Federal Emergency Management Agency

[September 14th, 2005] It seems an obvious choice, but the Rogue Desk can't resist adding its local complaints to the national pile-on of the Federal Emergency Management Agency .

After a week of waffling, the agency didn't send hundreds of Hurricane Katrina evacuees to a shelter that volunteers hustled to assemble at Washington-Monroe High School in Southeast Portland.

FEMA's hot-and-cold antics squandered thousands of hours spent by well-meaning volunteers here and around the country, many of whom waited at home instead of flying immediately to the disaster area. FEMA's bumbling dashed our faith in the federal government's ability (or desire) to care for the neediest, and we're still not sure it's found a solution.

Instead of shipping survivors to cities like Portland, FEMA now plans to settle hundreds of thousands in sprawling trailer villages in Southern states-an option that keeps families close to home but offers little hope of permanence, safety or community.

The time and money piddled away in Portland and other cities may be negligible in the grand scheme-but serve as our own small taste of what must be a vaster level of waste and confusion by FEMA, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, in Katrina's path.

It's not as if Portland didn't have a lot to offer New Orleans' evacuees.

Consider the contrasts between the two similarly sized cities: Portland, the so-called City that Works, averages a couple dozen homicides a year and claims about one in seven of its residents live below the poverty line. Compare that to New Orleans' vitals: 10 times as many homicides a year, rampant government corruption and twice as many of its residents living below the poverty line. Certainly, Portland might have made a nice home, temporary or otherwise, for survivors. (It would have been interesting, too, for lily-white Portlanders to have faced a test of their liberalism-after all, our welcome came with the caveat of background checks.)

But surely whoever is in charge today at FEMA must know what they're doing in putting survivors into trailer villages instead of bringing them to a city like Portland that was ready to house, clothe and feed them.