About a hundred folks who'd made it to Cleveland under their own power, without benefit of airlift, came to the Convention Center to get signed up for various kinds of help. Most of them came through the computer center to use FEMA's on-line registration page or search for friends and family at sites like Yahoo's "Family Messages".
Jeff Hess of havecoffeewillwrite and Chris Nance of Rep. Stephanie
Tubbs-Jones' office talk with an evacuee
The major story of the day was FEMA's total incompetence at taking registrations.
You may find this difficult to believe, but FEMA doesn't accept paper applications. You have to get through on the phone or through the agency's website. So of course there are hundreds of thousands of Katrina evacuees, in desperate need of housing vouchers and other help, trying to do just that.
So of course they can't.
All day yesterday, the FEMA 800 line was disconnecting most callers. All day, our volunteers were walking evacuees through two, or three, or seven screens of the online application, only to get some bizarre error message that meant "We're too busy, go away." Dozens of homeless, broke people had to hang around the Convention Center literally all day, trying repeatedly to get that crucial FEMA registration number so they could get on with their lives.
They were unbelievably patient, which I guess is something you learn to be after a week of waiting for anything good to happen. And the couple of FEMA staffers working in the CC tried very hard to be helpful... but they had no way to solve the problem.
You can say the servers were overwhelmed. But why? Why isn't there enough server capacity to handle a load that has been absolutely predictable (actually inevitable) since last week? Why aren't there mirror sites? Is there something stopping FEMA from asking IBM or Google, or a dozen other companies, for emergency server capacity? What's the freaking problem?
The question answers itself, of course. The freaking problem is the same one that kept food, buses and adequate safety forces out of New Orleans for three days last week. The people running this show don't know what they're doing and apparently don't care.
At least this iteration of the freaking problem isn't life-threatening. But after all the crap the citizens of Louisiana have endured in the last week, it's incredible that the Feds can't figure out a way to spare them this.