Date: 2005-10-26
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

In advance of the storm. 2.000 FEMA employees who were supposed to be ready to be dispatched to get this stuff distributed. We had the Miami Beach distribution center supplied. Metro Zoo in South Dade. no water. partial ice. Homestead Sports Complex. which is near where the trucks were prepositioned. no supplies. None. I mean. in Homestead they did not have water or ice. and the trucks were right there .to start with. The Orange Bowl was supplied. but we had massive chaos in terms of the -thousands of people that showed up to try to get access -to that. We have MiamiDade College North. which is in the north part of the county. no water. partial ice. MiamiDade College Kendall. which is more towards south Dade. partially supplied. meaning they did not have enough water or ice for the people that showed up. And let us keep in mind that what they were distributing to people when they were able to get it were six bottles of water and a bag of ice. I mean. that is what people were able to take home while they are sitting in the dark with no ability to cool their food and keep it fresh. A.D. Barns Park. no supplies. Tamiami Park. no supplies. The Mall at 163rd Street. in both your and my district. no supplies. And Landmark Property. no water. partial ice. This is the model State for natural disasters. Let us talk about the IA. the granting of. individual assistance or lack thereof. Why did the State of Florida. why did Governor Bush. not request automatic individual assistance for both the. East Coast and the West Coast? He asked for that assistance immediately in advance of the storm for the West Coast. as if Wilma was going to hit a wall when she crossed over the West Coast and not cross over southeast Florida too. I mean. it took literally until 7:30 last night with the gentleman talking to Secretary Paulison. me talking to Secretary Paulison. who. by the way lives in my district. and is a constituent. and obviously knows the devastation. and he was in Washington. and much to his wifes dismay. he told me. But we even have the acting director of FEMA living in our area. and they still -were not able to get individual assistance granted. They literally went out on preli.mi: nary disaster assessments yesterday. as if you had to drive through a neighborhood to see the devastation. I mean. it was just so frustrating. This is what people are talking about when they say they do not feel their government is responsive to theirneeds. when they are frustrated beyond belief with the red tape. � I mean. it is so simple. It is very difficult to respond to natural disasters. there is no question about that. We lived through the chaos in the last few days. But. come on. if you are going to hold yourself up as a competent model and you are going to say that you are the example to which all ethers should be held. then you have to live up to that example. Before I turn it back over to the gentleman. I just want to make sure we are notonly talking about the one C. competence. we are talking about the cronyism too. I was interested to come across an article today that talked about how Mr. Brown. "Brownie." who was ejected because of his incompetence from FEMA. Secretary Chertoff. the Homeland Security Secretary. extended Michael Browns contract for another 30 days. For what? The gentleman is on the Committee on Homeland Security. We had this partisan. dependent committee asking the right questions. supposedly. or at least that is what it was set up to do. How are they letting this happen? That is why we need an independent commission. If we had an independent commission. this would not have happened because there would be some accountability. Our constituents want answers. I want to go home and make sure that FPL has the ability as much as they can humanly do to get those lights turned on. They are telling our people they are not going to be able to get those lights turned on possibly until November 22 at the earliest. The other thing really disturbing that I heard and read in the Governor and the State and FEMAs comments today was that they did not anticipate the intensity of the storm and they made a mistake in their calculations. The director of the State EOC. Emergency Operations Center. said today in the paper that they made a mistake in their calculations and did not account for the size of our population in South Florida when calculating how much ice and water was going to be needed. We have the biggest media market in the State. There are more than 6 million people. .7 million people that live in our three counties. if you count Palm Beach too?