FEMA Fiddles With Sexual Harrassment While New Orleans Drowns

Staghounds links to a truly depressing story of spurned Katrina aid by FEMA.

From NBC5 in Chicago:

When a group of Indiana firefighters traveled to the Gulf Coast to help in the rescue efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they thought their skills in rescuing people would be put to use….

“Our job was to advertise a phone number for FEMA,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Bill Lundy. “We were going to be given shirts and hats with a phone number on it and flyers, and sent to shelters, and we were going to pass out flyers.”

There was almost a fight,” said Portage Assistant Fire Chief Joe Calhoun. “There was probably 700 firefighters sitting in the room getting this training, and it dawned on them what we were going to be doing. And then it got bad from there.”

Lundy and Calhoun’s first task was an eight-hour course on sexual harassment and equal opportunity employment procedures, Rogers reported. Neither firefighter would be involved in technical rescues of trapped people or any of their other specialties. [Emphasis added]

“We’re trained in tactical medicine,” Lundy said. “We weren’t being used for that. We were being used to hand out flyers.”

Their boss, Portage Fire Chief Tim Sosby, said he was only too happy to loan out his two men, but thinks they were right to come back home.

“It seemed like an incredible misuse of valuable resources,” Sosby said.

I would comment, but this story has left me speechless (temporarily, I hope).

UPDATE

Today the New York Times also noticed the firefighters languishing in Atlanta while New Orleans suffered:

Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New Orleans.

“On the news every night you hear, ‘How come everybody forgot us?’ ” said Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. “We didn’t forget. We’re stuck in Atlanta drinking beer.”

Ms. Rule, the FEMA spokeswoman, said there was no urgency for the firefighters to arrive because they were primarily going to do community relations work, not rescue.

And just why weren’t they going to be used to rescue people, since at that time many people still needed rescuing?

FEMA needs rescuing … or maybe it doesn’t.

Say What? (18)

  1. actus September 11, 2005 at 1:33 am | | Reply

    I was upset when I first heard about this story. But FEMA claims that it made clear to the volunteers what their mission would be. And that it would not be rescue. It would be community outreach like handing out phone numbers and being props for bush. Don’t know about the latter, but the former are necessary, and so long as they knew what they were getting into, you can’t blame FEMA.

  2. meep September 11, 2005 at 6:01 am | | Reply

    AGH! Fix your tags!

  3. John Rosenberg September 11, 2005 at 12:20 pm | | Reply

    actus – FEMA using highly trained rescue personnel to hand out flyers, after giving them an 8 hour course in sexual harrasment and equal employment hiring? Seems to me there’s room for blame here.

    meep – Oops. Tag fixed. Thanks.

  4. actus September 11, 2005 at 12:41 pm | | Reply

    “Seems to me there’s room for blame here.”

    of course. But I’ve heard the firefighters were told that’s what they were getting into when they volunteered. I’m sure some were and some weren’t.

  5. Stephen September 11, 2005 at 12:53 pm | | Reply

    John, I hope you’ll excuse me for asking this of actus.

    Do you do anything except monitor this board? You respond within minutes to every post, lest any heresy to your Marxist ideology escape unchallenged.

    And, you insist on having the last word on every exchange.

    What gives? You really think that the world will fall apart if any unchallenged exceptions to your Marxist orthodoxy exist?

  6. actus September 11, 2005 at 2:09 pm | | Reply

    ‘You respond within minutes to every post, lest any heresy to your Marxist ideology escape unchallenged.’

    What heresy to marx is corrected by pointing out that FEMA asked for community relations volunteers?

  7. John Rosenberg September 12, 2005 at 8:56 am | | Reply

    The two stories I read said they asked for firefighters. That’s why the firefighters voluneered, and why the firefigherss were upset that 1) they were given an 8 hour class on sexual harrassment 2) why the firefighters were upset that they were going to be used for “community relations,” not rescuing people.

  8. actus September 12, 2005 at 9:14 am | | Reply

    “The two stories I read said they asked for firefighters. ”

    The one i read they asked for firefighters for community relations. But maybe the administration spokesperson was lying.

  9. Michelle Dulak Thomson September 12, 2005 at 12:44 pm | | Reply

    actus, even assuming the easiest way to get flyers to the population of New Orleans was to import trained firefighters from other states, which is (ahem) ridiculous on its face, even the flyers presumably needed to be distributed immediately, not after what the NYT calls “days” of training. Exactly what good could any of this do? Is there any reason that necessary “training” couldn’t have been handled in, oh, fifteen minutes tops? I mean, firefighters do occasionally, you know, interact with the public at the scene of a disaster. Something tells me that they’ve been briefed on “sexual harassment” and “community relations” before now. Like, say, when they were first hired.

    Stuff like this is beyond inexcusable. Sorry.

  10. Claire September 12, 2005 at 1:09 pm | | Reply

    Rather than just blaming ‘FEMA’, how about we start trying to find out specific names of FEMA officials who have made these idiotic decisions? I’m tired of self-centered politicians and incompetent bureaucrats hiding behind a faceless agency.

  11. actus September 12, 2005 at 1:22 pm | | Reply

    “I mean, firefighters do occasionally, you know, interact with the public at the scene of a disaster. Something tells me that they’ve been briefed on “sexual harassment” and “community relations” before now. Like, say, when they were first hired.”

    I think that the relations that firefighters have with the community when they are fighting fires are different than the ones they have with the community when they are doing community relations full time. Sorry.

  12. Michelle Dulak Thomson September 12, 2005 at 2:44 pm | | Reply

    actus,

    I think that the relations that firefighters have with the community when they are fighting fires are different than the ones they have with the community when they are doing community relations full time. Sorry.

    Well if that’s your worry, then, for God’s sake why didn’t they put out a call for volunteers who already do full-time “community relations” and let the firefighters do the urgently-needed work they are already trained to do? Such a pitiful, shameful waste.

    In any case, the large majority of a firefighter’s active work time, I’d guess, is spent responding to false alarms, fires set in dumpsters, popcorn left too long in the microwave, and other minor incidents — in other words, lots of “community relations” relative to actual firefighting. Large-scale fires are relatively rare, obviously.

    I’m sure somewhere in every firefighter’s training, by now, is an admonition to avoid sexually harassing the public, along the lines of the famous warning label on the iron cautioning the user not to iron clothes while wearing them; these days, you cover all bases if you don’t want to get sued. (Or is sexual harassment different around a massive flood than at a fire scene somehow? Is there a special non-harassing New Orleans method of handing someone a flyer?)

    I’m just gobsmacked that you’re even attempting to defend this.

  13. Michelle Dulak Thomson September 12, 2005 at 2:51 pm | | Reply

    I might add, actus, that if there is a mandatory evacuation order in effect and has been for a week, sending responsible and strong men trained in rescuing people in to hand out phone numbers (as you said in your first comment) when they might be, oh, I don’t know, actually evacuating people is doubly stupid. I don’t think New Orleans has phone service at the moment. Though maybe the idea was that by the time the training in sensitive flyer-distribution is finished, it will.

  14. actus September 12, 2005 at 3:22 pm | | Reply

    “Such a pitiful, shameful waste.”

    Thats the thing. I don’t thikn its that wasteful when they make clear what is going to happen. It is wasteful when people who think they’re going to be doing rescue are doing community relations. Maybe an administration spokesperson is lying about how clear this was.

    “In any case, the large majority of a firefighter’s active work time, I’d guess, is spent responding to false alarms, fires set in dumpsters, popcorn left too long in the microwave, and other minor incidents

  15. Michelle Dulak Thomson September 12, 2005 at 3:53 pm | | Reply

    actus,

    I don’t think that’s the same relation that the disaster community needs.

    I see. So they don’t need community relations in the sense of calming down people when the situation isn’t as bad as they thought (as in the case of the popcorn in the microwave); and they also don’t need community relations in the sense of responding quickly and authoritatively to urgent, real human distress (as in the case of a major fire), so which subtle flavor do they need? I need hardly add that no one has the capability of asking “them” at all, since the communications with the remnant in New Orleans and the other hardest-hit communities are still pretty much nonexistent. But if I were to guess, not being an expert nor a bureaucrat, I’d guess at “anyone with the capacity to help,” by which I’d mean “someone able to do more than give me an emergency phone number that I can call whenever the phone service comes back on.”

    The whole gulf is not under a mandatory evacuation order, whatever that means.

    “Whatever that means”? Google the phrase and you will find it in the order itself as Mayor Nagin sent it out. But you’re right; it applied to Orleans Parish only. Still, there are people to be rescued, and there are people able and eager to do the rescuing, and your complaint isn’t that the latter aren’t being allowed to do so, but that some “andministration spokesperson” may have lied about what someone else had told them they were to do. Not about the fact that what they were actually made to do was utterly idiotic; no, about someone (you think) lying about it.

    I can see the discussion:

    — We need some people to distribute flyers down there.

    Well, call in some firefighters. They’re suckers for anything involving rescuing people.

    — But they wouldn’t be rescuing people; they’d be handing out flyers!

    Well, just don’t tell them, then. Just get them. And then get them over to Atlanta and give them a couple of days of sexual-harassment training so they don’t start groping the inhabitants. We don’t want them to look like UN relief workers, now, do we?

    — What do I say to the press, then?

    Well, lie, obviously! Duh.

  16. actus September 12, 2005 at 4:28 pm | | Reply

    “So they don’t need community relations in the sense of calming down people when the situation isn’t as bad as they thought”

    the community relations they are providing are the provision of FEMA aid. Money, rebuilding, insurance, etc… They’re not giving old ladies their cats from trees. This is a new mission.

    “”Whatever that means”? Google the phrase and you will find it in the order itself as Mayor Nagin sent it out.”

    I don’t know what it means. Does it mean you can be arrested for being at home? Does it mean they won’t rescue you after they tell you specifically to leave? Its really unclear. I’ve been hearing ‘mandatory evacutation’ since before this thing hit. I’ve also been seing people move back into New orleans uptown neighborhood, and even hire private security firms (who seem to be allowed to carry their weapons).

    “Well, call in some firefighters. They’re suckers for anything involving rescuing people.”

    Tthats a problem. Its not a problem if we ask people to do something and tell them what it is they are doing. Rather than them being suckers. Obviously some of them were suckered into doing PR and being props for bush. But I want to know whose fault that was: FEMA’s or the firefighters.

  17. Michelle Dulak Thomson September 12, 2005 at 5:02 pm | | Reply

    actus,

    the community relations they are providing are the provision of FEMA aid. Money, rebuilding, insurance, etc… They’re not giving old ladies their cats from trees. This is a new mission.

    Ah, to mention cat rescue in connection with firefighters. Now. At least it wasn’t yesterday.

    Look, what we were hearing about “community relations” training in the articles John linked had nothing to do with telling the beleaguered how to file an insurance claim, although I rather think a working firefighter would have some idea what to say there too.

    (And you keep dodging the “sexual harassment” bit, actus. What earthly reason is there to waste time restating the obvious? And I do mean “waste time” — these people have been isolated or nearly so for a week, and you want to make sure that they don’t get sexually harassed by the folks handing them insurance claims?)

    Enough with the “props for Bush” already. I can’t think of many things that Bush would loathe more than sending eager firefighters into a couple days’ worth of sensitivity training before letting them into the Katrina-devastated areas.

    But I want to know whose fault that was: FEMA’s or the firefighters.

    Well, it’s FEMA’s, obviously, in that FEMA had a lot of skilled and eager men sitting on their butts stewing in the worst of the bureaucratic seminar-culture for no good reason, when if it really wanted dedicated, skilled leaflet-distributors it should’ve been on the phone to Howard Dean. And for not making some other use of these guys when it became obvious that they had misunderstood, if they had.

    But do consider, actus, the possibility that some of these guys knew that it was billed as a “community-outreach project” or whatever, but just wanted to get down into the disaster zone anyhow. To, y’know, help. It’s not impossible that neither side is lying, but it’s beyond impossible that FEMA is competent.

    You still seem more outraged at the idea of firefighters being gulled into distributing paperwork under false pretenses and then FEMA lying about what it told them than you are at the thought of people eager to help being forbidden to help. I mean, these men are here now, and (you keep saying but not demonstrating) apparently manifestly incapable of doing what FEMA wanted them for, though extremely capable of doing things that need doing, by total coincidence, in the exact same neighborhood. They’re here, they want to help, they can help, time is short. WHAT’S STOPPING THEM? Instead, oh, well these dudes are raw; gotta train them up on insurance claims first. And on not groping the claimants. If this doesn’t make you want to scream, actus, there’s no hope.

  18. actus September 12, 2005 at 7:09 pm | | Reply

    “What earthly reason is there to waste time restating the obvious? And I do mean “waste time”

Say What?