Sandy First Responders: FEMA Told Us to "Sightsee," Nothing to Do For Days After Storm

Where would we be without the feds?

Hurry up and wait.

That's what first responders were left to do after being deployed by FEMA to assist in the storm-ravaged areas in the initial days after superstorm Sandy, FoxNews.com has learned. A FEMA worker who spoke to FoxNews.com described a chaotic scene at New Jersey's Fort Dix, where emergency workers arrived as the storm bore down on the Atlantic Coast. The worker said officials at the staging area were unprepared and told the incoming responders there was nothing for them to do for nearly four days.

"They told us to hurry, hurry, hurry," the worker, who works at the agency's headquarters in Washington and volunteered to deploy for the storm recovery effort. "We rushed to Fort Dix, only to find out that our liaison didn't even know we were coming."

Comments

[Calvin Coolidge]

Hilarious. Before the wind had even died down, Eliot Spitzer was testing out "You didn't rebuild that!" as the triumphant FEMA motto for their sure-to-be-successful disaster recovery effort. And the NYT was wasting no time announcing the triumph of big government, which was the only institution capable of performing the sure-to-be-successful disaster recovery effort.

You would think that they would at least wait until there were some signs that FEMA was doing a good job, especially based on their track record from the past few dozen natural disasters, before declaring Mission Accomplished. But, then again, if faith in Big Government had to rest on actual demonstrations of its competence, there would be nothing to celebrate.