FEMA's Impartial Ineptitude

This morning’s AP story about FEMA’s distribution breakdowns and failures in Mississippi brings some things into perspective.

The next day, in another e-mail to headquarters about substandard levels of food, water and ice being distributed in Mississippi, Carwile reported, "System appears broken."

In a Sept. 1 exchange, FEMA regional response official Robert Fenton warned headquarters that the expected levels of water and ice being sent were far below what was needed.

"If we get the quantities in your report tomorrow we will have serious riots," Fenton wrote.

New Orleans, with its much larger concentration of people, the flooding, and the amazing media coverage, has allowed so much spinning and skewing to go on about what motivated (or didn’t motivate) the relief efforts. Reading this article, though, it seems pretty obvious that even had FEMA come running into the Superdome within hours of the hurricane, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

In fact, it might have made things worse. Ironic, no?

Polimom said this @ 6:18 AM