Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: “What are we doing here?”<\/p>\n
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. […]<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I sometimes feel like I’m trapped in a Twilight Zone episode.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}