Sunday, July 15, 2007
 The federal government's slow-motion genocide operation on South Louisiana continues, as highlighted this week in a U.S. Senate hearing shaired by Louisiana's Sen. Mary Landrieu.
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Release from the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, July 10 2007: "Senator Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., today chaired a hearing on the process localities must go through to complete Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) project worksheets (PWs), a requirement for receiving federal funds. As a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there are 23,000 public works projects in Louisiana, and each one requires complicated, time consuming steps in order to receive FEMA funds.
"The project worksheet system is inefficient, slow and contradictory," Sen. Landrieu said. "Anyone who comes in contact with it quickly understands it is one of the major roadblocks to our recovery from Katrina and Rita. Destroyed localities with no tax base are required to put up money in advance. Work is reviewed not just building-by-building but segment by segment. Tens of thousands of documents must be completed for a single project. Communities are prevented from building better and smarter. Our locals must re-justify their projects because of FEMA's high employee turnover. And FEMA inspectors systematically low ball damage estimates, in some cases by four or five times."
The first panel of witnesses that testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Disaster Recovery Subcommittee included locally elected officials who each testified that FEMA is tied up in bureaucracy and undermines the recovery by continually underestimating project costs and hiring inexperienced personnel.
The officials included: C. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans; Kevin Davis, President of St. Tammany Parish; and Henry "Junior" Rodriguez, President of St. Bernard Parish.
St. Bernard Parish was completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, displacing 67,500 people, and President Rodriguez said FEMA was primarily responsible for the slow pace of recovery. In one example, he explained that the parish sought to consolidate its sewer system into one wastewater plant, a less costly approach than repairing or replacing the pre-storm system. FEMA has told the parish to pursue the project in three different ways but because of FEMA's red tape, the parish still lacks a working sewer system and instead pumps out waste by the truckload.
"We got by Katrina and Rita," President Rodriguez said. "I don't know if we can get through FEMA. This is one hell of a catastrophe. We're still working out of trailers. We're in no better shape now than we were two years ago."
Mayor Nagin added that the constant FEMA staff turnover requires New Orleans to repeatedly justify the need for public works projects.
"Every couple of months we seem to have dealt with a different FEMA representative," Mayor Nagin said. "And we almost had to start from scratch every time a new person came in."
Witnesses who testified on the second panel included... Mark Merritt, Senior Vice President of Response and Recovery, James Lee Witt Associates.
Merritt, who worked for FEMA under Director James Lee Witt from 1993 until 2001, testified that FEMA is measuring its progress by the number of project worksheets written.
"We should be counting the number of schools, hospitals and miles of roads repaired and replaced, not the number of PWs written," he said. Merritt added that FEMA is a much different agency than when he worked there. He said the agency no longer employs the necessary staff to deal with catastrophic disasters and that 80 percent of FEMA employees sent to Louisiana following the hurricanes had just nine days of experience. FEMA staff tasked with Gulf Coast recovery lack the experience to recognize flexibility in the Stafford Act, which is the "core of what is inhibiting the PW process," he said.
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----- Labels: fema, Katrina
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