Quick Picks: Army Suicides and FEMA Aid

by Alexandra Andrews
ProPublica, Feb. 9, 2009, 12:50 p.m.

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Quick Picks focuses on a select few of the day’s stories from “Breaking on the Web.”

Salon follows up the Army’s admission two weeks ago that suicide rates in the Army were at a 30-year high with an in-depth look at deaths at Fort Carson. In the first installment of a week-long series, a soldier who survived a suicide attempt reports that the Army’s mental-health program is a “joke.” The Army charged him with defacing government property after he scrawled his suicide note on the wall, and his mother was given a bucket of paint to clean it up.
FEMA denied 90 percent of 730,000 applications for housing aid in the wake of Hurricane Ike, the Houston Chronicle reported yesterday. FEMA hired temporary workers to inspect home damage, but the workers had varying levels of training and had to cover their own expenses. FEMA officials told the Chronicle that FEMA only pays for home repairs that aren’t covered by insurance, a “widespread misunderstanding” that accounts for the “high percentage of ineligible applicants.”

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