About 1,400 firefighters responded to the call from FEMA early last week. They were told to prepare for “austere conditions,” and bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. The firefighters responded in kind, packing their gear and preparing to help deal with a disaster.
Were they on their way to the Gulf Coast? Unfortunately, no. They were sent to Atlanta — for training on “community relations.”
Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: “What are we doing here?”
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters — his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week — a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. […]
“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”
FEMA prepped the firefighters, not on relief efforts, but on disseminating FEMA’s phone number (1-800-621-FEMA) throughout the Gulf Coast region. Their job wasn’t to save lives or address the crisis; it was to go around and hand out fliers. Some of them, meanwhile, got slightly higher-profile gigs.
Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes and fire ants and travel into pockets of Louisiana where many people have yet to receive emergency aid.
But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
I sometimes feel like I’m trapped in a Twilight Zone episode.
For what it’s worth, by Monday, some firefighters at the community-relations seminar effectively gave up, took off FEMA-issued shirts, and said they would refuse to represent the federal agency. Who can blame them?