Steve Morse-Adventures in Disasters

Ok.. Going Home:::::::

2007-10-01T18:18:00.001-07:00

Again folks .. sorry it has been so long.. but this has been a remarkably busy disaster. I am going to be home by noonish on Oct 2 back in Highlands Ranch. I got good reviews and was pleased to be able to do this work. It is good to have positive feelings out of one of these.

I do have some thoughts about this place though. Rochester is a city of sick people really. The Mayo Clinic is for real and it attracts tens of thousands of patients here all year long. The Clinic is simply huge.. spread all over town and perhaps 1/3 of the 90,000 residents work for this health concern. If you are just passing through you would not notice it, you afterall see sick people all the time... but it is the scale and overwhelming numbers of them here.. is really sad after awhile. One of the features here is people profoundly deformed either by accident or disease or birth. One man was so altered he wore essentially a hood that was see through to him. he was eating at a buffett.. and faced the wall to eat... I saw what can best be described as a walking cadaver.. he was grey, sunken and eating dinner with what appeared to be his family.

If you are here for three meals a day.... you see families coping with the best and worst of things life can throw you. You can see families trying to come to grips with the worst news.. groups of people undergoing treatments out on the town to get pie... On balance what you see here is hope.... Overwhelming hope.. sick kids smiling cause they believe they are getting better.. parents smiling cause they cannot contemplate the alternative.... disfigured men and women hoping to feel restored... sons and daughters trying to find a way to take mom home one last time.... Perhaps if you live here long enough this all becomes part of the landscape.. but for me .. for five weeks... I have been thankful that I am happy and whole.. that I have choices that are not all bad and most of all that I am almost 56 and just now discovered what a place like the Mayo Clinic is all about.

Good luck folks.. I will post again.. new disasters after the first of the year unless a big hurricane strikes somewhere in a nice place in the south... (= anywhere but LA)

Slowdown:::::::::::::::::;

2007-09-15T18:11:00.000-07:00

Ok.. Tomorrow is a day off and I am looking forward to the rest. We had last Sunday off and it was nice but this one is really worth it. We started releasing Community Relations people this week and are now down to 171 people today from 205 fema people. that still leaves over 30 per IT guy so we will likely not downsize till Oct 1 although our hours will likely go way down in the next two weeks. I am the first one of the group to go so as long as I make Oct 1 I am happy.

There was wierdness in the JFO today. The human Services group try to put people in trailers to use as homes till their regular houses are completely fixed or 18 months which ever comes first. Before they set those trailers at someones house they have to do an inspection.. because they hook up sewage, power etc to the trailer before they walk away from it. The HS people got a call from a household that was supposed to get a trailer that was a complaint ..... apparently the home owners were upset that FEMA sent "an African" to evaluate the trailer site. There were aparently more words which I did not get and the whole thing was turned over to the managers to smooth over... seriously.....

The portions in restraunts here are just gigantic. I have only not taken home leftovers when I simply could not put any more in the fridge. Serious lumberjack meals no matter where or what. There is a chain of "Bakers something or other" that specializes in pie and a diverse kinda american menu. I ate there tonight.. (Cobb salad the size of a bale of hay) and I finished it off with a piece of "Carmel Pecan Satin Supreme" pie.. holy shit... four layers.. bottom like pecan pie.. next like cheese cake.. next like a carmel candy but not chewy and finally whip cream with carmel and chocolate sprinkles. wow.. come to Minnesota for THIS pie. Now I had a text message exchange with my SO Trena before ordering and she convinced me to order the salad instead of the 1/2 lb hamburger with real wisconsin chedar..... but when she suggested that I should not have the pie, her signal got kinda weak.. breaking up really.....

Frost this morning and 32 degrees... I do not have quite enough long sleeved shirts to make a week so.. either I try to man up and do short sleeves in Minnesota or I go buy another one or two from Farm Fleet.. i need to box up stuff to send home anyway I guess. They gave us shirts (short sleeved ofcourse).. I got a coat and wool hat in Louisiana... and short sleeved shirts in Minnesota in September.. go figure.

Pedicure and a movie tomorrow..going to see a real mans movie with Russel Crowe in it with a couple of the geek squad guys I work with. well.. the movie anyway.. the Pedicure is only me... LOL.. but it helps with the feet doing what i do... I am going to try to avoid Illinios, Ohio , Texas Lousiana and Arkansas that are either fresh declarations or soon to be fresh... and finish out my time for the year..... ... see what hits next year.... the raise I got has been nice on paychecks and the per diem up here is pretty fat so.. this is going to be pretty profitable for me. Time to enjoy home again. Two more weeks eh?

Food Related maunderings::::::::

2007-09-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

Ok... when you are feeling better and rested it is kind of amazing what catches your eye in places to eat. I was asked in a Dennys yesterday if I wanted grits with my "Moons over My Hammy".... I asked the waitress if anyone she knew ever ate them and she said "no..not unless they sound like you::"... (eyeroll).... I went to a Noodles and company where they advertised "Real Wisconsin Macaroni and Cheese" which is a favorite of mine... and.. had great expectations of some REAL mac and cheese... ok.. not so much... The Country Buffet has tobasco, tartar sauce and "chili sauce" on those pump applicators at the end of an isle .... they will also serve you a bloody steak if you ask for it.. I would caution you if you DO ask for one wear an apron.. they will bring it out making a pool on your plate. The corn bread has the option of eating it with either honey or REAL maple syrup.... I recommend the rhubarb pie too.. it was like home style for sure......

I get a day off Sunday.. and work hours go down an hour a day to 7 am to 6 pm six days a week... see how long that lasts.. but I think it looks good to get outa here early October for me still. Got my laundry washed and folded this morning..I now have fresh smelling clothes... I onlly have one long sleeved t-shirt and a very light fema jacket for this disaster... and cooler weather is starting this weekend with rain etc. I hate to go back to wearing long pants all the time again.. but oh well.. summer has been awesome for the shorts......

This place has the palest people in it...

Everyone have a good week ... more as I think it up.

Not Exactly Cheeseheads:::

2007-09-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

Ok.. I have not published because I have been both ill and working 12 hour days again... it has been wierdness associated with the beginnings of a disaster and what mom calls "FEMA flu" it is like everyone gets it at one time and struggles for a day or two.. runny noses, swelled heads.. congestion .. its tough. then.. boom it is gone...

Here in Rochester MN.. way out of my region.. (thanks to a promotion and upgrade in my status)... and i am having one of my best disasters so far. The group is pretty sober.. not too too of anything really and seem low key enough to get past all the day to day friction that can break up some departments. We have a simple setup.. not bad computers and a reasonable management team.. .. so the days are flying past and even though I have been ill I have enjoyed it.

As a note.. comments that get posted are "moderated" that is.. I read them before they get put on the blog as comments... So far I have only blocked one but had to go to them as a couple of comments were not appropriate back when. So if you post and it does not show right away, rest assured I am going to read it and approve it shortly... (Someone named SHARON with FEMA? I am sorry I missed your posting in February and just today approved it.. I was having a family crisis that month and did not do my mail very regularly.. thank you for your comments as a sister in the movement... :-D)

Travel put me in a "smoking room" .. bastards and I have been too busy to move.. and I kinda like the neighborhood.. I live across the street from some kind of fairgrounds... it is overviewed by a city water tank that is both shaped like and painted like a big ear of corn... its not exactly fair to say everyone here talks like FARGO but it is humerous to go to restrauants... last night there was some kind of party in the house behind my bedroom ... Karaoke ... till nearly midnight. You have not lived till you wake up (sick) to the sounds of a very loud drunk doing Johnny Cash.. (I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole!!!).... oh well... the food here is reasonably priced and not too bad.. the trees are starting to turn color.. noticed it on September 1st.

i am going to do my 60 days this year for sure.. plan on going home October first week ish.. I am sure this JFO will slow down pretty quick.. looks like it is going to top out at about 160 people.. they run pretty lean up here although we are getting shirts (short sleeved no shit in Minnesota in the fall)... funny I got a wool stocking cap and Jacket in Alexandria La last fall.. jeez... we are still working 12X7 and I expect it to go to 10X6 next week.. they are running a lot of DRCs here (7) but they are not planning for them to be open long.. maybe one or two by end of two weeks... so all those folks are going home.. (thankfully.... :-D)

I miss home but i am glad to be here too. This is good work. They seem to be having problems giving away FEMA trailers... no one will live in them for now.. (we will see how that fares as time goes by... living with other people for months is insane....).. one of the towns had four feet of sewage contaminated flood waters in every single building in town.. (lets all go EWWWWWWW at the same time)..... and local politicians are all prettied up expecting to hit the lottery in FEMA dollars... There are stories of communities sandbagging the local major employer and Liquor mart and overlooking the courthouse and firestation.. ... oh well... housed within our disaster is also the group of engineers that are building the bridge back in the minneapolis.. CH2M HILL is the lead and apparently we are giving some kind of aid and comfort to them as they are housed in our JFO. That collapse was pretty horriffic... gratefully we are not surrounding ourselves with pictures of it.

More as I have time and energy to provide it......Miss you all...

Missed me:::::::::::

2007-08-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

The State of Texas began de-mobilization this morning at 6 am... bringing everyone home from the valley and sending assets back home... the command center where chairs and tables were being fought over yesterday morning are in abundance and in the way today.. about half as many folk over there as today... traffic jams of ambulances and busses going home... some wierdness.. we have showers for the shelters being installed by tonight.. for maybe 12 hours use .. they are using the haz mat decontamination unit of the local firefighters to take showers .. it is akin to standing in a car wash.. that damn wand looks like it hurts...

this has been a wierd excercise.. we have a very skeleton crew.. but six new people showed up today. We only have two ESF groups here.. (Planning and OPS) and the wierdness of USDA veterinarians (I guess VMATS is not really around anymore>>???) five Logistics people showed up today and a new planning person.. and I think we are going home thursday night... I got a few pictures... nothing spectacular.. .. i will try to make a picture post of some of this with annotations.

I just have the best hotel room... marriot Plaza downtown.. place has an awesome pool area, restrauant and even room service which I have not used..... kinda pricey but they make the government rate... there is strangeness in the parking down there.. i guess there is like no place at all to park in the city so they charge an arm and a leg.. if you go in and out of the parking lot during the day it is up to $19 a day... since i am gone 12 hours at a time it is free.. go figure.

There is a chance i am going to be able to go home later this week. There is some chance i may have to go back to Denton and I will post that as I find it out. What an interesting deployment.

Artful Dodger::::::::::::::

2007-08-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

The morning briefing suggests we are going to be missed by a wide margin and likely Dean is heading for the dark heart of Mexico..... Ihave seen too many hurricanes turn due north after hitting the Yucatan though.. the high forehead types are saying something about a high stuck over Texas holding it down there.. yada yada yada.... Anyway they are using the word Demobilization here (we have one box to pack and outa here... ).. I never even got a phone, laptop or new badge.

This is a pretty big show though.. this morning driving in I saw a pad of an old building that had something under 200 ambulances parked door to door facing east. They had 600 school busses setting on a building pad half a mile over for deployment for evacuation and 6 fixed wing aircraft (great big C-130s) and another 6 helicopters sitting on the Air force base apron awaiting 24 hour operations.. these guys were seriously ready for the shit to hit the fan. They were ready for something in excess of 200,000 evacuees to hit the city of San Antonio.

The funny part about this is .... this is a State operation.. we are here as guests.. literally sitting on our hands.. (FEMA is used to throwing its weight around .. when we deploy we are the boss for the most part and our managers and ops people are not very well practiced in being observers and resources for questions.. a learning experience for our group.. kinda fun to see). My job would have been to prepare the place for a bigger FEMA presence in case the disaster got declared and we grew to our normal FEMA size... so I have had a badge and access to every part of this preparation and had not a single dedicated task in the whole thing. What a fun trip.

Now comes our De-Mobilization plan... (pack the one FEMA phone, put my laptop back in the bag, do expenses, do my time sheet and go home.... :-D) we can leave a dark room 20 minutes after we get the word this time.. usually it takes a week to break down an installation. I look forward to going home although it is possible they will ask me to go back to region for some reason. I am not wild about cooling my heels in Denton.. saw all i need to see of that operation last Friday afternoon.

More as it becomes clear to me.

On the Road Again::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2007-08-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

Hi guys.. it has been awhile. I got deployed to first Denton and now San Antonio to stand in front of Hurricane Dean. It has been an interesting trip.. I have to be either available or deployed for 60 days a year to maintain my active status with FEMA. We had some words between Region and myself about the terms of the contract I renewed with them this past spring. :-D eventually they saw things the way I read the words........ So I made myself available Aug 1 and I am going to do my 60 days of service and call it a year unless something interesting comes along.

I had a different mission this time.. I am "forward deployed" ahead of Hurricane Dean which was once forcast to hit the center of the Texas Gulf Coast.. and is not forcast to hit mexico way south of us... Frankly i am not sure.. once it hits the Yucatan it usually turns north a lot.. last couple that hit there did that.

I am embeded in the State of Texas evacuation center on an old air base in San Antonio. I am with an IT weenie from Denton and the two of us are FEMA for this site. There are hundreds of state and local officials, fire and rescue and police here from everywhere planning evacuations and executing their plans for a big hurricane coming ashore. I have to say.. these guys were ready to rock as soon as a blip occured on the satellite imagery. FEMA will not have a role till a disaster is declared but we are here in an advisory capacity till it hits .. and when the rest of the staff gets here today we should see all our OPS and management features in place to just hand off to the state when they ask.. it is very cool. If it does hit shore here I will likely be forward deployed to help build Disaster Recovery Centers toward the coast from the JFO which is already in Austin for this disaster.

Could be home in a week or six...LOL who knows. anyway.. it is back in the grind.. i am enjoying my new pay grade although I am still a grunt in all ways practical.

Home Again!!!

2006-12-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Home again.. and glad for it. No news from Alexandria so apparently I escaped without a single complaint... The trip home was uneventful and I have enjoyed my weekof sloth and wastage. Starting tomorrow I get back on my excercise program.. and life returns to being retired. Thank you all for watching out for me here... I have no new blog at this time as i know more in the spring I will post additional information here... you all have a greatHolidays...

RESCUE:::::::::

2006-12-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Late last evening, Happy Feet was rescued in a daring raid by the founder of this blog site and returned to the loving arms of his family. He was found still bound in blue tape and confined to a shoe box wrapped in wrapping paper under a palm tree christmas display in the planning section. I rescued the package and fought my way back to Logistics where the deputy log chief and I disinterred the victim and began emergency medical treatment.

Happy appeared ok if a bit thin from his confinement.. He was missing a couple patches of faux fur from his taping but appears to be resting comfortably in a secure location this morning. At this time it is not clear if the kidnappers even know he is missing as there was some sort of ransom demand early today. We have no photographs of the victim, his family has asked we respect their privacy in this reunion and we will honor that request.

The kidnappers remain at large.... they maintain plausable deniability although WE KNOW WHO THEY ARE. But your scifiblogger penetrated the maze of clues and red herrings to locate and retrieve our friend...... I am very proud.

More Happy Feet News::::::::::::::::::

2006-11-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Another list of demands came in today.. dropped in an envelope at the door of Logistics early...... They included pictures of Happy Feet blindfolded and smoking a cigarette in a bar with a corona beer... and with two strange women too.. clearly being forced to hang out with an unwholesome crowd... it is reminding me of Patty Hurst... Here are some pictures of the Wall where evidence of the investigation are displayed....

I thought you guys might get the flavor of the tension in the place from this set of pictures.

Kidnapping of Happy Feet

2006-11-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

I came back to the JFO with Logistics up in arms over the kidnapping of one of our own, a plush toy penguin named Happy Feet. He was part of our Christmas Display and was taken by unknown members of the JFO during Thanksgiving weekend.

We started receiving ransom demands.. and then pictures of Happy feet all tied in his captivity......

Our log chief gave directions to start collecting evidence and we have posted it on one of the cubicle walls that border Logistics. This includes photos, a profile of the perpetrators, photos of suspects, fingerprints .... etc.. we will catch these guys... in the mean time Happy feet has been shown on posters put up around the JFO and the mall.. on milk cartons and more....

The kidnappers set up an account on yahoo so they can taunt us ..... the email address of this dastardly group is wehavethepenguin@yahoo.com

Your thoughts for our brave comrade are appreciated.

Back to Alexandria::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-11-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

Made the drive in from Oklahoma this morning.. it was uneventful except for a few miles of "lostness" in SE Oklahoma.

I did have an adventure when I got to Alexandria however... I warn you this is NOT for the faint of heart and I recommend most of you not read further if you are the least bit queasy about odors and body things......

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Ok.. so I got my room back in the same quasi respectable place I had before (The Clarion) and got a room near where my last one was. I got semi unpacked and noticed the internet hardwire connection was literally in pieces. Sooooo.. I called the desk and they moved me... to the room across the hall. I got moved in.. the internet was just wonderful (not so common according to fema lore in this hotel) and I was happy. I went out for BBQ an hour or so later and came back to the room with some fruit and sherbet from Albertsons. About this time I went to the bathroom to use the facilitiies and opend the lid to the toilette and OH MY GOD there was a world champion turd in that thing. Now I only write about it because you are still not thinking big enough... Imagine one of those really large summer sausages in the mall this time of year.. and add maybe half an inch of diameter.. foot and a half long it was in one unbroken piece and resembled a piece of wood in the bottom of my toilette...surprised it did not lap over the edge... ok.. about this time my admiration for the sheer size of this thing wore off and I was seriously grossed out... I mean.. the maid missed THIS?... soo.. I called down to the front desk.. and told her the tale of the world champion turd sunk in my toilette. While she offered to move me again... (ok.. Iwas actually unpacked by this time and figured the bathroom would clean but the internet may not work out in another room sooo... I elected tostay).. I managed to get her to send up somoene to help me.. I expected a maintenance guy but got one of the housekeepers instead with some cleaning supplies and a plunger...

Here is where i shot cola through my nose... the cleaning lady came in.. apologized for the mess and went into the bathroom.. Literally shrieking she exclaimed "Lord have mercy.. someone must have died birthing this abomination!!!!!" at the top of her lungs..."Sweet Jesus help us!!!" and other religious offerings... I mean I knew it was a record but I figured the world hardened staff would just not react to such a thing. Makes me wish I had a picture. Ok.. it took some time.. but eventually it all went down I counted five flushes.. and she used her cleaning materials to return my bathroom into a usable place instead of a trophy room and then left still muttering God's wrath on the perpetrator of such an event.

Without trying to be mean.. it is fitting to remember Alexandria in such a way.

Happy Thanksgiving::::::::::::::

2006-11-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

No Vampires DEE.... somehow this place lacks the mystery of Southern Louisiana...

I did a road trip to Oklahoma to see mom and dad and kids and Trena met me here. We had the standard Turkey dinner... I managed the 500 plus miles and only got one speeding ticket.. (I ALMOST escaped texas and they caught me literally within site of the border... rats!!!) It is nice to have some relaxation time and then back for one more week. Then home for good maybe. depends on what FEMA does.

For those of you that read comments made here, I will tell you I do not engage in debate in this forum and generally ignore negative comments...

My family is well.. and life seems good here in Oklahoma.. I look forward to being back in Colorado even if it is cold. I will not mind leaving Lousy-anna behind at all.

Alexandria... Worst of all worlds....

2006-11-16T08:29:00.001-07:00

Hi guys... Alexandria is really awful. Just far enough north to be cold, still within that "you must fry everything" cooking zone that seems to thrive on extra salt... the people are nice ... but they have to be or they would kill each other....

DR 1668 is a cute little disaster.. 210 people checked in as of this morning.. there are 5 IT people checked in at this time but no Disaster Recovery Centers working except two mobile ones. We have been working 7 to 7 X 7 days a week since we got here and will through the day before Thanksgiving where we will begin to work half day saturdays and take off Sunday.

Our Federal Coordinating officer (the big boss) is a dick that learned what he knows about disasters from Katrina and has made life here seriously hell.. we seem to be more about the window dressing than we are about how well things work.

I am announcing that I am going home on December 3rd and will be there indefinitely. My life really is there and I remember how unhappy living on the road made me. I am semi-negotiating with my regional boss about terms for work and if they cannot accomodate me then likely I am done with disasters... I think I would go out in the beginnings of these things and work the first 30 days.. but these long term deployments by myself are too grinding... I have been stonewalled and sandbagged about getting Trena hired by FEMA and the new local hire restrictions are making it unlikely that any will be hired as they were in Baton Rouge last year..... My original hopes for this work was to do some service for my country... and in that regard I feel successful... Anyway... I will post a few more times before I go home but likely will not continue this blog as a disaster thing if I do not do FEMA... I will post if I put up a new blog for other things including "Adventures in Retirement" ... :-D Thanks to all that have supported me over time...

Alexandria it is::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-11-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

So the update is ... Traveling Sunday... headed to Alexandria..north of Baton Rouge. I have very little other informationo about the disaster. The group I am working with is very similar to the one in El Paso.. More news as I get it.

Louisiana Bound:::::::::: shit!!

2006-10-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

Howdy folks.. got the call today about flooding in Northern Louisiana. Heading out to an unknown location (likely Shreveport) on or about Nov 5th, a nice month off. Looks like only two of us in the IT group so it is either going to be very small or we are going to work a ton of hours. Have no idea how long it will take.. hopefully it is a better thing than any part of Katrina.

More information as it becomes available...

Not Going Back

2006-10-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

Hi readers!! Ok... I came home for a rotation.. a kind of vacation you get after 45 days on a disaster. I was going to be here ten or eleven days and head back. I got home and got some relaxation in and then called my boss down there before making reservations and found out they did not want me back. I am ok for future deployments but had a little personality issue with the deputy Federal Coordinating Officer and of course he won! So I am being punished by being sent home to play! I love my job.

It was on balance a good disaster. Pretty well run, things went on schedule a lot better and the smaller size made so many things manageable. six weeks gone was about the right amount for me and on balance it was a positive thing.

I amm home for awhile.. likely not to post till I get called again. Thanks everyone that read my El Paso Adventure.

Winding Down:::::::::::::::

2006-09-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

The powers that be have staked the end of October for closing up this place. It seems to have gone very smoothly compared to other disasters out here. The City and County are very cooperative and the money is flowing to the people to go ahead and start their lives over.

There is one community named Moade (and probably still spelled wrong) that is west of town that was incorporated into El Paso that is going to dissappear. The folk here do odd things compared to how we would think about owning things in other States. This is called a "Colonias" and is simply a community that sprang up without any regulation at all. None of the buildings are to code (some of the walls for instance are just propped up pallets with dry wall on them.. electricity is often done with expension cords...etc...) FEMA and the state and city/county are excercising 'eminent domian' and are going to condemn this entire neighborhood... I know I am missing some of the details of this transformation but these folk are all going to be offered buyouts... (and the implication is.. they will be forced buyouts if they refuse)... and they are going to turn the neighborhood into a flood plane for relief of future flooding. Things that are challenging here are things like a single mailing address on a street may have five or six 'houses' on it that all get mail from that same box.... it is very much like a foreign country here in some respects. Illegals are mixed with legals.. citizens in the same families with aliens... legal aliens owning property... holy cow what a mess. I have been very impressed though with the group here managing to cut through all that to the core issues and making the money flow and the people are making the best of it.

I am going to be here another week.. then home for ten days.. then back on oct 9th for the duration.. we are going to be breaking all this down starting the 16th for sure when all the application periods and paperwork demands are over... at some point this becomes a logistics building and mission and no one else is allowed.

It Had to be posted somewhere:::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-09-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

Our safety officer has been butchering his native English language in little cautionary emails to us all disaster. I am surprised by this time that he has not asked someone to perhaps proof read them in advance of his sending them. His latest was so bad I just have to pass it along...

The email was titled "Mosquetoe Infestitation". I spent some time walking around the JFO wondering quietly if this was some sort of strange Islamic Foot Fungus.... or perhaps some kind of religious slur.... I actually had tears in my eyes over this one though... he went on to explain how the standing water had greatly increasted the mosquetoe population and we should be careful when in the open lest one of them get on us.

It IS his native language so I do not feel so bad abusing him about it. People that write for large and professional audiences should know it well enough to use websters.com if for no other reason than to avoid people like me..

You know you work for FEMA when:::::::::::::::::

2006-09-06T14:23:00.000-07:00

20 You have dry cleaning waiting in 17 states

19 You have to look up the word "weekend" in a dictionary

18 You wear your Badge in the Shower

17 You think working half-day is 12 hours

16 The local McDonalds drive through knows your voice

15 Your favorite channel is "The Weather Channel"

14 You write email home and send a copy to the JFO for record retention

13 Your family considers FEMA a four letter word

12 Your spouse has a picture of yo uby the front door to ID you

11 Things actually begin to make sense

10 Your favorite restrauant is the Red Cross truck

9 The finally tell you to go home and you thnk they mean your hotel

8 You walk into a new JFO and know everyone there

7 You can name every announcer on the Weather Channel

6 You have memorized every one of the 110 channels in your hotel room

5 You submit your Christmas list on a 60-1 (form to purchase things here)

4 You get a date and spend the evening looking at floodplain maps

3 You are offered a 40 hour a week job and ask if they have a full time position instead

2 You start getting junk mail at your hotel

1 Your last three children are named after hurricanes (and more resemble the mailman?)

Another day::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-09-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

The floodwaters have subsided and moved downstream a hundred miles or so expending themselves in the wilds of the Trans-Pecos. All the evacuees are back home and the roads and highways are all open again. Concerns for earthen dams and some sets of local farm pond type dams failing have been abated by this afternoon and life proceeds apace. This entire set of events has happened with no fatalaties and no serious injuries. The disaster in New Mexico is primarily a PA disaster (roads, bridges, power and other infrastructure).

They have set the date here for closure of our DRC (Disaster Recovery Center) which seems early to me but, today had onlyl 15 applicants there. 3200 total applicants of which most are ending up in the SBA (Small Business Administration) or VOLAG (Voluntary agencies) assistance lists. It is odd to see how differently this thing runs than Louisiana... people are interested and kind of respectful of FEMA here... we are going to be able to dish out a ton of help and people are actively helping both themselves and their own government to make this work. Lots of money is in the pipeline already and I believe that the part already declared for DR 1658 will be mostly done by Mid October. The damage yesterday was literally thumping the rubble in most respects. The same arroyos have flooded the same trailer villages.... some additional damage has been done but it does not look like a whole new declaration to me (ok.. that is a wild ass guess but the places I saw did not look remarkably different than before... just scarey as hell when the water comes that fast.....)

I am concerned that i am in the desert for three weeks and my tan is fading.. it looks like working in Seattle in February.. even wore a jacket to work one day. What an odd place this is. :-D

Inside a developing Disaster::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-09-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Rain continues today quite heavy following rain almost every day within eyesight of us here for the last 8 days. Likely this will be declared as a new disaster since there was a distinct gap in time between the events that caused the damage for 1658 that I am working on and this mess. The soil in this entire region is and has been totaly saturated for many days now, we have had several accumulations of the average annual rainfall here in the last month and a half. The Rio Grand is running bank to bank (like a mile wide)and has white caps like you see in the bottom of the grand canyon. New Mexico is a green splotch of rain on the radar of weather bug.. (if you do that sort of thing.. look at zip code 79925 on weatherbug)

The drains everywhere are full of sand and clay so the water has defeated the drainage systems in place and goes where it wants.. the streets run hub deep everywhere and if the current rates continue I10 will be closed today, both directions, till it subsides. I am personally worried that they are going to have to begin releasing water from Elephant buttes reservoir in New Mexico which will further strain the Rio Grande.. fortunately east of here that river gets very steep banks and flooding is unlikely.. but river crossings will go down for sure.. :-D

Days off are a challenge when the weather is bad like that, but I got all my chores done and went to eat Sushi. There is a feeling of anticipation for a second or expanded declaration and the locals are antsy about additional help. I do have to say that everyone here is working. There are no piles of debris that the storm piled up 6 weeks ago, someone has worked every one of them.. they are shovelig muck while it is still raining.. the locals are out with what they have trying to make things better. This is not Louisiana and I am proud to be here with this bunch.

A New Month:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::;;

2006-09-01T19:27:00.000-07:00

Starting a new month in the field is always fun. People are trying to get reports to the managers they report to off site.. politicians are trying to make hay this time of year before the elections so they look good.. and it all runs on data.

The PA people are a hoot... lets be generous and say most of them are long retired and while they are interested in helping and hold a great deal of knowledge, they lack a certain patience for modern methods of dealing with data (computers) and other things the rest of us call rules. They tend to like the room temp to be about 78, and are generally retired people of substance that tend to make the mistake of talking to people like me as if we are servants.. :-D usually only happens once. Today I got a computer ticket, hand written that said simply "Cannot get it up".... My boss actually shot coffee through his nose when I showed it to him... so.. I went all through the call center asking for assistance with this problem as I am not at all sure what to do with the problem at all. Thankfully an unnamed Logistics manager gave me a little blue triangular pill which I taped to the work request and which I quietly returned to the desk with the instructions, "take immediately... call a doctor if erections lasts more than four hours" (now personally if I had one that long I would brag big time about it)... All told when the PA crew that this gentleman was imbedded in came back and read both the request and the solution I had quite a bit of hilarity on my hands and one beet red and angry septigenarian that wanted to talk to my boss that actually had to look away to control himself. The day ended with no one hurt and the little blue pill returned to its owner.. (it was a cut down altoids). And you thought desktop support did not have its moments.

New Mexico will be running Monday for some reason and I will not have anything to do with it.. going to be here for awhile longer for sure. We are starting to lose people already and are down ten this week from last. So it begins.

More as it becomes available

Now for Boredom:::::

2006-08-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Just a note.. I am sure that the former morgue at carville would have been used as a staging area for hurricane Ernesto if it came on shore.. they were going to send a group there to wait out the storm and then be behind it for operations..I can imagine being in there ... probably it would produce a new short story.....

They are taking a few people from this disaster to send to New Mexico for the two declarations going on up there this week. Also sending home several of the Community Relations people that had come for training and making that group more reasonable in size.

Some of our people are pretty bad with computer skills.. not knowing how to create or move documents on a desktop or make folders.. rename things.. pretty basic windows. I have spent a lot of time the last two weeks correcting things like that.. You do not need to be a genius to make most people get up and running in this environment..just a little common sense.. plug things in.. read the warnings that pop up..that sort of thing.. be patient.

I can see that we are goign to get horribly bored very soon here.. much like Arkansas was. We should staart to get smaller reasonably soon here. I will be glad to get home....MOre as it becomes available..

A Sunday Lunch::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-08-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

92 degrees and a 40% chance of rain... New hours tomorrow at the JFO so life is going back to a more normal way of doing things and fewer hours.. harder on the paycheck but easier on your body. 8-6 five days and saturday till noon is not a bad schedule. Figure an hour and a half by the pool on each weekend day and a dinner and laundry and you got a weekend.

Going for Mexican Food tonight to a place that has been recommended. No weenie Southwestern cooking here.. people would spit out cilantro.. all straight tex mex and no Beano. These folk can sure make beans though.. Had some tomato bisque at the restrauant last night and it was just the best ever.. seemed to have a bit of bacon in it and fresh tomato as base.. and floating chunks of chilis put a great bit of bite in it. The food here is fatty but not salty like Louisiana... my blood pressure for those of you that follow such stats is doing quite well.. This morning after Breakfast it was 100/60 which explains why I wanted to go back to bed and sleep some more.

Toured some of the damaged areas this morning. A remarkable number of damaged trailer houses... a FEMA trailer would be a massive upgrade for many many of them. The upshot of this flooding is the arroyos that feed the Rio Grande. The fall several hundred feet of sand covered hills leading into the drainage. These storms park and dump a couple inches of rain at a time on these spots and it goes WHOOSH downhill.. a wall of sandy muddy water that clogs drains and then spills over the walls of these dry gulches into communities.. and finally dumps several inches to feet of sandy muck into the farm land at the bottom covering crops etc... I neglected to bring my camera this time but will try to post some representative pictures from the PIO boys that have the fancy cameras...

Will know more tomorrow about how Ernesto will imapct my operation... not likely now that it is projected so far east so we can focus on the two pending declarations from New Mexico and finish this El Paso thing.......

My daily rant... Ray Nagin can kiss my sweaty white ass. He is STILL complaining about money that no responsible adult will give him. His diversion of his own lack of leadership on the "hole in the ground" in New York gets this comment from me... a year after those towers fell.. there was no debris left in place.. only a hole in the ground waiting to be rebuilt.. why are there tens of thousands of cars still rusting on the streets of New Orleans, and 85% of the original debris in place in New Orleans a year later? I will never willingly work in that state again, I may have to but I will do my minimum to get out if it does occur. People that will vote that moron back in office deserve to starve in the dark.

Now for the Heat::::::::::::::::::::::::::;

2006-08-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

wow is it hot. Our building has spotty air conditioning... my desk sits under the thermostat and was at 88 degrees for most of the day yesterday. Kept me moving to the cooler areas to do work... ;-). The disaster is moving along very quickly.. they are already reducing hours to five and a half days a week and I expect they will get out of here in record time. It has been good to be involved with setting up a disaster center and making all the pieces parts run. I have become more impressed with the region I work in as a result. They work very hard to be prepared for this type event.

We are about to lose people to both the anticipation of the hurricane out in the atlantic and also the two declarations apparently out of New Mexico and the fire declaration out of Nevada. Due to the security constraints that DHS has placed on us we cannot reasonably hire local hires for work at places like this... I am not sure what that means long term for our Cadre but it does mean we are going to have to hire people for disaster work we have not seen perform in this environment.

The room I am in is quite nice.. very close to the pool... they serve snacks at night till 7 and a continental breakfast... you can drink there in the evening too if you like... so I am lookingforward to being able to spend some time here.

I am pretty much already tired of Mexican food. Imagine that.........

WHEW::: or maybe GLUB

2006-08-21T10:48:00.000-07:00

Hello readers::: As you may expect, it has been a bit hectic here. Working tons of hours.. we are officially on 12X 7 days right now but the IT and logistics folk have been doing a bit more. The flooding has continued, hard to imagine for such a desert place but these have been horrendous thunderstorms that just refuse to move at all and dump huge amounts of rain. El Paso got a years rain in the last week of July if you can imagine... it has been hard on homes.. drains and bridges.. snarling traffic and looks like something over 1000 people and about 500 homes impacted. There are also related disasters taking shape in New Mexico.

Got a pretty good hotel.. a suites (Chase Suites here) and I am about 20 feet from the pool presuming we will eventually get a day off. Restaurants here are good and the Mexican food is excellent.

I am reasonably tired... the politics here are very different than Louisiana... lots more work and lots less bickering. This is a true Region 6 disaster... no people from other regions and no meddling from WAshington. Work just flows better.

More soon

Leaving On a Jet Plane:::::::::::::: Weeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

2006-08-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

Leaving on the 15th for El Paso via America West. Looks like a hotel for this trip at first. No JFO to check into so far so I will have to call the Log Chief when I get there and find out when the equipment will arrive...

Managed it all in one suitcase this time plus a took kit and a computer bag... I hope security lets me keep my computer carryon for at least this trip. What a pain and risk tocheck your laptop.

El Paso now? :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-08-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

Hi Guys again...

Got notice of a mobilization. El Paso Texas to do Individual and Public assistance declaration for flooding done there last week. According to my boss, the declaration could be any day (not sure what that really is in FEMA language).

More news as available

OFF To Arkansas::::::::::::::;;

2006-05-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

OFF To Arkansas::::::::::::::;;

Left this morning for Arkansas and disaster # 1636. I look forward to little rock as I do not recall being in this city as an adult at least. I may go look for a McDonalds that Bill Clinton has eaten at and see if the food is any better there.

What is the deal with people in airports? So you are standing in line for the only coffee shop open in the terminal at 7:00 AM and the line is moving at a snails pace. Ok.. so 12 or 15 min into your wait in line someone comes to the front of the line and just cannot decide what they want…… ……. Ok.. so the refreshing caffeine beverage of their choice is made (we are proud he is so confident of his sexuality that he can actually order something with whip cream on top at 7 am) this Twinkie just cannot decide between any of the 10 or 15 different pastries that are on display up front. Seriously.. after another four or five agonizing minutes he decides on a fruit stuffed croissant which he wants heated…….. (toe tapping….. urge to throw excrement at this guy) so the pastry goes into the microwave…. (Jeopardy music endlessly) and finally comes out…. Ok.. here is the part I really love..he complains that it is too hot… at which point the lady behind the counter suggests that if he just leave it standing for a moment it will be “JUST RIGHT”….. The woman behind me actually says out loud “TAKE IT AND RUN GOLDILOCKS>>> SOME OF US JUST NEED COFFEE”… the guy gathers his belongings with as much dignity as possible and leaves the area to a standing ovation…. Such is my entertainment on the road.

I am so unimpressed with American Airlines. I have taken four of their flights in the last two weeks and all of them have been between half hour to one hour late either leaving or arriving. Grrrrrrrrr….
Arkansas is one big forest and it is weird driving through town cause you cannot see anything but forest. Little rock is crowded with traffic but you never see anything off the side of the road.. I will have to try to see downtown at some point and make sure it really exists.

New Blogging Posts :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-05-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

Hi guys,

I am heading for Arkansas on Sunday aparently. Finish up a little tornado disaster there and then back in a couple weeks I hope. I am not really going to post much on this blog while I am not deployed as it is designed to be a kind of deployment bulletin board about my status and things going on around me in disasters. As a civiilan again I will be available for regular email and phone calls either through this site or: bullroartook@aol.com

More news as I get depolyed!!! Thank you all for your support and company while I was gone for so long. it has been very nice to be welcomed back.

GOING Home:::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-04-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

Started the trip home yesterday. Checkout at Katrina 1603 was without any comment worthy delay. Seems the FEMA machine is working smoothly and not even the car rental company wanted to give me any grief. (I knocked off the front license plate). Great learning experience here but glad to be going home. I have to go to Arkansas on May 7 for a couple weeks or perhaps a bit more to finish up a little tornado disaster over there. The good news is I am going as a Network manager for this little disaster which is actually smaller in manpower than the bit of network I had to manage out at the Morgue at Carville.

I got most of my stuff packed today in Andrews for the trip back .. my trailer and truck are loaded and I got to at least touch all my toys again!!!.. The motorcycle started instantly and while it is still trailer mounted, it was a sight for sore eyes. I will be driving tothe springs tomorrow with Trena and we are taking two vehicles and two trailers full of all the stuff I brought down here in the days before deploying for Katrina. I am looking foreward to sleeping in my own bed (my fema bed sucked) and having some days of doing my own stuff. Making money pales in a while in lieu of having time to go spend it.

I am going to quickly purchase a new Big Screen TV. .. and a DVD player to use with it (HDMI of course) and I am going to upgrade my wireless network (going wireless g with that fast stuff that lets you connect at 54 instead of 11) and build a server on it in Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 server edition.. I guess I need to do that to study over my break time and be more proficient with server software on the next trip out. I am buying a brand new BBQ grille for those steaks I am going to make. I look forward to my second spring in Colorado this year having had the first one in Louisiana a couple months ago. and a LONG summer by the pool.

So the movers are bringing my stuff out of storage on Friday and I hope to be substantially moved in by afternoon saturday, go to TESS' party and brunch on Sunday the 30th!! I am going to relax as best I can during that week before the 7th roles around, visit the doctor and get some sweaty excercise then pack up the "GO" bag and head for the hills again for a little while. I look forward to seeing you all here soon!!!

A Dead City:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-04-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

So a trip to New Orleans today seemed appropriate. Almost 8 months after the landfall of Katrina it seemed appropriate to see the place. I am prepared to pronounce the city dead and not recoverable in any sense of the word towards what it was before. My impressions are: miles of filthy streets still littered with storm debris in the gutters, miles of non functional traffic signals, abandoned houses with swollen walls and missing roofs , FEMA trailers on perhaps one in 50 driveways, abandoned apartment complexes, Strip malls with abandoned stores and scattered trash and debris in the parking area. Porta-Johns every half a block or so for miles on end are also de-rigueur for this place. Empty McDonalds and absence of people make the place look like video my daughter took in Yugoslavia in the early 90’s. There was a section of the elevated interstate that had storm damaged cars under it…. Miles and miles of cars… all of them stripped for parts by locals we presume.. I saw men lined up for day work on Easter Sunday …. There is great demand for labor here even semi skilled…. None of these men looked like locals.. they all appeared to be Hispanic folk and from somewhere else just here to make money. While they are fixing the roof of the superdome, they are not getting the sewers running again or the power back on. All are snapshots of a dead city that does not know it is dead. No permanent jobs, no housing, no commerce….. Ray Nagen has the audacity to run for mayor again……… hopefully the ones that left will rekindle some kind of sense of community somewhere else and not call this horrible place home ever again. 8 months….. checks from the FEDS in excess of $8 Billion dollars and you still got a dead city that looks like the storm hit last week. Mississippi has begun to rebuild.. they are complete with their debris removal…. The only difference is leadership and the heart of the people involved. They do not seem to be able to get out of their own way. I for one am sick of seeing good money go in after bad.

I got a place in the springs.. be back there on the evening of April 27th. I will be moving in that weekend , home there for a week getting settled and connected and then off to Arkansas for two weeks to finish up the end of that tornado disaster that has been going on there.. we should be closing that and then I am home for the summer. I am looking forward to a motorcycle ride and some bicycling and some food grilled on my new grille I am going to buy.. :-D see you all soon

FEMA Land::::::::::;;;;;

2006-04-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

Here in FEMA land we have no problem planning things, only we DO have problems deciding which plan to follow. :-D. Ok.. for now I am on Standby for Arkansas…. It looks like they are going to try to manage this entire disaster from the existing small JFO in Little Rock. This should be good news and I am still looking at 18 days left here. Another day in the 80’s I am sitting by the pool after work, I must be tan before I come home, it is an imperative.. :-D….

A new cycle::::::::

2006-04-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

As some of you might have read…. There were Tornados in Arkansas last week (other places too all the way through Ohio) but the Region 6 part is in Arkansas. They are taking some of our better people from Katrina to go work that disaster and leaving us thin at the top. This is such a strange business to be in…. you look at the weather completely differently when you work like this. The DAE cadre is doing little else these days but preparing for this seasons disasters including trying to get some rest, getting equipment staged and working on leaning up this organization so we can leave it.

Sorry it has been awhile since I wrote. This is kind of the Doldrums of a disaster from a FEMA point of view and from a personal point of view, I am about ready to come home and get started I have rented an apartment in the springs (address etc to follow for you guys that need it) and am handling the lease signing and all through snail mail. I hope to be able to just drive up to the garage and start unloading…. By the way I am going to need a burly guy to help me pull that motorcycle off my trailer when I get there.. any burly guy volunteers out there? Will take no more than ten minutes and I am asking no other work help.. :-D.

For the most part I am just gathering software that I would need if I had to work remotely and alone without a lot of support. When we did this big Network conversion a week ago, I saw a bit of the future here. They had to have the Admin team from Mt. Weather go out to the new staging/COOP site (still called “The Morgue at Carville”) to convert some of the equipment out there. The IT coordinator said “no one knows that place like you Steve so go show them around”…. (eyeroll)… Right after that I was tasked with preparing the site for a staging area for inbound disasters and also for COOP operations. The fun part is I get to go play server administrator again, place everything on the new domain and make the organization of IT out there for the next time it is used extensively. I have this sneaking suspicion when the wind blows again, someone in Region 6 is going to say, “we are gearing up that staging area.. who knows that morgue place better than anyone for the IT lead there?” and off I am again for the boondocks in Louisiana facing an inbound hurricane. Perhaps there is a short story in that………

We had a Region 6 DAE fire himself this morning. It was odd cause it dredged up old memories. He had been on site about 30 days.. and came here from Austin where he had been for the previous 6 months. He left work Friday and we never saw him again although he did call in Mon and Tues. What it sounds like is he went off on an alcoholic bender ….. now you are only allowed to miss 3 days in any disaster or they send you home so when he did not show this morning his supervisor called him and asked about his condition. Obviously drunk he said he was on a flight this afternoon and would not be back, never checked out, never filed any paperwork, left all his stuff in place and just walked. Hmmmmm…I sorta wonder if he is still in a blackout and gonna wake up tomorrow wondering what the heck happened. Disasters are not for everyone even at this stage of the game. These are very desired positions and hard to find and also get assigned to. Oh well!!

I have been sitting in the sun lately getting some color. It has been mid 80’s or higher here every day for the last week and it has felt very nice. I will get to see two late springs this year and that is something else I am looking forward too

The Old South:::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Old South::::::::::::::::::::;

So went to this Ante Bellum Plantation house (pre civil war is what all that means) to attend a kind of festival that was on the news and advertised in town. It was interesting, guides in the “Big House” in period dress, the grounds and all… there were lots of booths set up that reminded me of A Taste of Colorado with lots of food and such. Was there perhaps half an hour before I realized, there were no black people there. Ok.. Louisiana is about 60% black and I had not been in a nearly all white crowd in forever… it actually set me back a bit thinking.. “Did the Klan advertise this?... am I somehow contributing to a bad element here?” So the Plantation is a perfectly touristy place………. But as I got to thinking about it, I guess I realized it is not the sort of place the Blacks in this part of the world would ever go for food and fun… So you do not have to think long to see why… they have the old slave quarters, and the sharecroppers housing all that and it is impossible to not notice the comparison to the Big House which was very luxurious no matter what time frame you compare it to. It drew thousands of people this little festival…still part of the things that make you go Hmmmmmm.. down here though..

I have also decided that Louisiana is the home of four breasted women. Saw a comedy special where one of the comedians was talking about this phenomenon in a funny way so I immediately connected to this part of the world. Four breasted women have the regular breasts.. then.. another sort of set that pooches out the top of the bra leaving a kind of bulge up there….I have not decided if this is a local fashion statement as I have also been mystified by other clothing choices I have seen.

There was an all hands meeting here today with some big wigs from Washington trying to give a pep talk, exhorting people to “stay the course” and “never give up….. never surrender”…. About our new plan for this year which all things new seem to begin on June 1 (first day of hurricane season) or all projects are complete by June 1. It is interesting that one of the new initiatives here (due to be complete by June 1) is an evacuation plan for the 100,000 plus people in FEMA trailers that must be evacuated even in a tropical storm due to the fragile nature of the FEMA trailers. For some reason these big wigs felt obliged to do a planning exercise with the state over this issue as if they did not have confidence that Louisiana could organize an evacuation for these people… hmmmmmmmm…

They announced the Morgue they built at Carville is going to be a permanent FEMA COOP… (Continuity Of Operations) location.. essentially a disaster planning place for something that happens in a disaster. If a hurricane comes on shore and drowns New Orleans again then the AFO there moves essential operations to this COOP and work continues…. This I gotta see…. It also is a staging area for hurricanes hitting anywhere in the region 6 gulf area.. pretty close to the action and large enough to work for everyone

ETA One Month!! :::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

So I managed an entire week in Maryland with no pictures on a former campus of an all Catholic womens college/Nun repository. FEMA for some reason has classes there and it is Labeled as the "National Firefighters Memorial" and a place where they train firefighters in Leadership.

Campus is over a hundred years old, massive brick buildings.. lots of Catholic imagry. The class was not what I imagined, and I did not quite get out of it what I wanted, however..... I did get some surprising depth out of some things I had not anticipated and am better able to manage in the field in the future because of the experiences. The group was a combination of headquarters weenies, MERS crews (these guys are Daniel Boone kinda folk.. driving huge trucks of satellite gear into the teeth of a disaster the first day to provide communications... rough tough tobbacco chewin' mens men. ) It weenies like me and a couple of odd folk that had nothing at all to do with IT at all. We talked more about phones than is comfy for me (if you need a Merlin PBX hooked up, you better find someone else)................

Anyway.. this disaster ends for me on April 25.. I am flying out to Andrews that day. They are cutting the JFO down to half days Saturday and Sunday off so the hours are hardly worth it and the work gets pretty boring when the hours go down that way. My plans again are to return to Colorado Springs, set up a residence there in a place bigger than my last one and stay at least through Sept 1. We will see what the hurricane season brings this year.

I highly recomend you visit NOAA's website and look at the forecast for this hurricane season. There are imbedded there maps so you can track your own hurricane.. and a map that shows landfall for every hurricane that has made landfall in the US in the last 50 years.. (there are some surprises in that data).... I want to do a poll (if I could figure out how to DO one CHERYL) about where the first hurricane of the year is going to strike and the closest date to the first Cat 5 Hurricane of the season in this hemisphere and where it is going to hit. I also recommend a book by John Barnes called "Mother of all Storms" or something very near that for a Sci Fi book about weather (and humanity) beyond our control.,........... anyone know why hurricanes appear not to hit the Middle east? The new Zombie film has the Pilot (Malcom) from Serenity and for that reason alone I will be attending this weekend.....I am wondering if he can play another character.

Here is the NOAA hurricane site.. ::: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

I have a new rental car.. it sucks.. it came from a dedicated smoker.. ick.

Trains::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

This morning one of the peculiar things to Baton Rouge or Louisiana happened. For whatever reason, this town allows trains to just park in town. So a mile long train of boxcars and tankers will just be idle on a line that crosses every east/west access to downtown or out of town no matter where you are. One such track runs within 15 or 20 feet of the JFO. this morning at 7:05 am this train pulled into a slot that blocked every entry street to the JFO from the west. So the vast bulk of the 2,000 people in the JFO could not get to work. Now comes the fun part. Dozens of people went crazy..... it is the only way I can describe it.. simply they drove down the wrong way on the bumper to bumper street.. pulled down the railroad right of way and parked.. then.. either climbed through the train at a coupling or... crawled UNDER the damn thing between the wheels. This has taken southern idiocy to new heights... in my own mind it is a case of evolution in action.. if the train moves, there are fewer in the breeding pool to pass along those genes............

It was 88 degrees over the weekend a couple days. This prompted a walk along the levee and a discussion of spring flowers. I counted over 40 species flowering including escapees. Over my head are some morning glories.. but there were also Lantana and a couple of trees with huge clumps of Wysteria in them. Behind me the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. The barges are interesting to watch..... smashed cars going north and construction materials going south. I would wish everyone could see the Azaelas blooming as this area is a riot of those colors of whites and pinks and flaming reds.

My class begins monday with a travel day on sunday and friday. The trip has turned into a paperwork nightmare with regualtions I was not aware of for checking out of a disaster, checking into class, being redeployed both places (first class then disaster) and then checking back in when I get here... what a mess.. took most of the morning and will take me a large part of saturday to check out as I have to turn in all my equipment and you cannot imagine how much hardware has gone under my signature between the morgue and the JFO..........

Summer::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-11T16:55:00.000-07:00

Hi guys.. sorry for the long absences here.... the change of scenery to the JFO have limited my time a bit with a different work situation... But I had some time this afternoon ahead of a day off and put this together. Happy Weekend everyone!!

Today was 88 degrees… wind straight off the gulf of Mexico and muggy like a moist towelette on your face. I can remember summers nearly this far south… I know why I do not want to spend a summer here for sure.. beyond any hurricane things, it is freakin hot and oh so humid.. plus the mosquitoes… and chiggers and roaches.. ewwwwwww…

I am working on a case that is a piece of malicious vandalism on the network. A group of people create a share folder on the network and all of them but no one outside the group has access to the folder. Someone within one of these groups that is pretty sophisticated made hash out of one of these folders inside a share and made it not accessible to anyone. It has taken two days to try to find and return all the files this messed up and it looks like a situation where the people that did it performed a criminal act in order to play this joke. I think it is a rivalry within the group that got out of hand and created a real mess for us and of course the people in the group that were denied work tools for a couple days. We have arranged a surprise for anyone else in that group trying it again though.

Everything is on track for out of here on April 25th it seems. Class on the 20th in Maryland. So week after next and then home for three or four weeks and then out of here. Still plan on being in the springs before May 1 to find a place and get settled again. I am looking forward to my shopping spree… I need a TV and some furniture for sure.. maybe a new mattress as I am thinking about one of those fancy foam mattresses…Thinking about a couple of consumer electronics purchases and maybe a bicycle upgrade plus a couple adders for my BIKE to make me more roadworthy. So I am going to be BUSY getting all that stuff… and the fun of buying it.. as you know I have been not buying anything here so that I would not have to take it home.. so I have been many months without buying anything at all.. :-D

Summer is a coming.. this is a great year to avoid the gulf states from July through September cause of the hurricane threat.

Friday Again::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

This is Dan Queen as I most Remember him.. went through my pictures to see and this is one of only three pics O have of him.. the main one is on his blog.....
This has been a good week except for Dan.... FEMA is predicting at least as bad a storm season as we had last year. The water temp in the gulf is ten degrees hotter than this time last year and they are predicting an extensive gulf storm season. I am sure there is no escaping this. I am going back to colorado before it starts, at the end of april...... In the JFO, planning has begun working on storm season 2006, we have already been given evacuation plans for the JFO and I am pretty sure most of my DAE and regular FEMA folk will be out of town by early May and certainly before June one. I for one intend to screw off all summer in colorado springs and be a motorcycle bum with a tan and coffee every day.

The Passing of CandymanDan ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-03-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes sad things happen during your times away. On Tuesday of this week a good and loyal friend of mine from Denver was killed in a freak traffic accident in Wyoming. I have never had a forum such as this to eulogize someone close as I have been blessed again by losing very few people close to me in life by having them die.

Dan was 42 when he died, a kid really. He drove a truck and was good at it. He had a checkered past including prison but it never seemed to dim the character behind the smile of my friend. He was very active in his chosen AOL community. I expect he danced with every woman in AOL Denver at one time or another. His passion was ball room dancing and It was common to see him in his custom ZOOT suit with the 4 ft watch chain at every social function with a dance floor. Dan always carried hard candy in his coat pockets, and liked to style himself as a candyman. He was lonely and spent a lot of his energy looking for the perfect woman for his life. I think he always felt his personal life was not good enough for someone else cause he always had problems with money and his past, but he was a very good man and one this world will surely miss.

Dan and I rode motorcycles together on occasion. He drove an old Kawasaki beater of 750 cc’s that he spent more time under than riding. He was an awesome companion for lunch or sitting on a sunny patio eating ice cream and ogling the passing women at cold stone with me. He encouraged me at my lowest points and let me sit with him on a couple of his. In the end, you can call him one of those rare people in your life that, if he called, I would have come. I miss him terribly.

Before and After Spanish Town Parade

2006-02-26T17:51:00.000-07:00

Before::

AFTER:

Mardis Gras

2006-02-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

Hi guys... Have had an internet outage among other issues so no blogging lately. This is the weekend that the major portion of the Fat Tuesday celebration begins and ends on Tuesday late. The BEFORE and AFTER pics of me are on another posting.. it was rainy and cold for the Spanish Town parade, the biggest one in Baton Rouge. Just decided it was not worth going to New Orleans for this. It is still pretty nasty down there and it was raining all weekend, just cleared up this afternoon along with my internet.

The parade had a very anti FEMA theme, and was indeed titled... "FEMA-ture Evacuation" and filled with themes of FEMA trailers, blue tops, beaurocracy and other negative images. Every politician was lambasted from the mayor to the governor up through washington DC.

It was a fun two hours tell the truth but I am pretty sure it is not a party I would come down here for. The Streets of Spanish Town were so badly littered and nasty that you could not imagine it. Everyone kept their clothes on while I was there but the weather was mostly the culprit, it certainly was a festive atmosphere.

Anyway.. the "AFTER" pic of me is below.. it was a interesting to be buried in so many beads... I have on the order of 50 lbs of them in the apartment now following the last two weeks of parades around here... They are kinda neat and I am going to take a bag to work tomorrow.. FEMA is not letting people off work for Mardis Gras, (those slave driving bastards!!!) so I am going to take beads to work to .. ummm.. dispense... :-D..

JFO blues::::::::::::;;

2006-02-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

JFO blues::::::::::::;;

Ok.. back to the JFO again. You gotta love this place. Prim donnas, divas, drama masters… and morons. Oh My!! In a way the JFO is a place where people that are not able to be out on their own for some reason do tasks for FEMA. The secretary for the Travel group (either the 5th or 6th one I remember) cannot be bothered to hang up her perpetual cell phone conversation to answer the FEMA phone that is ringing off the hook four inches from her elbow………… This would be a local hire that is not long for FEMA land.. :-D There are confusing signs.. one says “Please do not Touch” and is taped to a glass window of the escalator well to the second floor. Now this sign is 6 or 8 feet away from a very nice 3D table model of New Orleans ….. and I am wondering if the sign means that model… or the glass wall it is mounted on… hmmmmm In November coffee was $0.25 a cup in the cafeteria (you could bring your own cup too) with free refills.. today it is a buck a cup regardless and no outside cups allowed. Almost no one eats there these days and leaves campus to eat which creates these gigantic traffic jams at noon and one. I will also tell of one style trend that I have found amazing……..:::::: Lets call them extremely large women….. wearing tiny little strapped shoes on four inch heels….this looks SO precarious.. SO precarious… I have no idea how they walk anywhere much less from the parking lot to our work area…. I keep expecting a wreck someday.. something just HAS to give there but no.. they make those heels tough…and I am thinking these women are very athletic to be able to do that trick.

FEMA made available these shell jackets with reflective armbands and the word FEMA in reflective strips on the back of the jacket for work in the field… hundreds of them. They have become known as “Target Jackets” after a few incidents in places outside the JFO and few people will now wear them in public……..

All the DAE’s like me that are not converting to this “CORE” designation (full time with benefits for 3-5 years) are plotting our departure. Most of us are running out of gas for this particular adventure as most of the charm has worn off after all this time. I am still having fun and have found lots to make my days happy here but spent part of the morning looking for houses to live in Colorado Springs. (Rents have gone down!! Yay!!)

Louisiana Drivers::::::::::::;;;

2006-02-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

Louisiana Drivers::::::::::::;;;

I hate this state for the traffic and drivers among other things. In Baton Rouge the city is over crowded by a flood of Katrina refugees as well as standard traffic, bad planning and a vast assortment of bad habits that drivers have. I have found that they tend to drive insanely fast where there is no room to do so… treating slower cars like gates on a giant slalom OR drive insanely slow…. Two lane highway, modern car going 40 mph in a 55 mph zone … creating long lines of impatient drivers behind them that try to pass 15 or 20 cars at a time ( I head for the shoulder). Within Baton Rouge, and within 3 or 4 miles of any interstate, it is grid lock or thereabout for 8 am to 6 pm. It is common to wait 6 or 7 or more light cycles to get through ever intersection. Drivers tend to pull out into intersections blocking traffic…. Crating longer lines which in turn block the intersection… No wonder my blood pressure spiked down here. My other favorite is lane crossing near intersections.. so imagine if you will… an intersection with ten lanes of traffic going 5 each both ways and no center median. It seems to be popular sport to try to cross all ten of those lanes 50 or 60 feet from the intersection when this traffic is totally stalled. These drivers universally seem to think if they catch my eye.. and POINT where they want to go that somehow it is ok to do that and even possible. Why do these people think it is ok to even try to do those things.. is a left hand turn in this exact spot SO important that you will interrupt the traffic flow of hundreds of other people? If I can just survive this place with no accidents in this FEMA paid for rental car I will be a very happy boy.

The morgue at Carville has been officially named the VIC.. victims identification center…. For whatever reason.. the whole world knows it as DMORT at Carville so when you see that on the news here in the next few days that is us.

Have you seen the cartoons that have set the Islamic world to rioting? I decided I needed to go look for them to see these inflammatory images and see if I could generate a particle of empathy for the position they find themselves in. I have included a link for it below. I have looked at them, and while I am pretty sure I could not determine if any of them actually look like Muhammad I am just totally at a loss to understand what the clamor is about. I rarely make group judgments about behavior or countries, but it is clear to me that we as a country and society.. true western society with values of free speech and other personal freedoms are at risk from this entire population that is creating this degree of violence. So Europe, Australia and North America are finding themselves truly at odds with a population of about 1.6 billion people. Since demonstrably their first reaction seems to be violence instead of civilized debate, I am ready to pronounce my judgment on the entire population of the Middle East. These are dangerous children and ought not be allowed to roam freely about the planet. The world has tried in the past to eradicate populations (Jews, Serbs, and to some degree Christians and also Muslims at different times) and there are always survivors and the people that tried to eradicate them tended to be Nazis or worse. So the world has to learn to live with a stone age culture that has money thanks to our Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian friends and access to modern freedoms which they use against us. But from this point forward… let none of them count on my empathy regarding the treatment of an entire class of individuals.

http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/jyllands-posten_cartoons/

Thursday, New Things Happening!!

2006-02-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

It is not smart to wait for specific things in a disaster to come clear before you write about them. Events overtake you and you are left without a story. The VIC and the DMORT facility is on a very short time frame by now. We had been waiting to find out if state and New Orleans officials were going to send DMORT in to search the 9th ward for additional victims. Turns out today is the day for that decision, but it is just a mission to recover bodies, they will not be coming to the VIC at all and our data mission is over. There is an orderly withdrawal of people and equipment, it has to be refurbished and restocked in preperation of the next disaster. This package goes to California, the one that was in Mississippi went back to Ohio.

I have been reassigned to the JFO again, and according to the network manager over there he wants me to be a floor manager.. I guess he is short handed with some of the people cycling out permanently. This should be an ok bridge back to unemployement in April and give me a chance to see the JFO in the midst of its transition to a different type of disaster employee. The demand for people has been so great, and the mission so long that the Feds are making a new kind of federal employee...... These guys are going to be 3-5 year "temporary" employees and will assume most of the responsibilities here for the duration of the disaster. Almost all the contractors are gone, or converted to local hires to help reduce costs (no rental cars or per-diem for them now). Presumably the last ones out this cycle are the DAE's like me and I believe they are trying to get our class of workers some rest before the next round of disasters this summer..... (none of you really think this will be a year without a disaster do you?)

Went to eat at Golden Corral the other evening and had quite a show. There was a brunette there, 20 something wearing a turquoise tube top and spray painted jeans... a classic beauty and she knew it. She was eating alone and every eye in the place was on her. Trena was laughing her ass off at the guys and teasing them for the jaw dropping displays they put on. This gal ate in about 20 min, chatting on the phone the whole time, completely above the fray and swayed out of that place with eye prints all over her smiling like a great big light bulb. Apparently exceptionally attractive people are rare here... :-D.......

For those of you that might want to live as I do, I might point out that tax time is a real headache. My mom has done a ton of work for me this year helping with my tax preparation but it has been a nightmare. one of my 1099's is 9 pages long.... close spaced small print and 9 pages... holy cow.... At least it is going to be done this weekend.. and likely am not going to owe very much.

Spring is fully here, trees are out, flowers are too... it is nice!!!

Wednesday… Happy February:::::::::::::

2006-02-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have been omitting a feature of most of my days that I will share for now. I left it out cause at first I thought it was kinda corny and then kind of private until today think it needs to be talked about. Every day the DMORT team has a meeting. It is a quick huddle that starts usually at 7 am and then more recently at 8 am. Every single morning they all stand, turn and face the flag and speak the pledge of allegiance. Then they all bow their heads and have about 90 seconds of silence “For the Victims” as a way to start off their work days. At first I was seriously non-plussed about this little ritual but came to eventually enjoy it. Seems to reinforce that we are here to serve our country and make respectful peace with the dead. It is kind of the feelings I signed up for… the opportunity to do something meaningful and give back something to a life that has been so good to me.

First of the month is always a pain. Time to putz with the Rental car .. I usually try to do timesheets, rental car and expenses in the same day so it is not three days of having to be out of place to get my stuff done. My current car is kinda muddy and says it needs an oil change so I will try to trade it for a cleaner full size car if they will do so. Maybe a pickup.

Mardi Gras Season:::::::::::::::

2006-01-30T17:30:00.000-07:00

Mardi Gras Season:::::::::::::::

“Carnival” , Mari Gras, Fat Tuesday….. all synonyms for a season down here I have not seen anything like before. It starts like Halloween in Colorado, suddenly there is an empty isle in the grocery store, then just as suddenly it is full of Purple/Gold/Green flashy things like tinsel wigs and bundles of beads for $6.00…. The Parade schedules are announced and people that I work with start planning which days they are going to be off, which they are going to be late and which they are going to be hung over.

There are funny names for parades… by the way, Mardi Gras is a day.. Feb 28th (this year) but actually represents a season and the “parties” are just parades with floats that throw beads. The Parades have themes…. Some of the funnier names I have heard this year include one in Baton Rouge that I cannot confirm “FEMA-ture Jackulation” at least they have a sense of humor. I have been horrified to learn that women do NOT have to show their breasts to get beads… turns out if you are not careful people will hit you right in the face with them… beads.. not breasts..

There is also Mardi Gras food. One traditional thing is something called a King Cake. They are rings, often they are filled with strawberry or lemon or cream cheese or come combination.. sometimes they are praline. The way they are used, someone buys a King Cake (by the way they are spray colored GOLD/GREEN/PURPLE with granular sugar and white sugar icing on top like a cinnamon roll you buy at the grocery store).. the person that buys the cake takes it somewhere like the office and it is cut and eaten. Inside there is a plastic baby… about an inch long… the person that gets the baby has to buy the NEXT King Cake…. Leave it to this state to put a choking hazard in a snack food and turn it into gambling.

More as this season progresses.

Saturday!!::::::::::::::::::

2006-01-28T13:22:00.000-07:00

Saturday!!::::::::::::::::::

Sorry for the distance between postings lately. It has been very similar to the movie “Groundhog Day” the last almost three weeks with little to capture the attention or imagination of anyone. I quit eating breakfast………… I know you were all dying to hear that. Something happened yesterday though that got my mind going again. I got contacted by someone from my days at IBM, someone I had not spoken to in a couple years, tracked me down among other ways, through my blog.

I am not a fan of IBM, I did make a lot of money out of them and learned a lot and made at least a couple of very long term friends out of it. They are not a good stock company and I would not own it, and they spit out people all chewed up, even when it is not necessary. I was reflecting with my friend from IBM that it was very odd that the attributes that limited my career with IBM were assets to me at FEMA.; hmmmmm..

Spring flowers are up here. Rhododendron are a red riot, lots of bushes with fragrant white flowers and trees with yellow and white flowers plus the spring bulbs you would all recognize from all over the place are up and flowering like mad. There are roadside flowers in the ditches, seems to be just the one species that is so yellow and showy so far but I expect more as the season progresses.

The state and parish of NO are being all wishy washy about the DMORT people doing searches in the 9th ward. Everyone agrees there are bodies there, maybe hundreds, but somehow the politics have brewed up so that actually going to get them has turned into a scene. There are still houses sitting in the middle of streets there now 152 days after Katrina hit. In the mean time DMORT and the VIC are filling time, trying to organize things and shipping bodies. Yep, one convoy the other day left here with 173 casketed remains for two of the southern parishes.

Louisiana is complaining that Mississippi got more money than they did in block grants … turns out the Mississippi plan was well developed, clear and efficient…… There seems to be plenty to do everywhere you turn down here, Everyone is busy but it is making little impact that is visible. I think that everyone is coming to grips with New Orleans present and future being about a maximum of 1/3 the size it was before the storm for years and years. School started again this spring and even now, there are only about 9,000 students in class in all of New Orleans (I am sure Arvada has way more than that). Politicians have lost their entire voting base in some cases, it affects seats in congress, in the state, number of police and fire fighters, teachers, infrastructure workers, state and local hires.. all permanently downsized. Ultimate recovery here does not mean returning everyone to their homes, as far as I can tell they are permanently gone. I think of a term Diaspora….

Otherwise life is good. I am heading home in mid to late april depending on the work here. Lets plan a big dinner!!!

Friday Thoughts::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2006-01-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

The cafeteria at the VIC is a trip. The “old” morgue over at St Gabriel was fed by a displaced Caterer from New Orleans featuring three stunning meals a day, vegetarian entrees etc. The New facility hired local cooks and no matter what changes they make it comes out very down home in composition. Rice is with virtually every meal, lots of red beans and starches, sausage, chicken leg quarters (I have seen one chicken breast in two months here). The salads have been nice and fresh and recently they started making the salad dressings which I have enjoyed at lunch sometimes. I always liked institutional food, and this is not bad, but the people here that have to live on the facility and eat three meals a day here are just up in arms. Last night was steak night and apparently the rib-eyes were severely over cooked and not edible so there was considerable angst this morning. The food does tend to be overly salty, too fatty and oddly scheduled, so macaroni and cheese and shrimp etufe (however you spell that) over rice in the same meal. I presume the alternative of heading to Yousefs for pig lips and pork rinds is not an option either.

The coke machine has been resupplied and the person that loaded it AGAIN alternated red fanta with diet coke so it is a pot luck thing which you get. My office mate Charlie and I flip a coin to see who goes first. One of us always gets diet coke, the other a fanta..or.. if the coke comes first, then the other gets a diet dr pepper….we cannot discover who the jokester is that does that to diet coke.

Today is a big day, New Orleans posted the first of the demolition orders for condemned property. The first 127 properties to be razed were posted today, 199,873 to go.

Thank you all for your comments about my short story. The long toothed skull was real, part of a family apparently, or group of people with these long teeth from New Orleans. Hard not to have the volume of deceased people going through this place and not find something creepy to talk about. There are 125+/- still unidentified bodies here, with 70 of them not even tentatively identified. There remain something over 3,000 missing from the storm (the state touts 11,000 plus but that number is just crazy where it came from). The state wants FEMA/DMORT/whoever to go examine in detail the 400+ addresses where the public has reported last seeing individuals. These flooded places are such a mess, furniture floats everywhere and stacks to the ceiling, it is all covered by inches of goo and covered several inches thick with fungus and mold. The dead are all degraded and frankly are hard to distinguish from the other muck covered debris. The only way to search the places is to literally remove every thing stick by stick. Job for huge crews of people working very long days for a very long time. Many of the houses are unstable, and already condemned and dangerous to go into, you hate to kill someone else looking for someone dead. If your son or mom were in one of those places, would you leave that job to someone else or would you go and drag all that crap out into the yard and look for yourself? I wonder….

The VIC IV

2006-01-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

The building was essentially a taught strung tent hung from aluminum and stainless frames that were cabled together for structural support. The world above the office roof was a cavernous dark space interlaced along the wall with wire rope cables that connected to the structural supports. We were only 15 or 20 feet from the Warehouse overhead and cautiously made our way that direction down the support beams that held the wiring and cabling for communications and power. There was a wall that bluntly ended our travel at the entry to the warehouse.

I used my folding belt knife to slit the fabric for four feet or so and then had to reach through and slit the other wall for the same distance to let the bright lights of the warehouse shine through. Sliding through this slit into the open of the warehouse felt liberating. There were two offices that were on this South wall of the warehouse that we stored empty boxes on for use when we had to pack up FEMA stuff for later deployment. The boxes had been stacked along the front edges of the offices and provided a very nice screen to the current denizens of the warehouse. The door into the warehouse from the offices had a simple push bar to open going that direction and a mass of the dead was milling about on the floor and banging on walls.

We were stuck up here it seemed. On the other hand whatever was driving these things did not seem to have any interest in having them look up. I felt momentarily safe enough to try to sit down and collect my thoughts. I pulled up one of the larger boxes from one of the Dell servers and sat. Julia did not seem so relaxed.

“Ok…. Where from here then?” she whispered. I responded with a shoulder shrug and whispered back “I have no idea but this seems safe for the moment anyway, we need to buy some time is what I am thinking right now”.

I realized that some of the booming in my ears was from my racing heart. So much for blood pressure medicine, stuff like this was going to run your vitals pretty hard. The incessant booming on the drumhead of the building though was like a giant rhythmic heartbeat, slow but loud, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

One of the dead must have hit the electric button for the extra large garage type door in the middle of this bay and the door opened up tall and wide enough for a semi trailer to be backed in. Standing in the center of this door was the dark man in black, tall, and while he was still over 100 feet away, I could see he was pale but seemed substantial and not skelotonized as he had been the last time I saw him. “Lestat” I whispered…..

Moments later a commotion outside and three of the blackwater personnel were drug into the light of the warehouse. They had tattered clothing and were bleeding from various wounds, I could not see how bad any of them were. I did not have to wait long. Lestat began a hissing sibilant speech waving his arms and gesturing with his fingers using nothing that I recognized as words in the echoey warehouse. The men were pinned to the storage racks of that West wall and spread eagled upright, held by a dozen or more dead or fragments of dead. What happened next I really cannot describe, there are blank places in my memory. I heard the first scream, saw Lestat bob his head at the first mans chest and leave with a blood covered face and the rest of the victims shirt in his hands….. I looked away as the choir of screaming began. It took these men over two hours to die. The cramp in my forearm was Julia gripping my arm with such force it cut off the blood. We cowered in our aerie wishing there were things we could do to help. The continuing BOOM BOOM BOOM on the walls was unrelenting punctuated by flashes of lightning and thunder from the still monstrous rain deluge outside.

When I looked again, there were only fragmentary remains of one of the Blackwater guys, even the clothing was gone. The man in black was nowhere to be seen and what remained of the dead in the warehouse were a swarming pile over the few remains left. Literally they had consumed these men such that nothing was left. But more than that, the booming of the building was fading. Julia was still sitting on the end of my box with her hands on her ears and elbows on her knees facing the roof below us with her eyes screwed shut. I touched her forearm…her startled jump reminded me how afraid both of us were. “Have you got any ideas at all?” I asked her

“We just have to get out of here is all I know Steve…… I cannot let one of those things touch me” she said low and intent to me. “Then lets plan something eh?” I suggested.

Together we discussed our options we could see. Stay put, get to the outside and make a run for it, try to move to a safer location and did not believe in any of them as being safe enough to just settle for. Julia then had the real inspiration “Gators….. how about the Gators?”. Gators are made by John Deere and are at home in the swamps. Open cab, multiwheel drive, big balloon tires and reliable as hell. There were half a dozen of them on site, even around the building and, sitting parked at the far end of the row of shelving, one fresh green one was waiting. “Great, so how the hell are we gonna get that?” I asked ….

Julia turned and looked at me intently and said “If you suggest we split up I am going to kill you myself”….which actually put a smile on my face.

“This is no horror movie, kiddo” I said…”but I am not too interested in being anywhere alone at this time anyway”

I did not feel TOO bad about getting off the roof of the office build we were sitting on. There was a Laundry cart below us and toward the Gator that I could jump and land in. Should be quiet although I had no idea if the dead could hear anything or not. I felt like I could be brave enough to try to get out if the man in Black was not present. Julia agreed with a nod. “No time like the present, lets go before I lose my nerve” I suggested and again, got the affirmative nod.

I went first, landing softly in the laundry cart, stepping down and moving to my left around the cart. Movement to the periphery of my vision from the direction I had come did not sufficiently warn me and as I turned the body was already upon me, bony fingers clutching my shoulders, open susurrus mouth painting my face with malodorous gasses. I had time to get my hands out, sinking through the chest cavity to the bony spine and holding the dead at arms length through the missing ribs of its chest. The pressure on my shoulders increased exponentially, the bony fingers spikes into the meaty part of the back of my shoulders, inexorably pulling me into the creature. As my arms began to tremble I was staring into the eye sockets, noting that there were rudimentary eyes there, glistening and alive. This silent drama went on for perhaps another 30 seconds when the head of the dead did not so much be removed as it exploded. The POP of its disintegration was partially masked by the loud “NO NO NO” that Julia was focusing on the corpse. I saw her just as she reswung the baseball bat she had found in the warehouse and hit the body again just below the shoulder joints of the beast, disarticulating the upper torso and causing the collapse of the rest of the body.

“GO!” She said

Without further interruption I skulked crabwise down a row of shelving in the warehouse towards the Gator with Julia directly behind me. I was watching the last of the dead through the boxes continue to finish remains of the Blacwater guy as I approached the Gator. “You drive” she ordered and I was not in the mood to debate at this time.

The Gator has a little diesel engine in it, and requires no keys, you simply turn a starter and it runs, lever up for reverse and down for forward, the belt drive does not let it go very fast but it is faster than I can run for very long for sure. I had the Gator started and moving backwards just as Julia hit the seat next to me, I was backing out the door. One of the dead stood in my path and I hit him at perhaps ten or 15 miles an hour. The effect was impressive as the body went down and I could feel it grinding away under the vehicle as I exited the warehouse in full speed reverse into the rain.

Fifteen or twenty yards into the parking lot I smashed the brakes on… let the Gator slide to a full stop and began looking for forward. Julia was swinging from a seated position at two bodies that had arisen from nowhere and scored a direct hit on the first, hindering the second sufficiently that I found forward and floored the little ATV feeling the exhilaration of it leaping forward, its six wheel drive throwing mud in all directions.

We were a couple hundred yards from the front gate at that point, needing to round the front portion of the building in order to clear the gate at the front. The guard shack was a welded steel trailer that masked off the gate access from the buildings it protected. I rounded the guard shack at perhaps 20 mph and saw the man in black standing astride the centerline of the gate. He was flanked left and right by a phalanx of the dead. I so clearly remember his smile, and the extended canines glistening in my headlights.

“HOLD ON” I bellowed and whipped the Gator over to the left side of the gate causing Lestat to mirror my movement as I reached the gate he was still on the right half of the centerline on Julia’s side of the vehicle and I slewed the Gator back toward the centerline, within a couple feet of my collision with him, Julia launched the baseball bat with a two handed overhead fling that spun the bat directly at the head of the Vampire. His move to deflect the bat partially distracted him at our moment of impact and the gator rolled over this creature like a log in the forest and sped up the road trailing pieces of the dead phalanx of bodies at his side. I hit the centerline of the mud lane that was our only exit from this place and looked over my shoulder as the creature in black stood, turned to face my tail lights and strode purposefully down the muddy lane after us. Julia had turned as well and was watching backwards at him as I focused on finding the right slushy spots to hit and miss for the gator to go forward. Half a mile to the paved road was such a long trip. I hit the pavement at an angle and turned toward St Gabriel, pushing the Gator flat out. It did decent speed on the pavement, perhaps 25 miles an hour and as we let the miles slide behind us looking for lights and people I began to really have hope of surviving this night.

We hit the Mobile gas station 20 min later at the intersection of 30 and 75 and pulled into the lighted pump area of the gas station and drove to the parking. Julia asked the cashier to call 911 and we waited inside till the highway patrol arrived. She spoke to the patrolmen as well, since my attempts at telling any part of the story rapidly got incoherent , literally a string of nouns without verbs, “bodies, Lestat, the dead, man in black, blood, oh blood”. Half an hour after that a group of cars and a swat team headed back to the VIC. Gratefully I did not go.

Dawn lit the VIC with Julia and I sitting in the command van for the State Highway patrol. Federal Police cars surrounded us and perhaps 50 vehicles and a hundred armed personnel were up and down the access to the VIC. I could see the smoldering remains of half of the barracks in the rear of the VIC, apparently they were on fire when the SWAT team arrived. I had to tell this story 50 times in ten hours it seemed like, had to pee in a cup, and take a breathalyzer test as well. Julia’s story apparently matched mine for 50 times because right at dawn they put us back in the same van and drove us to the location.

A man in the black uniform of the Federal Protective Services opened the sliding door and sat with us for a second looking at his notes. He looked us directly in the eyes then and alternating his gaze between us explained what he knew.

“We have no indication that anyone was killed inside the facility. While there is extensive damage to the facility there is no sign in the places you indicated deaths occurred that any such deaths in fact happened there. There are thousands of body parts of the dead lying everywhere, almost completely in parts as if they exploded, and there is no sign of a man in black, toothy or otherwise inside. Do you wish to amend any part of your statements to us?”

“No” we chorused

“This event has been classified by the Federal government. You may not speak of this event to anyone. Do you Understand?”

I nodded, Julia was quiet, then “But what happened here then” she asked

“I have no true idea, but I cannot believe what you say is true. Our investigation will continue and you will make yourselves available to additional questions as they occur. Do not leave the vicinity” he said

With that he left the van, and motioned for a driver to take us. I was delivered to my apartment and have not seen Julia since.

I keep watching for news of unexplained deaths south of Baton Rouge, but then, did I ever hear of them before? I have no idea what this was, who that person was, where he came from or even how I lived when those others died so frequently. Lestat abandoned his cohort so easily that I presume they were tools for him to return to some state of being that allowed him to leave…… but what do I know of his motivations……There are no neat strings to tie up this story, simply, it happened and then he disappeared. I wonder if his work will show up again in the devastated South of the state. Going North seems a good idea now, winter or no, surely nothing like this could ever happen in Colorado. I can sleep now some, if the lights are on and nothing goes bump in the night, perhaps one day that will fade and I will feel normal again.

The VIC III

2006-01-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
I decided to wait a while before leaving for the day, hoping this downpour would slacken up and it would not be so dangerous going home. I did not count on the parking lot being paved with gravel and dirt, being very new and covering only Louisiana gumbo for substrate. An hour later my car was nearly up to the hubs in water where it was parked and there were precious few islands where one might see the mud that the parking lot was now become. Two hours later and it was clear I was not leaving soon. By early afternoon the parking lot and entry road were a sea of grey gumbo mud and standing water. The trip to the paved road never looked so long. I went back to the double doors overlooking the morgue to watch the rain.

Don, our remaining trailer management fellow, ambled down to the guard shack on the inside gate. He had noticed the booming in the Trailer area. Apparently he enlisted the help of the Federal Police Sergeant, and the Blackwater gate guard to come with him to investigate. In the intensifying rain squall, the sergeant, a blackwater security man and Don climbed into the white and blue police car and drove across the compound to the gate to the trailer parking area. The sergeant stayed in the car as blackwater and Don got out in the deluge to investigate the noises. I can so clearly remember thinking “Boy those guys are going to get SO wet” and watched them go into the trailer area through the internal gate flashlights ticking left-right, left-right.

Gunshots are not as loud outdoors as you might imagine from movies you have seen. They are muffled even more by the rain, thunder and that continuing booming from the trailer area. The first one was so faint I could have missed it but heard something odd and opened the door to listen further and heard the next six in rapid succession. My next impression is of Don running full out coming out of the gate with an oddly lumpy appearance, his flashlight jumping crazily up and down.. even in circles. As he approached the police car something slid down his back and around his legs and down he went.. face first into the goop and directly in front of the Police car. The sergeant to his credit did not hesitate, he was out of the car before Dons’ body hit the mud, weapon at the ready as the last set of gunshots came from the trailer area, two quick ones.. then a final shot. I could hear the sergeant bellowing something but it was faded by the rain. He holstered his weapon and with his bare hands tried to remove the largish lumps from the back of the fallen Don, only to have the first one he touched reverse itself and attach itself to his chest, levitating the two and a half feet from Don’s back to the sergeants chest as if spring-loaded. I could see now the lump had arms of some kind and as the sergeant whirled and fought, I could make out that it appeared to be a torso, a badly decomposed torso in a tux top, the head buried to the eyesockets in the sergeants chest.

This was enough for me. I turned on my heel and sprinted back into the main bullpen in the office area and called loudly if anyone was there. Julia popped her head out of IR and said “Hey Steve!! Whats up?” Again at a run I got to her and took hold of her arm saying “We have to leave now… now…. It is something terrible”…. And tugged with increasing vigor at her arm. People like Julia have been looking at dead bodies for months now, identifying lost folk, sorting the trivia of hundreds of dead people so she is not so easily panicked.

“What? What on earth are you talking about?” She asked.

What came out was simply jibberish I am sure..”Trailers, dead bodies, Don is dead, police are down.. come NOW” and continued to tug away at her arm. Some hero I am, no glib answers only thinly disguised panic.

Julia reversed my course and headed back to the double doors I had been observing from. By the time she got there, with me on her arm blabbering the whole way that it was time to go she peered into the gloom through the torrential rain to the police car and the activities going on there. I noticed immediately one change…. In the gap of the gate stood a solitary figure in black he looked familiar and appeared to be giving silent directions as I could not hear a thing.

“What… IS that?” she asked

“They are all dead” is the answer I supplied…. “and now it is time for us to go NOW.”

Julia still was not moving. “What is on the ground?” “Who is that guy at the gate?” and then slowly the mass on the ground moved. Pieces came off the mound and resolved themselves into body fragments, crawling along in the mud with our building as a destination. At that moment a shambling avalanche of the dead flowed out the gate in the wake of the man in black, pacing towards our building as steady as a metronome.

We Ran.

I locked doors behind us. There were solid core doors in steel frames on the inside of the building, I always noticed how strong they were. I hoped that they would forever hold out the swarm that I had seen last. When we got to the IT office I stopped. The intervening 150 feet or so caused me to realize I did not feel good about where I might go to or how I might get there. Julia being part of the DMORT team had not been issued a car and while mine was just outside the back door to my office I was not at all sure it would drive across that open morass to the highway and I for sure did not want to get caught out there with these things. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have run like a scalded dog but instead paused long enough to have my options severely limited. When you are in that spot, stupid shit runs through your head…… “I am responsible for these servers and the data on them” “ Where is my rain jacket?”

That useless reverie ended less than ten minutes later when simultaneously the entire building began to reverberate with the steady pounding of BOOM BOOM BOOM on the taught fabric material of the building itself. This drumhead booming came from everywhere. It was then that the thought struck me that they escaped from locked steel and aluminum trailers and this building was only covered in fabric, tough space age fabric but still.. taught fabric. I heard the glass of the back door shatter and in one movement pushed Julia inside the IT office and slammed shut the door auto locking it.

Once inside the office Julia noted sarcastically “So… can you find a smaller hole for us to hide in?” to which I had no answer at all and have never felt so claustrophobic. I reacted.. I pushed the steel sever box up against the door and stuck pieces of cat 5 wire under the casters, essentially welding that heavy thing in place. At that moment the walls began to thump and boom as the walls on the outside of the building had boomed, seems our visitors did not care much about doors, the walls were just drywall and not particularly sturdy. I caught Julia looking overhead.

“Up there!” she whispered and was in motion at the same time. Up on the server and through the acoustic ceiling to the roof supports above she went. I paused long enough to dump the server over on its side, and then using the bundled server interface lines climbed through the ceiling to the supports above spitting out insulation as I went. Once on the support, I cut the cat 5 letting it fall and replaced the ceiling tile. We moved quietly in the gloom toward the warehouse towards the largest open area in the building and away from the claustrophobic office area.

The VIC II

2006-01-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

Highway 30 going South on Dec 31..a-headin for the VIC…… Most mornings it is easier to let your brain get slowly in gear so you notice the imagery of the countryside again as I headed in for a half day…YAY.. so a half a day off and some time relaxing. The day looked ominous from the very beginning, not raining yet, but the air so thick with grey water you could almost reach out and wring a glass full out of a passing fog bank. Awesome smells in this world, and driving a late December morning with the windows down always is an odorous way to get to work. I mostly remember being happy, reflecting on one of the best years of my life and letting the miles roll by and sipping some of CCs’ finest black coffee.

Blackwater security stopped me at the first of the security gates and examined my badge. The exchange was always the same: “Morning!! “

“Good Morning Sir” says the guard, reading my badge for an expiration date. It is not fair, they carefully read my badge and know my name “Have a good Day Mr Morse” but I have no clue who they are. Should I have asked?

“Gonna rain a gusher boys…. Better get those ponchos on for later!!” I threw out the window and head for the second checkpoint. I wonder how much inane banter like this these guys had to put up with every day of the world. The inner guard positions had a single man standing in the middle of the road.

“When will you be leaving the facility today Mr Morse?” asked the guard

“As Early as I possibly can “ I threw back “Maybe as early as ten o’clock!!”

“Good Luck then, we are going on skeleton staff after the morgue shuts down at noon today.” He said as I drifted forward towards my parking spot.

Holidays on these disasters are pretty bleak. Those that can head home early or cycle out are gone already. We are officially open but everyone is just trying to finish what is on their plate, there are serious plans for large groups to head for New Orleans as early as possible to bring in the new year in style in the crippled city. I knew I had to stay till the last one quit and then start the data backup on my server which had been being balky lately (stupid Microsoft backup software anyway).

I refreshed my coffee and made the rounds, trying to see who was going to be the dweeb that kept us all late today. The groups in IR and Dental were truly working as usual, the state people were nowhere to be seen and it appeared I was the lone representative of FEMA in the front office.

The building was built very oddly, covered in the same roofing material that the roof of DIA in Denver was made from, the whole thing looked like a blimp hanger, a 400 foot white blimp hanger. 250 yards to the North, a similar but shorter version of the same building housed the actual morgue. There were hundreds of trailers standing silent sentry inside a second fence around the back and sides of the morgue extending along the northern fence, neatly arranged and parked with military precision. The office building had the FEMA portion so completely separated from the rest of the facility that you have to leave the building to get to other parts. The DMORT/State section was next followed by warehouse, then overflow sleeping then the entertainment section with couches and tvs and washers and dryers and gym equipment and then the kitchen/dining area. Beyond the end of the building and on the west side of the compound were the dorms, co-ed with everyone having a room but with bathroom facilities for each gender and a kind of break room with a fridge and a microwave.

I stopped at trailer management and spoke to Don there, he looked hung over and not too cheerful. “What are you looking so pissed about?” I asked him.

“Oh No one can find Mudflap this morning and he was supposed to update the trailer rosters last night and now we have to go re-count a half a dozen units before we can get out of here” Don grumbled. I smiled on the inside, what the heck, you pop open a door, walk down an isle, read metal tags and write down half a dozen numbers, you are done, how bad can that be.

“Happy New Year Don!!” I said over my shoulder, determined not to let this guy get into my good mood. I heard the outer door slam behind me and went on back to my little hole of a place in IT.

ÛÛÛ¿ÛÛÛÞJ

By 10:30 the last of the partiers had departed for New Orleans, the last three of the working groups were shutting down and the VIC was reduced to 22 living humans. I was standing at the double glass door that overlooks the morgue as Julia came in from the morgue. “Just Blackwater left over there Steve” she said brightly. “Time to wrap it up” and brushed past me toward the IR offices she normally worked in. Julia was always bright and cheerful, with short brown hair, younger than me (who wasn’t these days) and from the Desert Southwest. I always noticed a big bright smile under a set of small wire rim glasses to start the day.

I continued to look toward the Morgue, as the rain began. The rain in the Gulf Coast South is a fearsome sight. When the fronts roll across it falls in sheets that make it hard to breathe on occasion if you are caught out in it. When those fronts stall, it can pour and blow for hours and when it does.. water backs up everywhere. I saw the Auxiliary generators shut down and the perimeter light trailers kick on throwing a blue cast through the cascading rain. The Booming thunder just KEPT rolling around in the sky and as it passed.. and the quiet returned….. something caught my ear. I stepped out on the sidewalk through the double doors and heard a background rumble that could not be a continuation of the thunder. Between bright flashes and booming thunder blasts, it remained constant, a resonant boom, what I now know to be the pounding in the trailers that attracted the attention of the Blackwater and trailer-management boys. The booming drumming that began the bloodbath at the VIC.

The VIC

2006-01-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

When you drive the back roads of Louisiana, you rarely think to look to the side and wonder what might be behind that tree-line, or what drama might be unfolding a few hundred yards to your left or right. When you are driving you have a goal, a destination, a reason for the direction you are going. I am here to document one of those times when something did happen along one of those Louisiana back roads. Here to speak that which the State and Federal Governments have decided to suppress. I have a story to tell about an Early January weekend and the heroic survivors of one of the most gruesome stories ever told in a land with a multitude of such tales.

Highway 30 runs South and East out of Baton Rouge, broadly paralleling the Mississippi river on its way to New Orleans. Along the way it passes the sleepy little community of St Gabriel, named ironically enough for the patron saint of communication. The sugar cane fields are bordered with moss hung trees, most without leaves this time of year. Driving down this highway in that time before dawn you see the patchy ground fog reaching tendrils upwards from unseen breezes, the entire scene barely visible in the morning light.

This is the land of giant oil and petrochemical refineries. The lights of the vessels and piping stand out even against the lightening morning sky. Steam from the cooling towers drifts over the road often obscuring oncoming traffic and adding to the morning fog. The food of the insatiable American industrial machine is manufactured here for use over the rest of the country. As you turn off Highway 30 and make for the Mississippi levee, the countryside becomes even more rural, isolated and strange.

This story begins really months before with the devastating hurricane one-two punch of Katrina and Rita, killing hundreds and washing away the interred remains of hundreds more. By design and accident these remains made their way to a temporary morgue facility in St Gabriel and then to a new morgue built well off the River Road, back in the trees along the Mississippi. The VIC as it became known stood for “Victims Identification Center” but in the parlance of those that worked here simply… The VIC.

These victims and disinterred remains found their way to frozen food trailers in the massive parking area of the VIC where they were processed by professionals in the fields of forensics, anthropology, dentistry, mortuary science, pathology and law enforcement. For those lucky ones that were identified, release was only delayed by political, legal and financial issues that were resolved often enough to keep a trickle of bodies leaving the facility against the tide of incoming dead.

December 28, 2005 a body was found in the remains of a washed away cemetery in Plaquemines parish. This casket was odd from the first, as it was bound in chains made of iron and padlocked. Most of these caskets had to be opened with power tools but this example required larger tools and drew quite a crowd of morgue workers when it was finally opened. This crew of hardened veterans had been processing bodies for four months by this time, little could happen that could phase them. Inside this secure casket were the severely decomposed remains of an individual dressed in black clothing. Virtually completely skeletonized, this body had among its other anomalous features, a round wooden dowel protruding from the chest and apparently driven through the clothing of the individual.

Once the body is removed from the casket, they are placed on stainless steel tables with casters for easy portability around the morgue. The bodies are digitally X-rayed both for whole body and Dental X-rays and the file sent across the parking lot to a server storing hundreds of similar files awaiting their turn at evaluation and hopefully identification. Any Personal effects that are seen either in the casket or on the body or observed in x-ray are catalogued and photographed separately.

My first encounter with the body was indirect. I was called to the Dental groups offices to assist with what they believed were corrupt files. The view on the monitor when I walked in was of the lower half of a skull oddly stretched left to right showing the entire upper jaw. Included in the view I was able to see were two massive canine teeth. The dentists all agreed they were vastly oversized from normal and extended to what would have been the gumline of the lower jaw.

“So…. You guys found Lestat?” was my only thought. Dentists have NO sense of humor about patients apparently.

As the sun went down on December 30th I drove away from the facility, back to my apartment, looking forward to just a half day work on new years eve and then a couple of days off for the New Year celebration. The first death occurred before I got home that night I am positive. No one was there to see it, but I can imagine it. The trailers that held the dead were in orderly rows, the freezer units running keeping them at just above freezing. The codes of the number and locations of bodies along the sides of the units. These trailers are managed by a group wearing red coats and shirts who move them and care for them and monitor them to keep them safe and running. I am positive that Mudflap (yes, this was his name) heard something…. If it was like later on, it was a banging inside the trailer that got his attention. He certainly had keys to the unit. I can only imagine what he must have had as his last thought, opening the door of that trailer, shining his flash inside. Did he see the horror shambling towards him or was he just fallen upon and consumed? What fetid breath greeted his light? He must have died almost instantly, I know now we all hope he did as the later victims often lived for many hours while being consumed.

2006-01-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

Happiest of new years. It has been in the 80’s the last few days, and while I do not expect that to continue, the days ARE getting longer and I am sure there will be spring flowers in five or six weeks. Mardi Gras is Feb 28th this year (Fat Tuesday) …… I had hoped to be able to get to the New Orleans celebration but we will likely not be able to do so because we are going to be moving the JFO “somewhere” as yet undetermined. There are parades and parties everywhere down here for Mardi Gras so I will likely take in one or two in Baton Rouge during that time instead of braving the crowds in New Orleans, the bad parking and the drive down and back…..play it by ear.

Newest news from here is that the city of New Orleans has retained a private firm to try to line up corporate sponsors for Mardi Gras… so you might see “American Express Baccus Parade”, or Prudential Financial Rex Parade as corporate sponsors for Mardi Gras… the locals are rolling their eyes over that one…. Seems this company is supposed to assemble a list of candidates and present it to the Mayor (remember mr FEMA lied to us?)who will make the final selections as to who the corporate sponsors are….it all seems so bizarre……

I have been camera shopping. Some of the photographs that were taken by the strike team that I displayed before and some of the personal effects photos I have seen but not displayed were taken with very high quality digital single lens reflex cameras. This is such photogenic country that having been exposed to high quality cameras again and these sights I really got the photography bug similar to grad school. Fog shrouded fields of sugar cane, sunrise along the Mississippi river and levee, frost on the grass… giant refineries…quaint buildings… gallon jars of pig lips,,, all crying out for a photo… :-D anyway.. the cameras are Nikon D2 and D200….. I also looked at the Nikon D70S with these two honker lenses for all three cameras (The Elite package…… now I expect OOOOOOO’s and AAHhhhhhhh’s from you each and every one) from this website called royalcamera.com... They got packages of lenses and accessories that are actually a very good deal….

Went to dinner this evening at the Casino Royale... they have a nice buffett... and excellent deserts including Bananas Foster.... One of the dishes was Fried Frog legs... which completely grossed out my dinner companion (this person actually ate something called "Gator Sausage" and pickled Okra but does not believe Pickled Watermelon exists and I cannot find it here to prove it). Now I am going to dispell all myth here as Frog legs do not taste like chicken. It is a tender white meat and tastes perfectly like Amphibian. This is still a delicacy in the South and I do not recall having it since I was in Jr High or something back in Oklahoma. So.. come to Louisiana and have frog legs.. and comment loudly.. "Yummm.. tastes JUST like Rana".

Eve of New Years Eve::::::::::::::

2005-12-30T16:18:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of my daughter Fran and I.

I have been prompted to write more... seems I have readers... :-D
This has been an extremely busy week for a short one .;.... I am
responsible for a set of servers that provided both logon and file
storage for this crazy array of systems that are in use here. On my
way home last Friday I got a phone call telling me that they wanted me
to give up two of the four servers I manage and bring them and the
steel case they are located in back to the JFO for use by another
group.....So my job is document retention as a primary role, I have to
ensure that none of the data that I am taking over there gets lost. I
put some up on a network server at the JFO, and then had to find
inventive ways to get TONS of other data over to a different
system\domain that is in my building that I also manage. I always find
I am learning a ton about upper level operations of servers and
networks when I do this, what can talk to what, what can write to what,
what can backup to where.. it is all very confusing till you get up to
your elbows in electrons and just do it. So...... one of the things I
discovered is that one should NEVER let doctors, dentists, coronors or
morturary officers set up file systems. Your middle of the road
administrative assistant could do a much better job of organizing
files...... Imagine if you will.. groups rotating out every couple
weeks, each group bringing in its own set of geniuses with attached
egos to "get this place going right" and setting out all these
changes.. and let that run for the duration of a disaster this big. I
got the task of unwinding all those attempts at reorginazation and
backup and try to put together a single record copy of the relevant
data for each body that went through this place. So.. Dental records
include personal effects but not the other way around, X-ray does not
talk to anyone elses data.. and they name all files associated with a
single individual by the same number which is etched on a metal dog tag
attached to each body bag.....so if you search for a folder name like
01-00001 you get back 25 files... one for personal effects (maybe) one
for Dental (more likely) one for Xray and.. every backup o fthem ever
created. How to tell which folder is the most recent is an excercise
in raw will..... and there are around 1400 individuals with these
types of file complexities. So this week, I have been cornering leads
and giving them the deep grilling about data handling and best
practices...... came up with a solution last night on the way home and
am currently making it work.. going to turn a data base of 400 plus
Gigabytes of data into about 100 and back it up every night.. easy
money.. :-D
Here is a fun factoid... I mentioned that the powers that be are going
to MOVE the JFO... the back story is, when it was leased, there was a
sale in progress.... since that time real estate in this town has
skyrocketed in value.. so the original owner has tried to back out of
the deal.... The new owner came in with full price no negotiations
needed and bought the property for August of 05's sales price (much
below current value)... the new owner wants to quadruple the rent or
something like that and FEMA is tryi8ng to find another place to move
to... 2,000 people, cross town.. miles and miles of blue cable and
fiber optics and telephone lines (which is scrapped by the way and all
new goes into the new building).. what took months to build will be
rebuilt in a week in a new location and group by group they are going
to move.... for me I get 16 hour days (wow look at that over time) and
it is going to probabliy fall RIGHT at Mardi Gras... I was hoping to
get a handfull of beads and get women to flash me to get the beads...

In summing up my year, this has been a great year. One of my happiest
times ever. I made some decisions last spring early that kicked off a
great time for me. Those of you that know me well know there were some
dark days the last few years (not all.... and there were some great
days in there too!!) but I am not sure I have ever been happier.
Happy New Year to you all and my best wishes into the new one.

2005-12-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

For those of you celebrating Christmas wherever you are, happy holidays. This picture is of a beach community South and West of New Orleans that I believe was primarily blown away by a direct hit from Rita. Hard to tell at this scale but the broken teeth of those pylons marches off to the horizon where houses and businesses once stood. This picture was taken last Thursday, almost 4 months after this hurricane hit. There are few Happy holidays in Louisiana this year, with official stats saying 200,000 homes destroyed by these two storms. The Southern half of Louisiana largly looks like this.

Everyone here has Terabytes of photos such as these. They decorate the halls of the JFO and are on the desktops of virtually everyone that touches this disaster.

They announced the locations where the city of New Orleans will put 8,000 trailers in the city limits this week. City parks, neighborhoods, any flat and otherwise unoccupied places. They are earmarked for workers, university, city officials and are grouped so they can be together. As you might imagine, the city is fighting with itself as to who has the authority to place these trailers .. the city council says one thing, the mayor (that insipid dumbass) says another. The governor (clearly the product of cousins marrying) is still harping on FEMA as being the bad guy for the state not getting everyone in a home yet.... and this is just barely day 120. The mayor of St Gabriel where the old morgue was is trying to hold up FEMA for 1.2 million a month in rent he charged us taxpayers for use of the abandoned school and is complaining that he put a new roof on it and wants us to pay for it.. any of you guys that ever rented a place ever paid for having the roof replaced>? He may get an extra month out of this ploy.. at this scale, it is hard to imagine the total value of the entire community exceeting 1.2 million very much.. I have posted pics of this community earlier in this blog. I would liike to see where the money goes though. If the mayor starts driving a new Cadillac, I would not be real surprised... :-)

I will have new news of my involvement in seperating FEMA and the state at the morgue. This has turned into a very interesting proposition. I am learning so much about who is supposed to do what here and.. how things end up going badly and sometimes very well. Happy Holidays to you all. Thinking about Colorado quite a bit during this season.

Things of interest to me:::::::

2005-12-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

This is a Nutria. Notice it has a kinda square snout? it is bigger than a muskrat, up to about the same size as a beaver and a voracious herbivore that has caused a lot of damage to native plants all over the south and south west. We use to varmint hunt them in west Texas as they tended to dig holes in earthen dams of farm lakes and ponds and ruin them. Imported from South America they have become one of those ecological disasters you hear about from time to time. They were along the side of the road the other day and I got this picture of them.

So.. DMORT is going to be moving out.. the plan is for the DMORT people to be totaly gone by Feb 28 and turn all this activity over to the state. We are talking now about what place FEMA is going to have on this location up to and after that time, there seem to be lots of options. For those of you that think you work in a fluid environment, you cannot imagine how quickly the road map changes for what happens tomorrow on one of these disasters. Virtually no plan survives writing it into a word document. FEMA is very used to moving in and out of
locations. In their minds, every one of these sites are temporary. I know they can either leave and donate, or loan some of this equipment to the state (hmmmmmm).... the data belongs to them, but the phones and switching gear is FEMA, the trailers are a bout half FEMA and half
DMORT, the generators, external lighting and security is all from FEMA . Everyone is going home for Christmas and a new bunch rotating in next Wednesday.

Not sure what to do with some reduced time down, but movies are on the list this weekend. Going to cook some food in the apartment, read.. do some laundry and maybe get out and see some of the sights in town during the daylight. There is a very nice Museum just down the street from the apartment too.. Maybe get some time walking on the levee ... supposed to be very nice weather anyway... YAY.

Yousef's::::::::::

2005-12-17T17:48:00.000-07:00

Yousef's::::::::::
Yousefs is a corner store here in "town". It has gasoline, cold drinks and beer, a kind of deli (Boudan HERE!!) and various sundried items. It is aparently also a kind of speak easy, after hours they lock the doors and you can get in the side by knowing a secret knock and you can
get in and drink beer in the cool without the watchful eye of John law and those pesky liquor control agents. People here in the DMORT always thought the name was some kind of horrible misspelling of some kind of "Serve Yo Sef" kind of coloquialism..... I had to laugh.. I have been
in the store several times and I have met Yousef.. he is a black muslim and this is his store. This is one of the more bizarre points of this kind of place ... Yousef is a practicing muslim, in the heart of some bizarre cross between a Catholic state religion here and the prostelitizing evangelical Christians..... in a country that wears American flags on everything that is at war with radical elements of the very religion this store owner in the middle of absolutely no where
makes a living (I have not been too impressed with the "live and let live" attitudes I have found here). Yet Yousef survives and seems to flourish selling pork and alcohol products he neither consumes nor believes in (you can buy Pig Lips out of a one gallon wide mouth jar at the front for $0.75 each.... ok. even I am not that brave but they are a local favorite.. purple, pickled and juicy). Since all of us are foreigners we are not included on the inside of things, but it is clear
to me that Yousef is doing ok for himself and his family. He has a sign on the door "no cell phones inside" which he enforces..... I wonder why but am afraid to ask.

There is another part of NDMS (National DIsaster Medical System) which includes DMORT and DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team.. esentially MASH from volunteers)... one you likely have not heard about is VMAT (Veterinary Medical Assistance Team) which comes in to help with animals that have been hurt or displaced by the disaster. So from New Orleans dogs and cats and what ever plus cows and other lifestock displaced by the storm here..VMATS had a resence in the old morgue before we moved over here but has since left this disaster as being
complete. They tried to save starving animals in the NO metro area and either find the owners or find new owners for them. They saved thousands of animals from death as far as I know and I ever saw a single thing about them in the news.

Friday::

2005-12-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry guys. Internet has been down for the last three days and has prevented me from blogging recently. I have some prepared and will be presenting them consecutively here for the next few days.

Ok.. I got to brag. This stretch of 70 degree days is amazing. It actually warms UP when it rains here so today is expected to be warmer and rainy and in truth realliy smells like a damp spring morning. They have been doing extensive burning up and down the Mississippi and the outdoors smells like wood smoke and a couple nights ago it was even hazy with smoke at the apartment.

I met a woman from Andrews here at DMORT this week. She just rotated in and is the Finance section Chief for DMORT in region six I think. She is also the justice of the peace and aparently the coronor in Andrews as well. Since this is my official FEMA region six address, it was interesting that I knew so little about the town.. :-) turns out she knows my parents there and had played golf with mom and dad as couples many years ago and that my mom inspired her to be in FEMA or in this case DMORT which she got to by being the coronor of Andrews... odd little world.

I am also liking my new rental car. It is a fully decked out Chevy Impala. Electric everything, nice sound system, cloth seats and a V-8 I think. FEMA gets this for the price of a compact car so I am a very happy boy. Makes my commutes quite comfy. The local Public radio station is very similar to the one in the Springs so I get all my favorite morning and evening programming for that commute. Ok.. it is not perfect as there is not a drive through Starbucks directly on the route (sigh.. the things you must abandon when you are roughing it).

I think I am surprised at how bad things still are in the disaster zone south of us. I think people are not in danger of dying of thirst, hunger or exposure but there is very little movement towards restoration of some normalcy of life in the southern half of this state. The latest uproar is over trailers, who has them, who pays for them, where do they go, who gets them how long do they keep them... what a mess. you have to prepare a site for them and they have to plumb in sewage, power and water and these sites have to be available for the duration of the disaster.. so years. land has been hard to come by, the actual purchase of the units has been slowed by the purchase process... FEMA is saying they want to move in (gulp) 125,000 ??? trailers??? ok.. so the next big wind is gonna stack up a giant tally of trailers. It is very difficult to both believe and sometimes get your arms around some of these numbers. But in Louisiana alone there are over 50,000 people still in hotels and I have no idea how many are in tents, in tents INSIDE their old houses, barns, anything with a roof on it. There is a very healthy debate in New Orleans about whether to put on Mardi Gras there or not. The debate is: If we do not put on this party we will starve in the dark with no income, so lets all go back to work :: vs :: we do not have sewage, power or infrastructure, is this really the best time to shut down and have a party for two weeks??

Saturday::: Again

2005-12-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post more pictures from the strike teams. These are pretty deep into the disaster area and are often very rural in the Western Parishes more affected by RITA. The focus of DMORT of course is human remains, but they come across lots of other items. Here is some of the damage they saw up close and personal and the trials they went through to both recover people and cemetary escapees (this IS the land of Cool Hand Luke...... what we got here.. is a failure to communicate).

Today is the day lots of the staff rotate out. There will be a group go out at Christmas and another one come in on the 28th for a shot at the new year. DMORT is not that big an organization and it is possible that I will be able to meet nearly everyone in the cadre before I leave the disaster. There are some interesting characters here carrying names like "mudflap" and "Bigun".

I am going to see Narnia tomorrow before I go to work in the evening.. we are switching in some new network equipment in advance of taking the populace here inside the web of the FEMA networking gnomes. I will write my short review of the movie and hope for the best.

The cafeteria lady here is under fire for the "down home" cooking that is done. We have lots of people from places like New York and California and other uptown places like Nebraska that do not favor this style of cooking. We have chicken with almost every meal (very much like central america) baked, fried, wings, buffaloed, BBQ'd, fried, stewed and gumboed....Beef tends to be ground and served as meat loaf, hamburgers or meat balls. There is rice for almost every dish, the red beans and, the chicen and, the etoufe' (sp??) all have rice. This cook also has a fondness of putting shrimp in the most unlikely things like the spagetti sauce and then not warning folk that may have allergies..... let the eater beware. I helped her with her descriptions of food and it sounds better to eat than it did before. I kind of like it all, the greens are fresh at the DMORT facility, and hwile I wish there was more fresh fruit, I would eat like a pig here if I ate my meals here.

So DMORT will put these remains in caskets for people, even the bodies that have been disinterred. Just to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, people are complaining that they are not going back into the original coffin that the dear departed were once planted in. My son Jake will remember the movie The Mummy where they were talking about the state of the mummy they had found and decided it was a bit "gooey" to be so old. Well, the entire caskets coming out of these cemetaries are like that.. goo... so the government is offering these not quite top of the line metal caskets, with nice fittings to rebury folk and.... are getting grief about it.

Strike Teams:::::::::::

2005-12-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

DMORT has strike teams that go out to recover bodiies from any source. So, from washed away cemetaries, storm deaths etc. Frequently these bodies are in very rugged places both rural and urban. The Guy in the Green top is a DMORT person, they wear paramilitary uniforms and are very distinctive... the guys in black are Federal Police.. note the ratio.. and how attentive they are.. and how armed they are. All the strike teams went with armed escorts it seems. I did not take this picture rather one of the strike team members did. There are still strike teams out in the field today, rescuing washed away coffins, and retrieving bodies from locations they are identified. There is still a trickle of bodies as they re-open more and more of New Orleans and find victims in the houses.

Life is fun here, quick switch of gears. This is just the best job. I would wish everyone could have the opportunity to get involved and try to help in an effort like this. the JFO is doing a toys for tots campaign and you should see the mountain of toys that has accumulated for delivery to kids, it is very impressive.

Back to 50 today, this last cold spell almost took the leaves off the tree. I recommend a winter here ... it is very relaxing.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....... send winter away!!!

2005-12-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Ok.. today is the day I get to quit bragging about how nice it is here. It is 40 degrees and a cold rain at 11 am.. I was sitting last night watching the rain come down on my patio in shorts.. so it is officially miserable.

The parking lot of the Main building of the morgue is all made with white limestone gravel and shells, they grade it and roll it and grade and roll and it becomes just like concrete. "they assure me" it will not be horribly dusty in the summer but we will see.

I lament not being able to take the time to have seen Harry Potter or the forthcoming Lion Witch and Wardrobe. I will have an additional backlog of books and movies to have seen by the time I abandon the disaster next year.

Morgue Stats and urban legends. Something just under 1000 bodies recovered to the morgue, about 125 identified about 135 are tentatively identified, and just over 100 have been released. The most recent hateful urban legend is that FEMA is taking the bodies in but intend to keep them forever. The most southern and remote parishes are reluctant to release bodies for both religious and political reasons including this particular urban lgend. There are private estimates taht there are at least as many still out there as have been brought in. At least one mausoleum was discovered all barnacle encrusted... aparently washed out to sea by a previous hurricane and redeposited on land with Rita. Two of the Parishes had mass graves from a previous hurricane... unidentified bodies from the 40's .... that were disenterred and the location of them is undetermined..... I was working on a computer in the dental lab when a positive ID was made today.... a very odd mixture of happiness and sadness.... They had an antemortem "life" photo of a smiling 7 or 8 year or so old boy.. with stubby front teeth and a peculiar gold tooth on his right incisor...that matched photos exactly of postmortem photos of the remains of this little guy.... hard not to think of my son in that circumstance... that I am glad his mom will know where he is... my job is to keep the computers and files that allow these matches running and safe from lost or corruption.

Sundays in a Morgue:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

2005-12-04T17:53:00.000-07:00

Sundays in a Morgue:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Happy days!!!... we had a “gate incident” yesterday evening that has everyone a bit jumpy here today. It follows closely on the heels of one more public problem that happened at the JFO two days ago where a man with a big knife wanted to “cut a FEMA employee” and has prompted emails suggesting we wear nothing FEMA on the outside of our work. Our incident was a family that is sure that their family member is being held here and were crashing the gate to rescue this poor dead person. We presume they are thinking that they could just tell which is theirs from the remains and pick them up out of the hundreds that are here. In a way this is the problem with being so secretive with these things, it creates an aura of distrust that somehow we are keeping information from people that they could better interpret than these professionals. I saw perhaps 20 body bags in the morgue for autopsy yesterday all on mobile stainless steel tables and none of them more than 8 inches thick. Certainly not a shape recognizable as a human in there at all. Our gate crashers are very lucky as all these guards are armed and most are recently back from the military in Iraq …. I am certain no one wants any additional victims.

Urban Legends::::: The latest one is from New Orleans …. The worst Urban Legends are the ones that are just barely possible… This one is especially heinous as it is especially racial and hateful. It is now passed around that the Corps of Engineers purposefully blew up the levees in the poor areas of New Orleans to relieve pressure on the levees so that more affluent (read here the color white) neighborhoods would be spared the worst of the flooding. This one has apparently gone national in some regard so if you hear it do not be surprised. I have seen the maps and laid my hands on the 3d table maps of the flooded areas and while the poorer parts flooded worse, there were plenty of breaks in middle class neighborhoods and.. it presumes a level of coherence within the corps I am not sure exists… I bet that this one stays around for awhile.. see if the congress investigates it. FEMA T shirts in New Orleans now read Federal Employees Missing Again and Fix Everything My Ass.

I love my weather here. I had half a day off yesterday so that I opened the double back doors to my patio and sat essentially on the outside till almost ten pm. It was 72 degrees till then….. I am loving my winter without snow. This part of the world WILL feed you. I have never seen such giant portions in all my life. If I ate my Per Diem here I would weigh 1100 lbs in six months…….

News on the political front. FEMA rarely keeps contractors on past the initial setup of a disaster, taking in Local Hires and DAE’s (like me) to handle the work load as the Disaster matures. We are at the time when the contractors (several of them extremely talented folk) are being pared back and all are not eligible to be converted to local hires or DAE’s and it is pretty high tension here about this transition. It did happen quickly and last night so I am all alone here today and may only have one helper here for my duration here. I am going to be on call from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm.. oh.. and also from 8:00 pm to 7:00 am J… gosh.. that is 24 hour call!! Imagine my time sheet if you will… good thing I am used to working with people on the phone solving issues eh?? Things are running smoothly so life is good here at last.

Morgue Humor:::::::::

2005-12-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

Got a new place last night.. this is my third move. i am staying at the Riverview Condos and have a one bedroom apartment there. It is a bout half the size of my last one bedroom but seems very spacious after being in such confined spaces for this amount of time. Pictures to follow when I get to see it in daylight,,...... It has very close parking.. about 30 square feet of back yard and patio... a nice kitchen small living area and decent bathroom on a queen bed.. I can live in it for a long time and be ok.

The JFO has lots of urban legends about the DMORT facility. One is that they have a 30 foot alligator (no typo) in a freezer truck that ate a bunch of bodies and was killed so they could reclaim the parts for identification.. (notes below on the accuracy of these).... One of the reasons there are so many bodies here (many hundreds) is that the cemetaries floated away (they are on the surface remember), There is a story that one of the floating mauseleums was captured, flown into the morgue in the old facility and cracked open in hopes of finding clues to the location this body (bodies?) might belong. The Floating cement enclosure was opened only to be found full of snakes trying to evade the flood and on opening the snakes almost explosively left that enclosure and sent the staff running terrified into the night.

The alligator "does" exist. Actually the head does, I hve seen it, and it was perhaps 9 feet as an adult. Aparenly this gator had staked out one of the floaters as lunch and was waiting for it to get properly tender before consuming it. When humans came to reclaim the body, the gator attacked and was killed by armed guards that aparently accompany all these recovery missions. The head was returned to the morgue as some kind of grisly trophy... but no one felt the need to necropsy the beast to see who if anyone was inside and he was 1/3 the length of the story over at the JFO. The snake story is very true and is actually documented on tape from one of the running autopsy cameras... not sure if you wll see it on Americans funniest home videos anytime here soon but you have never seen men and women move so fast in your life....I believe them all to have been poisonous snakes based on what I could see... It apparently shook up one worker so bad they had to be released and sent home more or less permanently.

Busted:::::::::::::::

2005-11-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

Today was a work day again. The move to DMORT is one of endless work here at the beginning. We are still working over the server and actual domain configuration out there. We got our lock to our door and I scrounged a cabinet so we can lock up incidentals out there. Knocked off at noon and took a drive to take pictures of the countryside.

This is kind of typical of rural Lousiana as far as I can see. Get just 4 or 5 miles outside places like Baton Rouge and people live in places like this. Notice how they are elevated up on pilings... Saw things similar to this in Belize and also the Yucatan from the locals there.

Another ramshackle pace.. but they are in such pretty locations. Everyone sits outside on their porches rain or shine. Must be too hot inside no matter what the day

This is a Catholic church near the DMORT. There is storm damage still evident on the front and also the rear of the steeple. There is a quite old cemetary behind this place too. Very pretty in the country like this

Ok.. this last pic is of the DMORT, the new and at the time of this photograph, unoccupied, DMORT. Just seconds after this picture was taken we were rounded up by the security forces of our National Police (odd black uniforms) and detained long enough for them to establish our identity. We were on the Levee with our backs to the Mississippi nearly 400 yards from the facility when we took them. Lets say it was not a comfortable moment... :-)... I resisted the urge to be a wise ass and we were eventually released... oddly enough. it was my fema credit card that convinced them we were not terrorists bent on stealing bodies or news people trying to stir up trouble. Who says I cannot show a girl a good time eh?? Who WOULD NOT like a sunday afternoon in handcuffs after a quiet picture taking episode eh??

The front building you can see left of the phone pole is where I work and is over 400 feet long. They are almost triangular in cross section and made of the same material of the DIA roof. I can attest they do not leak after a deluge last night.

New Digs...a move to a different office

2005-11-26T19:53:00.000-07:00

Today was interesting...... I was reassigned to a different building this morning doing the IT work for a different group. It was an upgrade in responsibility [gulp] in that I have a tiny little kingdom of like 248 users and all the network responsibility for them all in a remote site.

My new group is DMORT... which stands for Disaster Morturary O.............. Response Team. These guys live and breathe taking care of victims of the disasters that did not survive. They are trying to identify a number of dead(there are still hundreds unidentified) by distinguishing characteristics, x-rays, dental records and DNA where possible. They are moving from a temporary morgue to a permanent one that has been constructed on ground that FEMA purchased in a tiny little town south west of Baton Rouge that was once famous for housing a leper colony. The temp morgue was an abandoned elementary school..... They housed people in classrooms, fed them in the cafeteria and entertained them in the gym. These people are still working virtually 24X7 to identify the dead. They housed the dead in Trailers with freezer units on them.. an endless line of hastily white painted trailers with deisel engines running freezer units. The autopsy room was a tent...... aparently doing that outside was a blessing but it created very unpleasant smells throughout the compound. I saw some of the effort to identify people ..... most that have been recovered are horribly disfigured ... this climate degrades them very quickly especially in the water. The teams trying to identify them are still sleeping on cots in barely ventilated abandoned classrooms and eating off paper plates to get this job done... makes me kind of ashamed I was complaining about the hotel I was staying at.

The new digs are very plush however. Nice wide parking lot, the buildings are made of the "tent" material that the roof of Denver International is made from. All the wires are run in the walls or in the ceiling, it has a dining room, a huge dorm for sleeping, a warehouse, an excercise room and a kind of TV/Great room with a wireless router for doing personal computing. My job gets tough when these foolk get here as they are bringing in computers of dubious heritage that have to be joined to a finicky network with all kinds of restrictions that doctors do not like to hear. My first mission is data retention to make sure nothing is lost. I am in this place to promote a "FEMA presence" to this and make sure our protocols are followed.. one of those situations guaranteed to grate somewhere... I will send pictures as I am allowed to. As you can imagine this is a very sensitive area with lots of privacy restrictions. The compound has 9 foot chain link fences with canvas tied to the fence to block views of anything. After the things I saw today, I doubt I will be making any "Dawn of the Dead" references again anytime soon.

Style::::::::::::::::;

2005-11-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

The JFO has a “dress code” that is widely ignored. While I have seen few people actually in shorts, you see all other manner of clothing deemed appropriate by the person that put it on that morning. I have to admit sometimes I want to ask some of these folk.. “did you LOOK at yourself in a mirror this am?”…… There is a woman in planning that has found some of the most unusual outfits I have ever seen. She seems to gravitate towards spandex.. (this is a serious mistake except I am sure it is comfortable)… Now she has a completely matching outfit every day, jacket, blouse and pants… These have run from a desert camo type outfit to a Jimi Hendrix experience type psychedelic number that Has more bright colors than a mardi gras parade. She has a total Flamingo pink outfit, forest camo, a kind of watermelon stripe thing and one that is totally black that is stretched SO tight you can see her white thong undies through it…. I keep wondering if she wrestles heavyweight on the WWF or something….

There is a park that the interstate 10 bisects with a lake (swamp?) that runs on both sides. In the evening the trees have hundreds of Cattle Egrets sitting in them (big white heron looking birds). In the mornings they are all separated and standing in the shallow water fishing for breakfast…. This is very pretty with the lily pads and elephant ear growing on the banks. I remember that it is not a good idea to just go “swimmin’ ” down here.. you tend to forget that there are leeches, snakes and gators in this environment till you get here. The frost we had the other day kind of burned an edge or two of some of the bedding and garden plants. But there are still banana trees and all kinds of ferns and tropical palms and such here that are blooming outside.

Monday:::::

2005-11-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

Monday:::::

I took these pictures on Sunday… an idea of what parking is like, and the outside of the building I am in.. (yes it was a grey day).. My rental is in the foreground here.. kind of peppy for a Pontiac.. J … The second is what some of the internal life at FEMA and disasters is about. We are hiring approx 500 people in the Baton Rouge area between now and Dec 7……. This is a standard Sunday move of people.. this is the Admin department and all these people are splitting it into two parts and moving them. They gave everyone Sunday off in this department so they could all be rested for their new location Monday morning…… so here comes the fun part. Half the group was up and running at 7:30 am this morning and… and……. And.. powers that be decided they needed to be in a different location…I actually thought the lady responsible for this group was going to come to blows with the building people and there was an actual intervention performed to settle the issue… needless to say they are all moved and we had to set up all their computers yet again. They were all moved and “back at work” by noon.. but wow!!!!

We reduced hours starting this week, it will lessen my work load some and give me some time to see part of the city perhaps. Looking forward to that . Found a ship thing down by the river that looks interesting and a big museum down there so there are cultural features to see as well. For those of you stuck in northern climes, it is going to be “seasonal” this week meaning temps at or near 70 degrees….. the humidity is just perfect and it rains occasionally. I do not even have to wear jackets out in the evening…………….

We are starting to plan Thanksgiving things here in the JFO… seems lots of people are staying here as we mostly only get one day off. There were a ton of people cycling out at this time but the ones not going home for a period of time are not going to work and are planning Thanksgiving things. I have not exactly done that but will likely go to Ruby Tuesdays for Thanksgiving dinner… They are planning some kinda thing there… Wishing you all an awesome Thanksgiving.

Friday::::::: “Working For the Weekend”

2005-11-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

Friday::::::: “Working For the Weekend”

For those of you that might like to know. New Orleans will be open for Mardi Gras. The airport is currently building its flights and if you can stand the smell, you will find the French quarter actually somewhat better than it was last year. Good luck finding a place to stay…. What was once a 70 or 80 min drive down I 10 or I 12 is now on the order of 3 and a half hours if you are lucky apparently due to traffic rather than damage. Everyone working in the city has to leave to eat and sleep for the most part.

There are still about 1800 people living in tents in the state, I read they have put up 30,000 “blue roofs” with another 30,000 to go these are tarps in place of a roof on a house. FEMA is still serving three hot meals to evacuees in a tent city just across the river from me. Some folk are staying there because the food is so good. Several of our Local hires are people displaced by both Hurricanes.. One just get set up in a trailer and her remaining belongings put in safe storage when the trailer she was in got destroyed by Rita after Katrina and 30 days later. She lived on a cot upstairs for 30 days eating meals here and working during the day.. and has been sharing hotel rooms with co-workers on Per-Diem and with fema supplied housing since there is simply no place to live in Baton Rouge either. That is actually one of the success stories, FEMA was going to stop paying for hotels for evacuees on December 2, but got it delayed to December 15 as it apparently would have made 52,000 people homeless if they did that (/? The math of that does not pass my sniff test but I cannot prove or disprove it)

We had two bomb scares this week that we evacuated the building for, the first one we moved outside the compound fence, the second one I actually went to lunch for the duration.

I found a place to do my laundry, they do wash and fold and they came out real pretty…. 8 lbs of laundry was $10 folded.. this seems very cheap to me but I was able to run the clothes in and get them during the work day on my breaks as it is so close to work. Our presence seems to be impacting this laundry lady in a very positive way.. she has hired her sister to help and they are doing very well it seems (Doc’s Laundry if you are ever here for any Length of time.. on Government Street) Laundry is a little sub story of this whole place. One savvy lady has bribed the hotel laundry person to do hers on Sunday when she is very slow for about $12 a week.

Parking is insane. The old mall parking was too small anyway so they park on sidewalks.. grass medians, parallel and in every possible way on the parking lot itself.. it forces you to walk on the street which is death defying anyway… This place opens at 7, and if you get here at 6:45 you can park anywhere you want.. if you get here at 7 you will hear honking and tire squealing I am very surprised there is so little paint swapped in this lot.

2005-11-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

Hats::::::::::::;

Hard to live long in this country and not notice the racial overtones of this place. I certainly work in a more racially diverse climate than I have ever been before. The mall is full of differences, there are black sales people and Hispanic mangers and professional people. Two of the MD’s here at FEMA are both black and women, so they are double dippers in that regard. I have seen no mixed race couples at all here, but I commonly sit in restaurants in the middle of families of a variety of backgrounds winding down their days. There is a pressing need for Vietnamese translators here in Louisiana for disaster relief. I cannot wait to hear Cajun incorporate Vietnamese in it’s patois.

I want to talk about fashion though. I am sure this will perk up the ears of at least one of my readers. First is a comparison. There is a Bennigans on Mississippi and I 270 in Aurora. Once upon a time we used to have an AOL luncheon there on Sunday afternoons. This place is very close to a Black gospel church and I had the opportunity to watch many many of these stylish women exit church and come to the Bennigans for Sunday Dinner. I was always delighted to see the amazing hats these women wore and the elaborate hair styling under the hats that they wore. They are hard to describe from memory but they were intricate, very very matched with the rest of the wardrobe (I decided they bought the hat, and then bought an outfit to go with it, cause I am sure it was not accidental in those colors) The hair was also amazing.. swooping curves, impossible balance, perfect ringlets.. quite amazing… Actually I bet that show still goes on every Sunday……. Ok.. fast forward…..this past Sunday I was eating in the golden corral. It was 12:30 ish and right after church.. and there were a number of families in this place a preponderance of which were black. Clearly these folk were just coming from church, the men were dressed in ties and slacks… the women in nice dresses on balance, but not one hat.. and.. not one seriously interesting hair style. Do you suppose it is regional?

There is going to be a big announcement tomorrow about staffing in the JFO and other FEMA locations …massive hiring… they are putting more local hires on the payroll and letting contractors go… lots of them coming up to terminate December one. So this is a good time to be hired into FEMA here if you have certain skills. Lots of people will draw a pretty decent pay check for quite a while here. FEMA apparently leased this building for three years so a long time for some people.

This is a picture of some of the water available. Likely this is from one of the brewers… it IS water.. but is more like a chlorine cocktail than something fun to drink. I am positive it is safe, but it is also something you could use to fumigate an apartment with. Makes your eyes water.

This is a partial project plan up on the wall about removal of debris... the FEMA part of the plan runs into 3Q of 07 and is the solid dark line in the middle.. these are sites in every declared parish. This is a very simple project plan, each limb is very clean and has no real dependencies, but the sheer volume would be a very challenging project to manage.

Sunday::::: Pictures!!!!

2005-11-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

This is the lobby and the Nurse stationed there. On a weekday this place is a crisscross of people going between west and east. The escalators in the background go to a giant room where all the maps you see on the walls are printed on site. There are some beautiful graphics that demonstrate the severity of the damage and all.

The second picture is the main concourse of the building... most of the assistance, mitigation and evaluations are done on this floor. Note the bundles of cables up on the walls to the upper right. These are a combination of telephony, fiberoptics and Cap 5 computer cabling that enervates the building.

Here is a hastily created sign.. hopefully you can catch which one.. :-D I love our language

Here is the work area for a group called PA (I think it is assistance for individuals.. anyway.. the insurance and planners sit in this area.... ) When it is a weekday during the day this is very much like images you have seen of one of the trading pits at the Mercantile exchange in New York. Chaos is amazing in this area....

This is the cafeteria late morning and before they set out all of lunch. It has sandwiches and at least one hot dish each of the morning and noon meals. They quit serving dinner as the work load decreased so you have to eat out of machines if you are here that late... most are gone by 7 pm most days.

Saturday::::: End of a week...

2005-11-12T18:30:00.000-07:00

I over heard my boss this evening saying they were going to cut back some on staff for our group. I am not at all sure what that may mean for me here, things have been a little bit slow for our group, perhaps we set it up so well it will almost run itself. Anyway.. short day tomorrow only four hours 8 to noon and I am going to get some sunshine and try to find a new pair of shoes anyway.

Lots of tidbits and facts come out of doing desktop support in these different areas... some of the information you would just as soon not know... Health and Human Services are still trying to locate the parents of something in excess of 1800 children... most of which were just abandoned in aftermath of the storm..... what is considered the worlds largest colony of madascar (?) termites is living UNDER bourbon street in the french quarter of New Orleans... aparently the flood and sudden abundance of ready food has brought them and all their cousins out of the ground and they are actively munching on fallen trees, scraps and what remains of otherwise healthy dwellings in all of South Lousiana..... potentially a different kind of natural disaster triggered by another the hurricanes......

Traffic alone in this area will turn you grey. I am somewhat used to pushy drivers etc....but theyse guys take the cake.. :-D... More as time and energy allows. New Pay Period starts Tomorrow!!

TGIF:::::::::::: Southern Food

2005-11-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Ok.. got to the new hote. What can I tell you... The Hampton Inn rocks. Thick soft towels, King sized bed, all my stuff fits on or in something and is not in the way, there is a coffee table in front of my loveseat , a small microwave and fridge.. and a nice sized bathroom. I have four pillows on the bed and it is a big pillowtop thing that is comfy as hell. it even has one of those laptop things like a table that you can write or work from in bed... very nice and I believe I will be very comfy here. They even have breakfast from 6 am for three hours.. so I will get a banana every day or something.

I went out for dinner when I got here this evening. Ended up having BBQ at a place near here called "The Grill". I am very near LSU campus over here so it has a college flair. I got to thinking about the similarities and differences in both Southern cooking and Southern regions.

To begin with, I believe you can define the "Modern South" by looking at the breakfast menu's of wherever you stop. The border of the south is defined as those restrauants where they offer grits with eggs, In the Deep south, you can substitute tomatoes for grits in season :-) . Now BBQ is very different in the regional South... Texas BBQ is sweeter, darker and has a more of a vineager tang to me, here in LA, it is pepper spicier but still nice and red, and more semi sweet. Some of the BBQ in the south even has a mayonaise cachet to it..... anyway.. tonights BBQ was very good. You can define the south as well by ordering iced tea. In the south IF they ask, they will ask if you want your tea sweet or unsweetend. Standard iced tea for the south is sweet tea and it iis with real sugar and is more like brown cool aid than a refreshing drink. If you travel in the South, you may as well make a contest of discovering the best chicken fried steak ever. In rural communities and on highways not on the interstate, you will have your best luck either taking without question whatever the "special" is.. or.. asking for the chicken fried steak. The South will have a preponderance of these steaks NOT deep fried (one of the few foods preferentially NOT dropped in gallons of boiling grease down here) rather they are pan or griddle fried. Proper southern white gravy will not be clotted rather.. thickened and not overly black peppered. If the mashed potatos come with any other seasoning than butter and salt, you are in a gay bar. ;-) . More on Southern food here soon.

My group is getting at least some of Thanksgiving weekend off. I am going to get Thanksgiving day for sure and also Sunday following it off... but will have to work for sure one of the two days in between, and likely both.

2005-11-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

Today I sat at the help desk near the front door. This desk has phones for the receptionist for this whole place as well as the walk up help desk. People with problems for anything walk up to the help desk and make a paper ticket for help on their issue. This is quite familiar but instead of wearing a head set taking phone calls, the people walk up to the front desk and talk to you directly about their issues. (yes.. shoot me now)…… Same issues to deal with but with the addition of all the spin these folk want to let go of for their frustrations of the working day…….

Speaking of which, there is a stress reduction center upstairs, and a cubby for a set of conflict resolution specialists who apparently help people resolve differences without resorting to name calling, finger pointing and rolling around on the floor. There is an on staff doctor, (hopefully not one of the ones discussing euthanasia in New Orleans during the Hurricane) and Nurses everywhere with ibuprofrin, Neosporin and bandaids as well as stuff for flu symptoms. There are tens of thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer on every level surface and everyone is constantly applying this to try to reduce the amount of contamination you get. Since I spend all day with my hands on other peoples computers (keyboards are the nastier than a toilet seat according to “Mythbusters””) I use this alcohol based gel by the gallon it seems.. it is very good for removing the dead skin from my hands… For those of you that know me and my terminally dry and scaley hands….. the humidity here plus the treatment of this antiseptic have very much removed the layers of deep dead skin on my left hand in particular.. but both hands very generally… I will not apparently have to whittle a finger out of the callus here.

I spent last evening preparing for my move tomorrow.. I had substantially unpacked in the room and spent time packing again. Put one big suit case in the car trunk where it may stay for quite a while and got the rest of the place organized so I can do it pretty easily tonight when I get done and get out so I can be on time for work in the morning. Then tomorrow night in a new place!!! Maybe there will be more of my peers living there. But for sure some sunshine by the pool next chance I get and the access to the gym for workouts.

Time for CSI and some time with my feet up in the air.... hope you all have a great day...

Second Wind Tuesday

2005-11-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Today FEMA man Traced a network cable from a balky printer to an obscure box in a wall way back in the back of the mall. Imagine a mouse cam view of a blue network cable going through amazingly hard to get into places to this switch. The net effect of the effort was to find the location of a problem and help a bunch of people to be able to print. These connection problems are a daily thing.. In Places where cables are on the floor they get run over by chairs or walked on by heavy shoes and get bruised so they quit working… then.. you have to trace the end of the wire through hell and gone to where it connects to the network and often pull replacement wire along the same route. Not a good day to have on your cape usually.

I had to take computer parts out to the depot this evening.. last thing of the day. This is where they are marshalling and shipping out among other things, the trailers that the people evacuated are going to live..... Oh My God.. what a bunch of trailers. Trucks to the horizon bringing them in and shipping them out.. 24 X 7 they are handling them.. it is simply the biggest operation I have ever seen.

I am going to take and post pictures from this building on Sunday… it is the slowest day and least likely to draw any flak for doing so. I have just decided it is too interesting not to document and post.

Only three more days after today till I get a different Hotel. Going to move on Friday so if you have not sent snail mail yet please hold off doing so. I am moving to a place where I get towels delivered to me and that has a pool and a gym… :-D I am pretty happy. Some of the people that have been here a couple months are getting transitioned over into apartments and condos (?) not sure how that would work but I am pretty happy with a smaller room and someone to make my bed and take out my trash. For now I am ok with restaurants for my food, lots of diversity here in types of things to eat and I am avoiding fried chicken and burgers for now.

And on that subject (written at work during break) I stopped at a Sushi place on the way home from work tonight and ate $35 worth of prime Sushi. The Yellowtail was simply the best I have ever tasted.. buttery and sweet. I had Tuna and Salmon too.. along with a tiny portion of eel for desert (it is served with a sweet sauce). YUM!! Nothing funny today.... the announcements for cars parked illegally are getting more creative (parking is horrendous for those folks that try to get to work EXACTLY on time).. this afternoon they threatened burning a Hertz rental that was blocking four other cars..... I never saw smoke so I presume it was moved.

:-)

Random Thots:::::::::::::::::::

2005-11-07T18:55:00.000-07:00

Long if uneventful day at work, well as uneventful as things go here. I was met at the door this morning by a woman wearing the security guard uni that our door and gate security wear (feds on the gates, security on the doors lotsa sidearms on people I am not sure can hit a barn with them).... anyway.. she was wearing the uni.. all dark black with shiney silver chrome and badges.. very sharp... wearing 225 lbs of silver jewlrey fromher haiir to her neckline.. and black patent leather high heels with four inch heels and very pointy toes....when she caught me looking at them she told me that if she did not wear them, her ass looked fat in her uniform....

I was very productiive today, felt like I earned my pay for a change as I was able to work more on my own. I am glad I was not out of IT for another year I would have had a very long way to go to be useful. This is a very complex and odd way of getting masses of people on a government internet ...... as many of you might imagine, I would do it different.... :-D

I did dinner again at the Golden Corral... the guy cooking steaks picked out one just for me and made it medium rare just like I like it.. (they were not very busy) so I got this huge steak done my way.. very nice...

More when time and energy allows

Half a Day off!!! how nice!!

2005-11-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

So the center closes after noon on Sunday, usually a good time for network weenies to make major changes, but this time it was time to send people out for a days rest. I went to the mall (funny since I seem to work at a mall) but I needed one where I could buy some shoes. I could not find either my style or size that I wanted even though I hit every shoe selling store in the "Mall of Lousiana" but Payless. Oh well maybe next time.

I got informed by my hotel that they will only clean my room once a week and that if I need more towels I have to come to the front desk. There are no Klenex or paper towels here either.. I am somewhat non-plussed by this place. They were insistent that I come to the front desk and pay with my credit card on a daily basis, rather than charge me for a week or let me run a tab ........ it is so very bizarre... I am looking for another place but it does not look good till after Christmas. I think if I get some luck, I will find some places around Thanksgiving with people traveling out of town to see relatives.......

So..to treat myself I went to a seafood place that was recommended to me. I ordered something called "Seafood Platter" and had a very pleasant surprise. Biggest plate of fish and fish products I have ever seen. Shrimp, stuffed shrimp, catfish strips (best I ever had), a cup of seafood gumbo, oysters, crab stuffed crab and one soft shelled crab ( and a mountain of french fries) ALL FRIED....... Ok.. I have to say, I have seen soft shelled crab in a sushi place in handrolls and always thought it looked good butttttttttttt..... This one was fried golden crispy.... I could not shed the image that it was a batter dipped and fried spider........ like it was going to try to get away when I munched on its little legs.... that when I bit into its carapace it was going to shriek EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All this visualization made me just a bit queazy...... The place had more stuffed critters on the wall than any other restrauant I have been to yet.. lots of fish too.. but they had these tiny little elk up there.. I asked the manager why they had to stuff the little one and he looked at me funny. The Buckhorn Exchange on 10th and Osage in Denver has the biggest elk in the world in it, one head going from waist high on the first floor to almost waist hi on the second inside a stairwell... wow.....

I was glad to get a half a day off. I learned to burn mass disks in the copy room today as desktop support was otherwise quite slow. More as time and energy allow

A Day in the life of FEMA Man

2005-11-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

Workdays::::::::::::

Workdays are interesting. There are a number of help desks (down here they are Hep desks) where people can call or walk by and fill out a trouble ticket to get assistance with their computer. The issues are standard help desk stuff except for the scale and scope of the operation. Imagine picnic tables sitting back to back two deep and running 150 feet or more per unit and then people sitting at these tables elbow to elbow such that they are all full. There are military units, EPA, Several State agencies, Debris, Corps of Engineers, groups for helping towns and individuals, plus groups for support of the infrastructure here like billeting (place to stay) and medical and cafeteria, APO where you get all your supplies, training and security….. like a small city really. I walk down to the call in desk and get the paper copies of the trouble tickets and then try to follow either a paper taped on signs or little group signs hung from the dividers between groups. You look for the location of the person needing help in that group and then try to fix what you can. I literally go everywhere in the “WEST WING” which is my area… maybe 250,000 square feet that is still growing. Todays unusual event was ... the mens bathroom in the main building went out.. not so bad you say.. but it is the only one for the building.. say... 2000 people and 1000 men. We got directed to 4 porta poties outside (thankfully) where the temps were 85 deg with 90% humidity. Wheeeeewwwwweeeeeeee!!!!!!! how long can you hold your breath. Porta poties were not designed for southern living.... ewwwwwwww

The commute in is in the dark, the drive home is in the dark so I cannot really show much in pictures that way. People are very image conscious inside the building where we all spend 12 hour days. No reading, even on breaks, no headphones, no music playing (thankfully) and everyone appears busy. No cameras on the inside, I think this is more of the political side of things so I cannot take pictures of the place……. So you are going to have to try to visualize my descriptions.

My rental car had the “Service Engine Soon” light pop on yesterday…. I love American Engineering. Pontiac whatever it is… although it will get up and run on the interstate entries, it smells like an ashtray so I drive around everywhere with the windows down.

I am going for a Seafood dinner tonight. Somewhere South down by the Mall (off Bluebonnet Lane… ) and also look for a new pair of shoes. Grocery store last night got me a couple frozen dinners, some fruit and bread and some drinks. I think I am going to have to drink more water here even though it is quite humid….

More as energy and time allows.

FEMA Mans Fortress of Solitude

2005-11-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

The Air trip was uneventful. I did get virtually strip searched in Midland which would have been much more fun under other cirucumstances. Arrived at Baton Rouge FEMA operations about 1 and went home about 6. Found perhaps the last room in the city to stay at, and will be moving if I can find something open during the next couple weeks closer to work, I am about half an hour away down some very busy and ugly streets.

The room is ok, the hotel has lots of evacuees here, what seems like thousands of kids loitering around the front door. It has a microwave and toaster and fridge. It is the Crestwood Suites on Sherwood forest Blvd.. (yes.. rob from the rich, give to the poor place)and is 225-2915200.

FEMA is pretty crazy, there are lots of odd things to get used to. Over 3,000 people in the place where I work. It is literally an abandoned mall (I am reminded of Dawn of the Dead). Everyone has a laptop, wireless connections are common, but there are waist thick bundles of cables and chellenges to be overcome.. crazy. Hours are 7 am to 6 pm on normal days so... i will see if tomorrow I can take some pictures of this cavernous place.

This is also "doo-gooder" central. I ate at Golden Corral next to a quite large group of uniformed "Victim Chaplains" from Dallas. Bright yellow jackets with GIANT crosses on the back with black pants and yellow bowling looking shirts ..... There were matching Ford Explorer type vehicles out front with logos of "Victim Chaplains" on the doors and BIG ROTATING FLASHING LIGHT BARS ON TOP>>>.... I could only think that if they drove up to someone in dire need of immediate prayer or something they could stop traffic so it could proceed without hesistation. It is possible this type side show is common to all disasters but this seemed over the top.. and reminded me I needed to take my camera to Dinner at least.... Who is going to believe there are roving gangs of aged Dallas Bible thumpers with more money than sense invading a disaster area to pray over a bunch of Catholics..... I love this country.

More as energy and time make it available.

Moving Day

2005-11-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

Hi All, Sorry for being absent but no new news to report till this afternoon. When things move they all seem to move at one time. I have been assigned to the Baton Rouge Joint Field Office (JFO) (( Lets get used to these acronyms!!)). I would be traveling today, but the Midland airport has no connecting flights not sold out prior till tomorrow so I will be flying out on Thursday morning and be in Baton Rouge about noonish on the same day. I am getting a "Compact Car 4dr Auto AC" to drive (POS) but at least it will blow cool air (one hopes). Here is the fun part, the travel agent says there is no hotel availability in town anywhere and I am waiting for a phone call from my on site supervisor about a place to stay. I am informed that I may be sleeping in the field office till a room opens somewhere (imagine me without coffee).

I will more fully chronicle the actual travel day , maybe even as it happens since I have layover in Houston and some time in the Midland airport as well. I am carrying two giant suitcases, a shoulder bag suitcase and my laptop bag. Call it 140 lbs of luggage. So.. for my fashion concious friends, on occaison my underwear will not match and.. AND.. my shoes will not be the cutest I own for the outfit I wear. No pictures till I get unpacked as I do not want to have to try to get all that through security. Here we GO!!

Credit Card Day:::::::::::::::

2005-10-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

My Shiney new FEMA credit card came today. It is a Master Card with the words "The United States of America" across the top. It came via UPS about 5 pm today and cascaded a series of events I have been waiting for. I had to call my boss in Austin and remind him who I was (Oh YEah you're Mary's boy) it has been so long. He is going too make sure I am attached to the right job function in Lousiana and then I call one number, make a change in my status as "ready to go" (no shit) and FEMA man has his cape and launch point again!!!!! I have to wait for one more call (there is a code number I need to get before I can put charges on my card for this disaster.... it is how they keep the charges for them seperate)

My boss Kent promised to call me tomorrow so it is possible I will be traveling that quickly. Either way it should be very soon now. Very few hanging chads between me and the airplane terminal. More info as it comes available.

Another Wednesday in Texas

2005-10-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

Hello Readers!!

Letter this morning from FEMA that detailed some parts of my employement, instructions for comportment and dress and how to use my credit card (which is not here yet). They did tell me that I have a card "In the Mail" and it will get here in from 5 to 7 days (but not from what date!!)... So I am cooling my heels and still homeless in my parents house till I get additional word on the location of my credit card and final travel instructions. As you all might imagine I am reasonably frustrated at the snails pace of the proceedings. This is on par with normal daily operations in a company like IBM so it is not wholly surprising, rather it iis just a frustrating experience on balance. Here is the chronology of events of getting where I am if anyone is interested but me:

August 28 Katrina makes landfall in New Orleans

Sept 1 FEMA makes contact with me by phone and I resubmit my resume for inspection

Sept 9 Call from my current boss Kent to say he was forwarding a letter with my name on it to hire me.

Sept 21 Received package of paperwork to fill out for hire and fingerprints. Overnight back

Oct 19 Moved from my residence in Colorado Springs, put everything in storage and go to parents house to wait "forthcoming" credit card and travel instructions

Oct 26 Receive hiring letter detailing use of travel and credit card and a promise of credit card in 5-7 days

I know this is a huge set of disasters given that Rita hit another Region 6 location right in the middle of that time line. So it seems I am stuck. FEMA man is grounded. So more news when it is available.

Safe in Texas for the Moment

2005-10-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

Hi all!! Made it to My parents house in Andrews Tx today. Not quite ten hours on the road. D0gie made it ok, she does not drink or eat while in transit so she was pretty wrung out by the time we got here. Spending at least two days here prior to heading out. More news as it is available.