Why is fema building coffins

He eventually did, but only after much criticism. Federal Emergency Management Agency is behind the camps. Lewis is a veteran maker of conspiracy-minded videos; Franchi heads Restore the Republic, an antigovernment "Patriot" group with militia-like beliefs.

The minute film opens with newsreel footage of Japanese Americans being forced into internment camps on the West Coast during World War II and a narrator declaring that after the Sept. Many of the purported detention camps are supposedly on military bases around the country, including some that are closed.

The radical-right conspiracy theorists say that nearby railroad tracks and aircraft runways near many of these sites are proof there are FEMA camps in the vicinity, because this is how prisoners will be easily moved. They also claim that razor wire atop tall fences around some of these facilities provides a key clue to their real purpose.

Red: You are shot in the head immediately. Myth at Maxwell On a long list of murky origins that regularly circulates on the Internet, Maxwell Air Force Base is identified as already operating a civilian prison camp with a small support staff and inmate population. But one of them shot a nine-minute video that appeared last year on YouTube and had been viewed by 1, people at press time. In it, the unnamed videographer locates what he thinks must be the spot. He eventually videotapes what he describes as a watchtower, dozens of large tents, an old ambulance, and what he says are picnic tables and games on the other side of a six-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

In a silent, isolated corner of Maxwell is indeed the supposedly ominous tower, perhaps three dozen tents and other structures shown in the video. Some days, the only sign of life here is an occasional jogger. The place looks about as sinister as a deserted summer camp. There is razor wire atop the six-foot tall chain-link fence, but it is facing outward. The Air Force is trying to keep people out, not in.

Mark Ramsey said during a recent tour of the site. On a degree morning this January, Air Force personnel were going through drills. There was no evidence of a detention camp — but there were innocent explanations for everything the anonymous videomaker discovered. The watchtower? The tent city?

The ambulance? The picnic tables and games? There are benches in open-air shelters, but no picnic tables. They direct workers to staging areas on the base where they can coordinate efforts, collect supplies and respond to crises in the region, such as providing relief after a hurricane or tornado. Copies of the film were distributed in advance to civil defense officials and some television stations, and 15 prewritten newspaper articles distributed by FEMA covered much of the same ground.

The low-tech film featured only illustrations and animations of stick figures—no live action—because by the s civil defense planners had grown tired of retaping propaganda films every time fashion or car styles changed.

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Then would come detailed evacuation instructions: FEMA would distribute millions of preprinted brochures, perhaps going door to door or perhaps by distributing it with local newspapers.

They also took out ads in local telephone books. Together, FEMA estimated the multimedia campaign would boost survival rates by 8 to 12 percent. Even the evacuation of major cities like New York City were carefully planned.

However impractical in reality, there was no faulting the level of detail of the page plan for evacuating New York, which included both a primary plan and 11 alternatives. Each of the five boroughs would rely on different transit modes to evacuate over the course of precisely 3. The per-hour capacity of each road out of New York had been carefully calculated; prepositioned bulldozers would help ensure smooth travel, quickly removing disabled automobiles.

More than 4. Some 75, Manhattan residents would travel up the Hudson to Saratoga using three round-trips of five requisitioned Staten Island ferries. Another , Manhattan residents would travel by subway to Hoboken and be loaded into boxcars for the trip to upstate New York near Syracuse. Each host area was expected to absorb five times its normal peacetime population in evacuees and, after registering, all evacuees would be directed to and housed in the various government, community, or commercial buildings identified by the FBI in Project Many local leaders were understandingly dubious of the FEMA plans—even on paper they seemed difficult to coordinate and implement.

In October , as the autumn foliage began to turn in the Green Mountains, local officials from Connecticut journeyed north to Vermont to familiarize themselves with the locations where , residents of the Nutmeg State would evacuate if plans were activated.

Across the state line in New Hampshire, locals in Barrington looked at the pitched roof of their congregational church, some 40 feet off the ground, and wondered exactly how Washington bureaucrats expected them to bury the church under a foot of dirt to provide the adequate fallout protection required for a portion of the 8, residents of Monroe, Connecticut, who would be housed in the small town in an emergency. And what happened if the nuclear attack came during the roughly one-third of the year when the ground was frozen solid?

The facility had meeting rooms for the House and the Senate, a cafeteria, medical facilities, and dormitories so elaborately stocked that they even included the prescription eyeglasses for members of Congress.

When one Greenbrier executive asked why they were taking away the weapons cache, the head of Forsythe explained that FEMA feared congressional officials would descend on the facility to inspect it—and then raise the obvious question about how FEMA intended to use such weaponry on US soil.

For the Cold War, it had created a special mobile command centers, known as Mobile Emergency Response Support MERS units—eventually building some special vehicles and stationing them across the country at its regional facilities. It tried to repurpose them for natural disasters. Following Hurricane Andrew in , FEMA dispatched MERS units to help the residents of hard-hit Homestead, Florida, but found the vehicles were too high-tech to be of much use—the souped-up tractor-trailers could communicate on encrypted channels with military forces around the world but lacked the basic hand-held radios and telephones necessary to communicate with first responders down the street.

Its inadequate response to those public disasters made it an easy target for attack. We need food. We need water. We need people. James Lee Witt seemed perhaps an odd fit at first. A Skoal-dipping son of a farmer who became known in the capital for his ostrich-skin boots and Southern drawl, he had never graduated from college, but he had a forceful personality and a strong background in emergency management from Arkansas.

FEMA streamlined its public mission to just four priorities that would become familiar hallmarks in the years ahead: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Witt launched a public relations campaign on Capitol Hill to reassure representatives and senators that their states would get the help they needed. Quietly, the agency had mothballed relocation sites and put into standby many of its nuclear war preparations—or repurposed them to deal with natural disasters.

FEMA updated the MERS command posts to be useful for civilian emergencies and deployed 43 of them to help communications during massive flooding in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the agency was getting downright innovative as well as effective. As part of its response to the Los Angeles earthquake in , it distributed assistance forms right in the daily Los Angeles Times to ensure as many people as possible could access help quickly. By the time George W.

Bush took over the White House, FEMA had the highest public approval ratings it had ever had—and was publicly known primarily as a natural disaster response agency. The agency manual, version And while conspiracy theories about the COVID pandemic having been "planned" have raged for more than a year, there is no evidence that this is the case.

The vaults are meant to protect interred caskets. In , Madison-based newspaper the Morgan County Citizen, debunked the claim and stated that Vantage leased the land and used it to store burial vaults. She also noted that there were 50, vaults stored on the property — far fewer than the hundreds of thousands that Jones had described in the video.

Ventura and Jones, who owns Austin-based InfoWars, a site known to promote right-wing conspiracy theories, also claimed that Vantage used to be owned by a company that had ties to Halliburton, a Houston-based oil and energy company once led by former Vice President Dick Cheney that held lucrative government contracts during the Iraq War.