Originally posted by Jessicamsa
As posted about before, those who were able bodied and tried to walk out were fired at by police. The bridge leading to the nearby town was blocked off by police and those approaching the bridge were shot at.

Please post your source for this statement.

Even if this is true, and I am skeptical that it id until I see the source, NO ONE was prevented from leaving BEFORE the hurricane hit. They were activlely encouraged to leave by local and state officials.

Those who CHOSE to stay behind suffered for their mistake.

A Doctor I know here in Oklahoma loaded up his car with bottled water to hand out to Katrina victims. He drove all the way down to New Orleans to offer much needed water and his skills as a physician. He found a large group of displaced persons "camping" out in the open, pulled over, opened his car and began offering bottled water to the "campers". He said that several asked him if he had any sodas. He told them that he did not have sodas but had a car full of bottled water. He became disgusted when he saw these obviously needy people throw his bottles of water on the ground and grumble about the lack of sodas. At that point he got in his car and drove back to Oklahoma.

While there may have been a less than bed-n-breakfast atmosphere in the accommodations (funded by taxpayers and out of pocket charitable people such as Val), there WERE accommodations for the victims of this disaster.

Most decent people are apalled to think that their fellow man would be subjected to the indignities enforced in a survival situation such as we saw with Katrina. Please keep in mind what kind of fellow man one is dealing with. I'm not saying that EVERYONE in that disaster-stricken area was the sort of person that requires close scrutiny and rigid regulation but N.O. was known as "sodom and gomorrha" even before Katrina hit. People who have just survived a flood and are homeless, hungry, without transportation or even water and yet would reject help because it's not the type of handout they're accustomed to getting don't deserve help.

I don't know what went on at Falls Creek and have only Vals interpretation of what she suspects was going on but I know the people of Oklahoma have proven themselves a generous, compassionate and helpful people to their neighbors in need in times of crisis.

When the Murrah Building was bombed, my mother and I made sandwiches for the rescue workers and gathered supplies that FEMA was asking Oklahomans to donate. I thought it curious that a federal emergency management agency wouldn't HAVE blankets, candles, etc. that they were asking us to donate but we brought them some anyway. So many helpful people were pouring in that martial law was declared so that the emergency workers could do their jobs unimpeded. Many cried "foul" and "conspiracy" but as it turned out, there were no survivors to save or help so our well-intentioned efforts weren't needed.

The point to all this being that not everything is a conspiracy of nefarious plots within plots. Sometimes it's just an overblown, ill-managed beaurocracy muddling through the best it can. Personally, I'm trained in how to handle quite a few bizarre situations that come up so rarely that when they do, I, as the "expert" forget what the training manual said was the way to handle it and just jump in and do what looks like it might work in the situation. Large scale operations do much the same thing.

MAYBE FEMA was inept. MAYBE their plans for "detainees" (we called them "guests") were not noble. MAYBE our government is bent on genocidal intent. MAYBE the sky will fall tomorrow. Let's all take a deep breath and say Maybe. Maybe not.

Originally posted by whitewave
A Doctor I know here in Oklahoma loaded up his car with bottled water to hand out to Katrina victims. He drove all the way down to New Orleans to offer much needed water and his skills as a physician. He found a large group of displaced persons "camping" out in the open, pulled over, opened his car and began offering bottled water to the "campers". He said that several asked him if he had any sodas. He told them that he did not have sodas but had a car full of bottled water. He became disgusted when he saw these obviously needy people throw his bottles of water on the ground and grumble about the lack of sodas. At that point he got in his car and drove back to Oklahoma.

I know first hand that a lot of these welfare types behave this way. I was attending a welfare workshop and the members were expected to bring stuff like chips and drinks. I bought a bunch of bottled water, celery, carrot sticks, apples, etc (you know, healthy stuff). What did the others do? They complained about the food and then proceeded to open up and pour out the new bottles of water and used them as cups to pour soda into right in front of me. That was the last time I brought food or drinks to that place. While I was there, I was also the only person who didn't smoke. The others would brag about getting high or drunk the previous weekend. I found them quite disgusting. I ended up having to do all of the work there because they would be smoking or doing fun stuff instead of working.

There were lots of innocent children stranded in New Orleans. It's not right to penalize them and leave them to dehydrate to death. The children did not have basic necessities met and many died needlessly.

In the days following Katrina when horror stories and national embarassments were pouring out of the astrodome, an encouraging story was reported on the nightly news. It was about a small boy ( 7 years old as I recall) who was left stranded and in charge of 5 YOUNGER relatives. He quickly realized his situation and WALKED those kids out of N.O. No food, no water, no transportation, no protection from child victimizers. Those willing to help themselves and their fellows (no matter what age, color, social stature, etc.) will always be welcome to whatever help I can give or muster on their behalf. Those kids were true heroes and rightfully put to shame their elders who raped, looted, whined and waited for someone else to take care of them. Those kids had every right to expect someone else to take care of them but when it wasn't forthcoming, they exhibited the best qualities of humanity (and American self-reliance).

And a child shall lead them....

I have friends and family in New Orleans. I grew up in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Because of the god-awful crooked political atmosphere in that state which allowed my wife's family to get by with destroying my small business because we wouldn't let them run our lives, my wife and I no longer live there, and thank God were not there for Katrina.

But I have weathered out Betsy, Hilda and Camille. Betsy and Camille were arguably as bad or worse than Katrina - just not as hyped by the press. Back then, we didn't have FEMA, we had local Civil Defense agencies, the US Army Office of Civil Defense, the state National Guard and local government to respond to massive destruction from hurricanes.

Upshot? I think we coped better despite using civil defense plans designed for nuclear war, not for hurricanes (since then, I have spoken to national authorities on climatology and named storms who say that the energy output and destructive power of the average hurricane dwarfs what would be available from any but the absolute worst nuclear exchange - the fallout that would kill most of the people after a nuclear war, not the blast and heat). Back then, in Louisiana it was not unlike it was in Mississippi during Katrina (where they said "you loot, we shoot" and everyone had a major incentive NOT to be a**holes).

What real preparation did the local government people make for Katrina? Did New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin make a real effort to evacuate the poor of New Orleans prior to the storm? He had the authority to requisition public transport, school buses, Greyhound buses, to ask for the state National Guard to help with evacuations, to use prison transport - and prisoners, for that matter, to help with sandbagging and levee maintenance - what, exactly, did Ray Nagin DO? Damn little, from what I can see, except issue endless press releases blaming Bush long BEFORE Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.

Ray Nagin did not do ANYTHING for the people of New Orleans except offer them up as human sacrifices to the national Democratic Party. If he had just done his JOB, many lives would have been saved. Look at what prior mayors, like Vic Schiro during Betsy and Hilda and Moon Landrieu under Camille did for their people during hurricanes - they didn't disappear into rooms at the Hyatt Regency for the storm, they were at city/parish emergency operating centers directing life-saving activity and protecting their citizens.

Admittedly FEMA was clueless in the lead-up, during the storm, and long afterwards - my son and grandson were left without a place to stay, had to wait months for people from Kentucky (!) to come down and prepare a trailer which sat waiting unused for them, then were turned out of that trailer months before their previous home was ready to live in. There's a good argument for FEMA to be completely disbanded and the prior state/local/federal Civil Defense organization restored - THAT worked. It may have been just as politicized as FEMA (though I can't see how) but it worked one HELL of a lot better.

Of course, in the '60s and '70s, when hurricanes and floods threatened, we all turned out to help with things like sandbagging levees and other work - for free, because it was OUR homes being threatened. We wouldn't have dreamed of sitting on our butts cursing out the President (whether it was Johnson or Nixon) and waiting for someone else to do for us. WE DID FOR OURSELVES.

I also must agree with Catherder's remarks about the "suehappy" society. Because our society has been Sharptonized to such a large extent, every bit of emergency aid must be standardized so that no outside hustler can come in and say "Look, you poor people are eating Dollar General PopTarts some woman brought in from California, and over there in the next refuge, where the people are another color, THEY have KELLOGG'S PopTarts.

Blame the politics of envy.

Originally posted by Murky

I also must agree with Catherder's remarks about the "suehappy" society. Because our society has been Sharptonized to such a large extent, every bit of emergency aid must be standardized so that no outside hustler can come in and say "Look, you poor people are eating Dollar General PopTarts some woman brought in from California, and over there in the next refuge, where the people are another color, THEY have KELLOGG'S PopTarts.

Blame the politics of envy.

Well, my point would be that your personal assumption that people think this way or will act this way is not a valid reason to treat people as if they are about to act this way.

You're out of line to assume you know other people's intent and then treat them in a certain fashion based on your personal speculations.

That's my opinion.

You see refugees and they see test subjects

You know what I don't understand? Why would fema opt to rent out an entire location, keep disaster refugees in prison like conditions, when they could have simply given the refugees some initial get back on your feet money and set them loose to start rebuilding their lives. Instead, they rob 5 months of their lives in complacency. What is the true purpose of this camp? Is it to serve as a dress rehearsal to how to contain people. Did we ever hear from any of these people again? Were they experimented on. My wife said she heard that they were forced to breath in chemicals they put in the air to see how they would react.

It all STINKS. What stinks more is most people don't even care much about the atrosities of others, as long as they themselves are left alone they really don't care! They hide their heads in ignorance and just believe that it's being done for good causes.

from iowa flooding 2008- hey great article. scary thought. we have fema handlign alot of our flooding in iowa now, and wo, cant trust any authorities . id hate to see my town here end up lik that, most of iowa is flooded.
god helps us all. we need it.

i am new to the FEMA concentration camps but the more a person digs into the stories the more skeptical i become. Allowing stories to come out in this great of a depth is amazing. Many people feel that we are all free in the US but honestly everything has been monitored and unmonitored. Example is the posting of this comment. The staff is reviewing to make sure that this pertains to the discussion. So as you can see everything is being monitored to our phone calls to what we say in our cars. If the government chose they could shoot a flea off of a horses butt with a laser from a satellite and leave the horse perfectly fine so the openness of this subject is quite a disturbing fact. many people see this as a reason to not fear because if the government truly did not want this story out it wouldn't be this website would not be up and who could say it was the government. no one so is it that they use this as a tactic to take fear from the camps or is this truly just a misunderstanding? No one really knows all i have to say is be prepared for something its coming and we are all left out of the governmental loop