Wednesday, October 26, 2005

What about some AirForce cargo planes full of ice and water waiting a state or two away???

Can this really be as difficult solution as they make it out to be? Who are these idiots running things? I sure didn't elect either of the Bush Bozos

We were on the ground the day after the Tsunami hit in Sri Lanka with ice and water

The Hell with Jeb Bush and FEMA. What the heck is going on in this country. I'm sick if the insipid Bush brothers and their lines of crap.

The Chertoff bullshit of the day

Chertoff urges Wilma victims to be patient
By LARA JAKES JORDANASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
ABOVE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. -- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Wednesday asked victims of Hurricane Wilma to have patience for relief efforts as he surveyed crumpled boats, shattered mobile homes and snaking lines of cars at fuel stations along the storm's path.
Stepping up aid in Wilma's wake, Chertoff promised to deploy cargo planes overnight to gather water and ice from across the country for delivery by Thursday. He also said the government was working to find more power generators to send to south Florida, and called on oil companies to help distributors get fuel out of the ground and into gas tanks.
"I have to say, in honesty, patience will be required for everybody," Chertoff told The Associated Press during his flight to Florida. "Under the best circumstances, even in the best planning, you still confront the physical reality of a destructive storm."
Chertoff took an aerial tour of the Miami area by helicopter as part of a day in Florida overseeing the federal government's response to Wilma. Though he acknowledged delays in getting supplies to storm victims even two days after Wilma blew through the state, he said the demand for water, food, ice and gas simply outstripped what authorities had stockpiled in preparation.
Chertoff oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was widely criticized for the government's sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina when it ravaged the Gulf Coast nearly two months ago.
He spent part of Wednesday hearing pleas and complaints from local officials. He was greeted in Opa Locka by a gaggle of frustrated local officials who pleaded for water, ice, fuel and - most importantly - power.

"A lot of challenges," said Chertoff, who mostly listened and offered few promises to the officials.
"We're all hurricaned out," he said.
Power shortages were one of the largest problems, said Miami-Dade County Commissioner, Carlos Gimanez, who pressed Chertoff for more generators. As many as 2.8 million power customers were still without electricity on Wednesday, said Gov. Jeb Bush.
"It's not a matter of we lack fuel, we just can't get it out of the ground because we lack power," Gimanez said. "Grocery stores are closed because we don't have power. The longer we go without power, the worse the situation gets."
Did he get a satisfactory response from Chertoff? "He said he'll look into it," Gimanez said. "That's as good as I'm going to get. He's not going to tell me there's 10,000 generators on the way."
Other local officials were more vocal in their frustrations.
Before Chertoff arrived in Miami, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez said he was "disappointed, angered" that FEMA hadn't sent more emergency supplies and that some sites were running low of water and ice.
Alvarez said FEMA officials have not been able to tell him when more supplies will be coming. He said bureaucratic delays were hindering Miami officials from distributing supplies from a site in Homestead, Fla., where FEMA delivered them.
In Tallahassee, where Chertoff began his swing through Florida, Gov. Bush angrily defended FEMA's performance and said the blame for any delays should fall on his shoulders.
"The emergency operations folks are doing their job, and they do it well here, irrespective of what people write," Bush told Chertoff as the two toured the state's emergency operations center, accompanied by an AP reporter. "I've got total confidence in that at the end of this, our reputations will be intact. ... We've worked our asses off."
Turning to the reporter, the governor said, "You can quote me on that."
Bush said an estimated 4,000 storm evacuees remained in 31 shelters across the state. Distributing supplies to victims had been largely successful at scores of centers across the region, he said, but, "Where they didn't work, we had supply but it wasn't adequate. It was not adequate for the demand."
Bush said "significant improvement" had been made over the last day.
On his helicopter tour over metropolitan Miami, Chertoff watched as cars lined up around the block to enter gas stations, and saw a distribution center surrounded by trucks in an empty parking lot. The storm capsized a ship in the port of Miami, where some cargo containers were knocked off their blocks. Large swaths of trees were uprooted.
Meeting with about 30 FEMA employees in Tallahassee, Chertoff asked how he could help them deliver what victims needed most.
"More water, ice," said one worker.
"Triple that," called another.
"We're working on it," Chertoff said.
---

Here's the " Jeb Bullshit" of the day

Posted on Wed, Oct. 26, 2005
Gov. Bush defends FEMA, takes blame for shortcomings
BY MARY ELLEN KLAS, NOAH BIERMAN AND EVAN S. BENN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Gov. Jeb Bush on Wednesday took the blame for underestimating the need for emergency supplies in Miami-Dade and Broward counties after Hurricane Wilma struck, and he aggressively defended the Federal Emergency Management Agency, urging critics to call him instead.
"If anybody wants to blame anybody, let them blame me. Don't blame FEMA," he said at the state emergency operations center with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA Acting Director R. David Paulison at this side.
"This is our responsibility and overall we are doing a good job," added Bush, who had promised before Wilma hit that relief supplies would be distributed to victims in the first 24 hours.
South Florida storm victims waited in lines for hours Tuesday at distribution centers, many perplexed and angry that state, local and federal officials seemed to have misled them about when and whether ice and water would arrive. The scenes were televised nationally, adding to FEMA's battered post-Katrina image.
Wednesday's operation was smoother at most of South Florida's distribution sites, but supplies ran out at some places in Miami-Dade and Broward.
"When they run out, that's it," said a frustrated Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez. "FEMA cannot tell us when they will be resupplied."
In Hollywood, where ice trucks scheduled to arrive at 10 a.m. were delayed until 2:20 p.m., Mayor Mara Giulianti pointed the finger at FEMA, the bureaucratic whipping boy of Hurricane Katrina.
"Again, there's been a failure," she said. "If there's a failure of the government over something this simple, I'm frightened to see what would happen in an even worse crisis."
Speaking Wednesday afternoon from Opa-locka Airport, Chertoff pledged to send cargo planes and more trucks carrying ice, food and water to Homestead Air Reserve Base by the end of Thursday.
Bush and Chertoff, who oversees FEMA and was touring South Florida with Paulison, said they failed to anticipate how many people would need food, ice and water and then failed to get the supplies to people quickly.
The state has primary responsibility in managing natural disasters and Bush testified last week in Congress that he'd like to keep it that way. FEMA is supposed to support the state and anticipate gaps. Before the storm, both state and FEMA officials bragged that Florida's vast experience in storms has made for a seamless process and what Bush called a "unified command."
On Friday, three days before Wilma arrived, FEMA officials said they had more than 300 truckloads of water, ice and meals stockpiled at Homestead and Jacksonville staging areas.
By Wednesday afternoon, officials said the combined state-federal effort had delivered 1,046 truckloads of food, water and ice to local distribution sites.
Bush's strong comments in defense of FEMA Wednesday underscored the political stakes for his brother, President George W. Bush. Hobbled tremendously after Katrina, the president plans to visit South Florida on Thursday. Wilma did far less damage than Katrina and no one is making comparisons in the government's response.
But in this latest storm, President Bush needs to "reaffirm that the systems work," said William Waugh, disaster management expert and professor of public administration at Georgia State University.
Waugh said the late ice and water do not reflect a failure of Florida's excellent emergency response track record, something Gov. Bush also made a point of emphasizing Wednesday. The first 24 hours after the storm are always the hardest logistically, because trucks have trouble traversing roads still strewn with debris, Waugh said.
State officials had trouble reaching truck drivers by cell phone Tuesday and could not give them instructions on how to fill their gas tanks so they could move supplies to Broward.
To fix early logistical problems, governments would need to deliver supplies by air rather than truck, Waugh said.
By comparison, it took two days for limited supplies of ice and water to arrive after Ivan struck the Panhandle last year and three days for relief to arrive in Mississippi after Katrina.
Paulison, Gov. Bush and Chertoff pushed some of the blame back at residents Wednesday, saying they should have had supplies at home for three days after the storm. Still, Bush promised before the storm that supplies would be in place within 24 hours. And the state's emergency management director, Craig Fugate, said it would be a "failure" they weren't.
"Part of the lesson of Katrina is that emergency management officials can't rely on the preparedness of the population, so there will be people with virtually nothing," Waugh said.
U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat, said Gov. Bush was "insulting the victims of the hurricane in South Florida telling them to be patient and that they should have had what they needed for 72 hours."
"No one is looking at the centers of poverty as a priority," he said, adding that Little Haiti and Overtown still don't have distribution sites.
Meek has been pressing to get supplies in those areas, but their exclusion from the list of 16 Miami-Dade sites was a local decision. Alvarez said he wished he had more sites, but accused critics of parochialism.
Most other politicians had toned down their FEMA criticism by Wednesday afternoon as the situation seemed to improve. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, said it was too soon to judge FEMA's response, but the agency seems "to be getting these hiccups ironed out."
He and others were pushing FEMA to get more generators to South Florida so the gas stations would be up and running.
"Folks are going to criticize anything that's not perfect," said U.S. Rep. Clay Shaw, a Republican and the head of Florida's congressional delegation. "FEMA is not perfect, but I think they're doing a great job."
Waugh said the quality of FEMA's response is tied directly to the state's abilities:
"There are always questions whether the emergency management systems work better if you're related to the president or if in the same political party, or it's an election year."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Knight Ridder correspondents Lesley Clark, Wanda J. DeMarzo, Trenton Daniel, Frank Davies, Gary Fineout, Jennifer Mooney Piedra, Tere Figueras Negrete and Joseph Goodman contributed to this report.

Here's an idea...

Lets put Jeb Bush and Michael Chertoff in the Everglades in their skivies without any food or water and when they ask for help we'll tell them "to be patient."

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Change in plan

We are going to ride out ths storm here in our house. We're going to clear off the table and chairs and stuff from the patio and put them out back in the laundry room. Then we're going to try and figure out how the plywood goes on the windows. This should be fun!
More later.