Hopelessly Prolonged Claims Crushing Families

Three years ago tomorrow, I submitted my Notice Of Loss (NOL) to FEMA as the first step toward being made whole again after the USFS had destroyed my homestead and everything I owned as result of their gross incompetence and criminal negligence in planning, igniting, and mismanaging a prescribed burn which subsequently went wild. I am still waiting for FEMA to finish the task of making me whole again, as are so many other hapless victims of that fire.

Consider this typical victim's account of their cruelly-protracted recovery ordeal:

A victim of the devastating Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire (HPCCF), her story embodies a truly world-class synergy of federal government inaction–first by highly skilled masters of mismanagement, and second by meticulously crafted bureaucratic indifference meted out with gusto. Three years ago, expert precision of the US Forest Service cost Sarah her homestead, her forestland, her livelihood–her entire way of life. Since then, Sarah has remained homeless at the behest of the FEMA HPCCF Claims Office.

Naturally, the trauma of watching her future burn to ash was instantly superseded by the sheer joy of navigating the FEMA HPCCF claims process, a model of streamlined inefficiency so giddily declared via many public media events by the former director of FEMA's HPCCF Claims Office as being "Simple, Fast, and Fair". That former director now touts her own startup LLC, claiming its foundational principles are Authenticity and Growth – because real leadership begins within.

Putting such folderol as that aside, for three agonizing years, Sarah has been given the unparalleled opportunity to participate in the bureaucratic masterpiece known so well now as the HPCCF Claims process, diligently pursuing an ungenerous, life-faltering compensation so vociferously promised by the former POTUS would absolutely make her whole again. She has patiently endured endless rounds of hoop jumping to prove her losses to clerks duty bound to provide diligent, Scroogish scrutiny, thereby preserving sacred public coffers at all cost.

Her goal is modest—a home and life restored. A simple request that demands nothing less than years of relentless effort and repetative forms filings from the victim herself. Now, as a fourth winter since the devastating conflagration sparked by highly trained USFS arsonists approaches, Sarah gets to embrace commencement of another year of her extended sabbatical from safe, warm, secure housing–a searing testament to a system that, while notoriously slow to pay, is brilliantly quick to crush.

Her justice is merely enjoying many more very long queues and months wasted at the bureaucratic house of horrors known as the FEMA-HPCCF Claims Office.