Resources For Coping With Hurricane Sandy Fema: Fill & Download for Free

Maria and Katrina were a different scale of disaster that impacted different demographics. Both were disasters on top of a disaster. The issue was not as much empathy, as it was performance.Hurricane Florence is no trap. It is an event the whole world knows is coming. FEMA will either stand up and do a good job or they won’t.When Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast, FEMA and local disaster relief did an admirable job of coping and recovery. We can only hope this time FEMA will do as well.Trump’s role is to assure FEMA is equipped to do the job. The rest is up to them. I have very low expectations. News reports indicate FEMA has been starved for funds to administer their organization. Without competent command and control, resources may not be dispatched efficiently. All we can do now is wait and see.

One answer here suggests that a smaller government approach would literally throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we're talking about stupid ideas, then sure, it's possible to dismantle every level of government structure that aids in emergencies. But I'd like to get us back to the spirit of the question, which I choose not to interpret as "please list all the ridiculous aspects of a philosophy you disagree with, and discuss how taking it to an extreme would hurt poor people".What Romney most definitely did not say in the debate tape we've been hearing is that FEMA should not exist, or that it should be reduced to an office of twenty people. What Republicans want to do is slow and then reverse the growth of federal spending, and that's simply not the same thing as dismantling the government. Any agency, like any manager, can be reliably predicted to react with less than total enthusiasm when their budget is frozen or cut - you wouldn't take it lying down if you now or previously worked in some large organization as a line manager. I didn't. And FEMA is an unusual case, not completely unlike national defense from human enemies; we have to respond to unplanned events - events beyond planning or control.We know it's a good thing when an agency is run by someone who has lots of experience in that area. I'm not one of those people, and I'm sure that Governor Romney isn't either. It was clear from what he said that managing government and spending money at the lowest practical level is a principle that should be applied across the board. Decentralize wherever it makes sense. Where it doesn't make sense, don't do it.One of the best things a federal operation could provide is expertise. When you picture the mayor of a medium sized town in New Jersey, or even the Governor of Kentucky, they might or might not have an adviser who has experienced the sort of emergency that has come up. It would be great to have someone at the federal level who could set up emergency systems for information flow, distribute best practices and sample messages that local leaders could relay to their own constituents.Perhaps Obama will be reelected within the week because Americans decide that they really like the idea of having the federal government swoop in with literally unlimited resources. (I don't mean mathematically infinite, but I mean that when we run out of emergency funds (or money for anything else we like), we just borrow some more.) Maybe buying personal insurance is a big hassle, and we'll just depend on the government to cover us for every problem we face.But let's also keep in mind that we're not Soviet Russia today, with everything centrally planned and coordinated. The fact is that the people who are walking around in rubber boots and operating sump pumps and reinstalling transformers (and especially, those who are just cleaning up) are not some sort of federal force that was in a special FEMA staging area in Kansas waiting to be deployed. I hesitate to name a number or a percentage, but most of the people cleaning up New York City probably live pretty close to New York City. Where I think George Bush got steamrollered by bad publicity was that he failed to simply state the obvious: hurricanes are bigger than anything we can control at this stage of our technological development. We will occasionally get our hats handed to us (quaint phrase - pick a stronger one) by mother nature. It is, and always will be, neighbors and owners who pick up the pieces and put Humpty Dumpty together again. I think the federal government should play the same role it plays in good times: nobody should starve or die of exposure, either because of long term chronic poverty or because of an unforeseen catastrophe from which they recover in months. It is in the nature of Americans to be self-reliant where they can be. And where or when they cannot, the federal government has programs in place to respond to poverty.