Biden admin turns down Ohio’s request for disaster assistance after toxic derailment

The Biden administration turned down a request for federal disaster assistance from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine in the aftermath of the train derailment in the state earlier this month that led to a large release of toxic chemicals.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told Ohio’s state government that it was not eligible for disaster assistance to help the community recover from the toxic spill, Dan Tierney, a spokesperson for DeWine, told Fox News Digital on Thursday. Tierney explained that FEMA believed the incident didn’t qualify as a traditional disaster, such as a tornado or hurricane, for which it usually provides assistance.

“The DeWine Administration has been in daily contact with FEMA to discuss the need for federal support, however FEMA continues to tell Governor DeWine that Ohio is not eligible for assistance at this time,” DeWine’s office said in a statement earlier in the day. “Governor DeWine will continue working with FEMA to determine what assistance can be provided.”

FEMA said that its team is in constant communication with DeWine’s office, but didn’t comment on the request for federal relief.

Keep reading

Dad Says FEMA Tried to Bribe Him After Teen Son’s Post-Vaccine Death: He Refused and Went Public

Ernest Ramirez says he wanted to do the right thing for his son, so he decided to have 16-year-old Ernesto take the COVID-19 vaccine.

After all, what was the harm? Ramirez was told the vaccine was 100 percent safe.

Five days later, on April 24, 2021, his son died from complications related to an enlarged heart, Ramirez told LifeSiteNews.

Soon after his son’s death, Ramirez says, he received a call from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. According to him, agency officials asked him to change the cause of death for his son to “COVID.”

Ramirez says they offered to help him financially in exchange for doing so.

Keep reading

FEMA Distributed Nonsense Emergency Brochures To Native Alaskans

FEMA hired a California government contractor to translate disaster-assistance information into two native Alaska languages, but all it and the natives got was a big heap of nonsense. 

After a typhoon hammered the west coast of Alaska in September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hired a Berkeley-based company, Accent on Languages, to translate instructions for applying for disaster aid. 

FEMA quickly turned the company’s work into tri-fold, glossy brochures that left native Alaskans utterly perplexed, as they encountered phrases like

  • “Your husband is a polar bear, skinny.”
  • “Tomorrow he will go hunting Alaska very early, and will (bring) nothing”  
  • “When she said so, the dog ran farther off from the curtain.”

University of Alaska Fairbanks linguist Gary Holton says one of the translations is a random assortment of phrases copied from a compilation of far-eastern Russian folklore: “Yupik Eskimo Texts from the 1940s.” 

“They clearly just grabbed the words from the document and then just put them in some random order and gave something that looked like Yup’ik but made no sense,” Holton told AP. He summed up the work as a “word salad.” 

In a publicly-posted letterAccent on Languages CEO Caroline Lee said her firm will reimburse FEMA $5,116. “We make no excuses for erroneous translations, and we deeply regret any inconvenience this has caused to the local community.” 

Lee said when the “horrifying,” botched translations came to her attention, that her company hired a new team of translators to do the project over again. FEMA has fired the company. 

Former Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney wants more than a reimbursement, saying the company is guilty of fraud — “and you can’t put a price on the impact of denying services to vulnerable communities because of misinformation.” The grandstanding Sweeney even called for congressional hearings. 

Keep reading

A FEMA document about nuclear explosions reveals the utter fatuousness of our bureaucracy

No matter the purpose for which they’re established, bureaucracies often become ends in themselves, self-perpetuating entities that generate paper to justify their existence.  That seems to be the case with FEMA, at least insofar as its rules for nuclear disasters go.  Some poor desk drone was given the task of updating FEMA documents to reflect the CDC’s ridiculous COVID requirements.  That drone worked hard, with the result being that the FEMA guidelines for a nuclear explosion now include masks and social distancing in bomb shelters.

Once again, Libs of Tik Tok has the news on her irreplaceable Twitter account.  She (or someone with whom she communicates) felt that, with Putin threatening to start a nuclear war, it might be useful to check out the government’s guidance for responding to the fallout from a nuclear attack.  That’s how we learn that someone at FEMA laboriously updated FEMA guidelines with CDC requirements about social distancing and masks.

Keep reading

Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings

This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings.1,2  This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available. Please check the CDC website periodically for updates.

Keep reading