The Truth Comes Out
As of right now there is no news about the hurricane victums I have written about. This is a little upsetting because my heart really goes out to them, especially Andre and Gisele. It has been a while since I started the "Rebuilding Lives" segment of my blog so hopefully the popular saying "No news is good news" applies to them.
I came across some news reguarding FEMA and Hurricane Katrina that I would like to share with everyone. After two months of the government acency's attempt to cover up, the truth comes out......
In the midst of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in New Orleans sent a dire e-mail to Director Michael Brown saying victims had no food and were dying. Brown did not reply. Instead, less than three hours later, an aide to Michael Brown sent an e-mail saying her boss wanted to go on a television program that night and needed at least an hour to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant.
Marty Bahamonde (pictured above), who sent the e-mail to Brown two days after the storm struck, said the correspondence illustrates the government’s failure to grasp what was happening. The 19 pages of internal FEMA e-mails show Bahamonde gave regular updates to people in contact with Brown as early as Aug. 28, the day before Katrina made landfall. They appear to contradict Brown, who has said he was not fully aware of the conditions until days after the storm hit. Brown quit after being recalled from New Orleans amid criticism of his work.
As Katrina’s outer bands began drenching the city Aug. 28, Bahamonde also sent an e-mail to Deborah Wing, a FEMA response specialist. He wrote: “Everyone is soaked. This is going to get ugly real fast.” Subsequent e-mails told of an increasingly desperate situation at the New Orleans Superdome, where tens of thousands of evacuees were staying including Marty Bahamonde, who spent two nights there with the evacuees. On Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that “estimates are many will die within hours.” A short time later, Brown’s press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening.
Marty Bahamonde testified last Thursday during a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, but there is no news as to what would be done about the situation.
This story really upsets me, but for some reason it doesn't surprise me. After learning about this I thought, "what if Brown responded instead of failing to do his job and letting the nation down." What do you think about this?
posted by Natalia B @ 7:06 PM
3 Comments:
I tend not to be a violent person, but Michael Brown ought to be tarred and feathered. He is an embarrassment and failed in his duties. As head of FEMA, he should have been one of the people getting involved right away, but I guess fame and dinner are much more important that people’s lives or even a little pride in your job. Clearly, he should never have been given the job of Director in the first place, because he clearly isn’t qualified. Someone in that position should be responsible and proactive, not to mention sympathetic and caring. He doesn’t appear to me to have any of those qualifications. I’m not quite sure if the government can do anything, but at the very least, there should be some sort of formal censure of him by Congress.
This sounds a lot like what happened on 9-11 but to a different degree. It is really upsetting to hear information like this coming out about three months after Katrina hit. I don't know what to think. I think if this information is true Michael Brown should at the least be fired and maybe not fed for a few weeks. But the damage has been done and I think a lot of effort should be going in to re-building LA and other areas hit by Katrina. There is politics in everything and it is beyond me why a man like Michael Brown would even be in the position that he was in in the first place!!! No one ever really truly understands pain and suffering unless it is staring them right in the face. Brown probably just blew off all of the e-mails about people starving because he really didn't take the time to understand what was really going on.
WOW! I just don’t even know where to begin. My heart just aches- that people are starving and dying of hunger because there is no food?! How can people like Michael Brown even sleep at night or let alone go out to dinner three hours later? Why is it that knowing the whole truth or the ugly things hardly get uncovered, or do the reporters get paid off ? I would not be surprised if they do. I wonder if we will ever recover from Katrina and if these people that are left with nothing are just going to die off? I just don’t understand, how something like this can happen in American, where there animal activists, and free speech?
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