Katrina victims: where is the outrage?

(Read time: 4 minutes. WaPo article: 2 minutes.)

In the delightful musical version of Al Capp’s comic strip “L’il Abner,” Senator Jack S. Phogbound tells the people of Dogpatch, USA, “Yore government is spending $1 million just to blow yore homes off the face of the earth, so show yore ah-pree-shee-a-shun!”

In Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13,” Ed Harris as NASA’s Gene Krantz delivers the line, “Tell me this is not a government operation.”

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Four short stories of shame in disaster’s aftermath:

NOLA homeless going hungry

One night last week I saw CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewing homeless Katrina victims living under a bridge in New Orleans. Food was a problem, they said, because grocery prices in the Crscent City have skyrocketed.

A rotten shame

CNN reported all weekend that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had “destroyed 6 million meals ready to eat (MREs) valued at $40 million.” These MREs, according to CNN, had been stockpiled for the 2006 hurricane season and had ruined due to improper storage.

Apparently CNN producers failed to read Saturday's Washington Post, which reported that FEMA had mischaracterized these meals as MREs; that, indeed, they were “box lunches” numbering 13.4 million at a cost to taxpayers of $70 million.

Honestly, I don’t know which is most confusing in the WaPo story: its headline that the 13.4 million meals were “lost,” FEMA’s statement that the meals had been stored in trailers on the Gulf Coast with temperatures reaching 120 degrees, the agency’s claim that the meals were donated to Second Harvest, OR the dizzying double-speak which follows in the form of FEMA quotes!

This brief WaPo story is a MUST-READ: LINK

Those not-so-mobile homes

In the meantime, those thousands of FEMA trailers continue to go to seed in Hope, Arkansas, and south Mississippi towns like Hattiesburg and Purvis. Seems there was some red-tape regulation that they couldn’t be placed in “flood-prone areas.” So absurd a situation that you can go to Ebay and get “FEMA trailer Mardi Gras beads and sterling silver FEMA trailer bracelets and earrings!”

“Like a good neighbor,” State Farm is where?

My old University of Southern Mississippi buddy Kathleen Koch reported Sunday morning that CNN has obtained emails showing State Farm Insurance Company threatened to fire an engineering firm making evaluations of Katrina damage in Mississippi.

The emails show engineers were asked to change reports from “wind damage” to “water damage” so State Farm would have to pay less in insurance settlements.

Both State Farm and the engineering firm executives are denying this, despite email evidence to the contrary. Mississippi’s attorney general says the emails will go a long way toward holding State Farm responsible to its policyholders in the state.

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Put me in charge of FEMA. I would have picked up the telephone and had all this straightened out in 20 minutes.

I can hear it now: “You’re doing a heckuva job, B. J.”

Postscript:

Who is the only media personality on the record who claimed the federal government’s “rescue” would have come sooner if those desperate stranded folks in New Orleans had been white?

You guessed it: Don Imus.