FEMA And The Firemen

If you read this whole article from the Salt Lake Tribune I advise you to put your WTF??? meter on standby. (link via Reason)

Here's just some of it:

Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As 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.

Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.

Go on, read it - and then tell me that FEMA has its act together, if you dare.

Highly trained firefighters, all keen to get down and dirty, sitting in sexual harassment classes(!), handing out leaflets with FEMA's phone number on them(!) and even being co-opted as a backdrop for Bush's latest photo-op visit(!) - it beggars belief, I tell you.

Yet when they complain -

I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak

See what I mean? The WTF? meter just went off the scale!