Date: 2005-09-10
To: Hurry up and wait
Miles today: 0.0

Right now it is day 4 of my adventure. (?) To recap what's been going on I got here on Wednesday morning. Karl and I got a rental car and checked into the Sheraton right next to the airport. The Sheraton is also where the FEMA Community Relations base is.Check in with FEMA went pretty fast. We had to fill out lots of paperwork, get innoculations, get a government cell phone, and government credit cards. We were also sworn in as federal employees, something which I never thought I'd ever do.We had 8 hours of training split over two days. Our morning was spend getting our paperwork and other things all set and we attended the afternoon session of training. There were about 400 firefighters (FFs) at the session. Diversity training? Sexual harrasment training? Are you freaking kidding me? There was a talk on "cultural connections" which let us know what groups of people we may encounter and how there value systems differ from group to group. I didn't know there was a Vietnamese population in NO (New Orleans).We were not directly told, but it seems the mission has changed since the internet announcement for 1000 2-person teams came out. All of us are prepared to be deployed into harsh conditions, but it now seems the federal gov't wants the firefighters to go to the shelters and be Community Relations workers there. We may end up staying in hotels for our time committment.On our second day we attended the morning session of training. We still haven't been told exactly what we are going to do (door-to-door contacting affected people, handing out FEMA leaflets, etc.) but there are reports from the feild that the firefighters aren't doing ANYTHING. Nothing like collecting a lot of potential and doing nothing with it.There is a lot of angst that we have been called up to hand out FEMA flyers instead of using our full potential as FFs. We know we are doing non-operational work, but anyone can hand out flyers. Why call up 2500+ firefighters to do this? A FF from Arkansas asked one of the speakers, "Sir we are 'can do' people; why are being used for this purpose?" We got the answer from a retired FF, Dr. O'neil who was brought in to speak with us. FEMA usually hires locals to do the community relations work. Seems a few felons got hired in the last FL disaster and spent a lot of of $$$ with their gov't cretit cards. They did not want that to happen again so they called for FFs. We are usually background checked already so we're certified good guys to start with. Add to that we need little supervision, we understand the Incident Command System (and I'm finding we understand it better than FEMA does), and we're used to emergency work.I bet we could also improve FEMA's image.At the end of Thursday morning's training we split into groups of eight people. So the waiting game starts. We need our credit cards before we can be deployed and no one on the team has them yet.Friday morning the two from NY and Karl and I got our cards. Our two FEMA teammates got reassigned to another location (thank God) and of the other two only one had not gotten their card..... So we wait.Since our team got chopped, FEMA thought to reassign us to other teams to get things moving. HaHa. Our buddies from NY (the guys we really liked) got reassigned to another team and we were put on another team. So, ok, FEMA in their great wisdom and desire to get things MOVING, reassigned 4 people with credit cards and who are all set to go with 4 people who just put in their credit card apps the day before? Hellllooooo? Credit cards have been taking 2-4 days to process. So, again, we wait.It is Saturday and our card-less teammates didn't have their's in the 8AM delivery so we are waiting until the 12PM delivery. Karl and I are going to go ballistic on FEMA if they don't get us out of here today. I just don't understand these people.The only good news is we've heard that FFs are also being sent to the affected areas to go house to house and check in on people, hand out info, and do basic medical. That's cool. That's what a lot of us came to do. But actually, ask any FF here and any of us would be glad to do something, anything to help out.But for now, we hurry up and wait.