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Somebody at FEMA needs to get their head out of their a***. This shows just how dumb some agencies can be.
Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"Posted by The Vorlon at September 7, 2005 9:46 PMAs New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
[. . .]
The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them
came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives."They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."