to chat about FEMA's historical
incompetence. You've got to remember, the agency has little if
anything in common with the movie version of the agency. It's actual
job, or 95% of it, consists of writing checks. Up until about 10 years
ago, there was virtually no effort to filter out recipients of those
checks who had the same structure "destroyed" in disaster after
disaster.
A buddy of mine was one of the first people engaged to address that
problem ... gong by the usual FEMA practice for evaluating
qualifications, he was a qualified engineering-bureaucrat with no
knowledge of databases - the obvious tool for the task. Just for grins
and giggles, I put together just the sort of thing he needed for
tracking loss payments, and to check for repetitive loss payments,
using File Maker Pro. It probably took about a week to do. It was
impressive enough - functional and easy to use - so that it was passed
up the line to consider for possible use on the national scale.
However, the upper level bureaucrat, who also had no working knowledge
of databases, decided that FMP couldn't be used because he'd never
heard of it. FEMA then proceeded to hire a consulting firm in DC to
essentially duplicate what I'd done at, I was told, a cost of something
like a quarter million dollars.
Speaking of recent FEMA incompetence is much like speaking of the
recent blueness of the sky.
Bill Holt
(BTW: The bud finished his work and it turned out that the
overpayments amounted to some billions - in the several states he
evaluated.)
On Thursday, September 8, 2005, at 02:04 PM, Bill Rising wrote:
> of recent FEMA incompetence:
>
> http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/08/
> 1212237&tid=113&tid=95&tid=103&tid=219
>
> It's a small point relative to the whole Katrina debacle, but
> indicative of Incompetence as a Way of Life.
>
> Bill<smime.p7s>
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