My time in Iowa 2008.

October 26th, 2008
03:53 am

Tonights weather: cold and very windy

Back in early July 2008, a co-worker invited me to come work with him and others over in the disaster areas of Iowa. I have always wanted to work or atleast volunteer in such an event but when I have tried before I was told that there was enough people already and then thanked me for the thought of helping. Now I have been here for four months working as an armed guard working at a FEMA site.

I work for a security corporation that is based out of Louisiana. They were able to get this contract in Iowa by piggybacking off of another company, Corporate Security Solutions (CSS), that is based from Michigan. The corporations received the contract from Federal Protective Services (FPS). Since my time here I have learned all about bidding for Federal contracts which I plan on getting into further in time.

Anyways, as I said I am working here as an armed guard. I was suppose to be policing the FEMA trailer parks over in Cedar Rapids which unfortunately things had changed. A guard that worked for CSS made the mistake of playing with his personal gun on a trailer park site. The gun accidentally fired off a round which went through his car door and landed into a mobile homes wall. The guard was fired and then all guards were banned from the trailer parks. So because of that one guy I have been guarding the trailer distribution center. I have been at this one site since early August, started working days when we were pushing twenty homes out a day. I have had to deal with a lot of citizens that want to see whats going on here. Everything from gawkers to mothers of daughters that CSS guards probably pregnated and are looking for the guy. As you can probably tell that CSS only hires the highest caliber of people.

Starting back on October 1st, I started working the nights by myself. Although I enjoy the quietness that the night provides besides the insecrts chirping and the wind swaying the trailers creating noise 8 - 12 hours a night can seem like an eternity.

The local news agencies have been on a witchhunt trying to get more money from FEMA or something like that. The initial and ongoing report is called, "Poisioned Promises", sounds extremely dramatic. I believe it was NBC that tested 20 trailers over in Cedar Rapids for fermeldahyde. Out of the 20, six were found to have a high level. Each house had families of four living since the start of it all here. Apparently it has flu-like symptoms and that humans can actually add to the levels due to lifestyles and chemicals that they leave indoors. After the news report came out, families that had trailers but werent tested were saying that they have gotten sick because of this. Even though that it is flu season already and that they may be looking for someone to blame. I feel bad for the people who really have gotten sick if it was from a trailer. It just seems a bit much to me. The governor even got into it and demanded FEMA retest all 542 of them.

I have four hours to go til the end of tonights shift and 11 days til I am done here in Iowa and will return home.