Situation Normal, All FEMA'd Up

In which we learn from zuzu at Feministe, based on this experience of the Katrina debacle, just why Bush wants the military to take over future disasters:

Mary told us that she'd been denied a FEMA trailer at first because one of her houses (she owned two on the street) had been determined to be livable. However, when she asked when that determination had been made, since she hadn't let anyone in her houses to inspect them, the FEMA people said 9/3. So Mary said, "Did someone swim in? Because the house was under 10 feet of water on 9/3." Turns out FEMA had done a flyover and determined that any house with a roof was livable regardless of what was in it. Mary finally got a FEMA trailer after getting her Congressman, Bobby Jindal, involved

(my sister had a similar experience in 1995, when her Navy base housing went up in flames while her husband was not only out to sea but underwater on a sub, and she was dicked around and blamed for the fire (even though it was due to faulty wiring) until she called her senator in Hawaii, Daniel Inouye. Within 16 hours, her husband's sub was ordered to surface and he was on a flight home, and she was in front of the commandant, explaining why she went over his head (um, because she was a civilian and had rights and her friend was in the house when the fire started)).