Making Things Happen

You can't rely on the government to fix things. The Federal government, doubly so. The best you can hope for is for it to get out of the way and let those who can step up and make things happen. FEMA isn't really good at getting out of the way.

In Waveland, Mississippi, for example, the manager of the local Wal-Mart worked with the company's corporate officials to open a store under a tent in the parking lot, then later opened a convenient, easily accessible "Wal-Mart Express"-the first-ever store of its type-designed especially for post-Katrina Mississippi. Such creativity and on-the-fly adaptation and innovation on-the-fly would have been inconceivable from FEMA, which kept physicians from treating wounded evacuees because they weren't registered with the federal government, and kept firefighters away from those in need until they completed sexual harassment training, and courses on FEMA's history.

Here's a great example of making things happen.

One example is Doris Voitier, the superintendent of the St. Bernard Parish Schools. Voitier became something of a local hero when she realized that functional schools were critical to getting residents to move back to the parish. She decided she'd figure out a way to open them, bureaucracy be damned.

Enter FEMA. FEMA officials told Voitier she'd need to have a "kickoff meeting" before she could open the schools-where she'd meet not with parents, or students, or teachers, but with a federal environmental protection team, a historical preservation team, and the "404-" and "406-mitigation teams" (terms which refer to specific sections of the Stafford Act, the law that covers federal disaster response). And it wasn't a "meeting" so much as an introduction to the vast bureaucracy that was FEMA's "education task force," basically a list of barriers Voitier would have to clear before she could start classes. Voitier says she sat in the meeting thinking, "Can't somebody help me get a school started and clean my schools?"

Voitier decided to cut her losses and reopen the schools without FEMA's help. She says she adopted a "the heck with you guys" approach. "We can do it, we'll make it happen, and we'll send you the bill." Before Thanksgiving, Voitier opened her first school, and 334 students attended the first day of classes. By the last day of the year, there were 2,360, and over 3,000 on the first day of the next.