I live in Portland, Oregon. We were "supposed" to get 1000 evacuees last weekend. We set up a temporary shelter for them. It kept getting postponed. Yesterday, it was down to 500 people, supposed to arrive today. Today, it has been cancelled. FEMA says the need isn't there.
Setting up the temporary shelter and now taking it down, and all the preparations, supposedly cost $100,000. And of course we're going to ask for reimbursement from FEMA.
Nice waste of valuable money, eh???????? How many times/places has this scenario played out in the last week across the country?
Where is the Command and Control? Where are the Grown-ups? Who is in charge of this fiasco, even after all this time?
It's not that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing... the left hand doesn't even know the right hand exists.
You also need to consider that once the refugees from the two cesspits got 3 squares and a shower, some were able to contact relatives and make arrangements to get as far away from a government sponsored anything as possible.
For mass evacuations you have to estimate large. I suspect some of the municipalities jumped the gun and took a stand-by request as a green light to proceed. To give Blank-o one tiny shred of support, I think there was someone with school buses turned back at the city limits and they whined, "we were told to come up with an inventory of what we had and a list of drivers." Somehow that morphed into an execute order and they showed up with an unairconditioned bus w/o rest room for a long-haul trip.
Finally, don't forget that past disasters gave the lesson that money will rain down from the heavens and that everything is reimbursable. I can't attribute the source but someone told me that when FPL was asked why they didn't do a better job of keeping the trees trimmed along the power line routes they said "why when FEMA will pay us to do it after a storm?" So no wonder your guys were so quick to spend 100K.