FEMA staffs clairvoyants!!

Okay that may not be exactly so -- but they did manage to creep us out this weekend.

Dave and I worked long hours this weekend trying to gather all of our receipts and estimates and all of our correspondence with insurance companies and SBA and FEMA. We also started composing a lengthy letter to go along with it. Yes, we were busy putting together an appeal. I have paced a path in the tile in the kitchen trying to figure out how we can repair our home and replace our furniture and pay our hospital bill and buy food for us all and so on and so on... The money that insurace has given us to repair our roof and our upstairs is frankly just enough to repair our roof and our upstairs.. Even if we used every dime downstairs we would still have to find the money for upstairs at some point. We were fortunate in that FEMA sent us assistance rather early on -- long before others we have spoken to... But perhaps it was a mixed blessing because FEMA has also closed our application long before others we have spoken to. We have received approximately $9000 from FEMA for home repair, rental assistance, and personal property. The rental assistance money might as well not exist because we're not going to touch it. We have gotten conflicting reports from different people at FEMA as to whether or not we can use that money for anything other than paying rent. Since we have lived in our house here for all but 12 days since Katrina -- we are going to just leave that money alone until someone can tell us for certain that we can spend it on something else -- or that we have to return it. So this means we have gotten around $7000 from FEMA. Wow that would have been a lot of money a few months ago. Sigh.

We gathered up our estimates and our receipts for repairs and replacing appliances and basic furniture and the figures are staggering. By our best estimates we sustained about $24,000 worth of damage to our home's exterior, to the roof, the attic, and several upstairs rooms and downstairs ceilings from wind damage. Downstairs we cautiously estimate around $60,000 in damage and $30,000 in lost contents. (This doesn't include the loss of BOTH of our vehicles for which we received a total of $3000 from insurance.) So a conservative estimate of our loss is $114,000. We have received $27,000 from insurance and FEMA. That means we're coming up a bit short, right?

I understand that none of this lends itself toward proof that FEMA does in fact staff clairvoyants. As a matter of fact, I suppose one would think that if there were some psychics around there they would know that their assistance packages are going to fall really really short for hundreds of thousands of people.

I was just thinking that it was oddly coincidental that after a long and mildly depressing weekend of going through all of these facts and figures for the purpose of appealing FEMA's decision to close our application - we received a phone call from FEMA late last night. Bizarre, isn't it?

Our new inspector's name is Tim. Tim came to the house around lunchtime this afternoon and told me that the previous inspector had made some mistakes on our application and it was his job to correct them. I was excited about this at first - but apparently the mistakes were simply a string of odd errors: for instance, the previous inspector stated that we had two utility rooms, two dining rooms, and four hallways downstairs. Tim explained that the odd layout of the house caused them to flag our application. He was only here for a few minutes -- took some measurements and left.

I don't think it's going to help us any. Even though he called again a couple hours after his inspection to say he had found another error -- and this one was probably the most important. He said the previous inspector forgot to include our children on the application. Apparently it read that we had four occupied bedrooms but only my husband and I lived here. Sigh. Dave and I had seen on the application WE filed over the telephone with FEMA many months ago that they had listed us as a family of four (we lost only two children on this application - not the whole brood).. We immediately called and waited hours to tell them about the mistake but the girl on the other end of the phone said that FEMA does not take the number of children into consideration when determining eligibility for assistance. Egad!

More confusion and more frustration.. We'll be sending the letter of appeal and the mountain of receipts anyway. There's still a glimmer of hope that keeps us going day after day... We certainly don't want to get in its way.