Everbody has good points all around. However, I am most appalled by the lack of response from the Department of Homeland Security. It seems like they have no idea that they are supposed to be in charge. FEMA and all the other agencies are supposed to work for them. They are supposed to coordinate all the involved personnel in a crisis exactly like this one. They have completley and utterly failed.
I saw the head of FEMA being interviewed by the Attack Chipmonk on Today this morning and he insisted that there were National Guard on the ground in New Orleans, that food was being supplied, that people were being gotten out—then they cut to news footage (current? A day or two old? I dunno) of people begging for food, water, protection, escape.
Who do we believe? Are we just not shown footage of people being fed and rescued because it’s not “sexy” enough? Or is Mr. FEMA lying about what’s going on because he can’t excuse why it’s not going on?
Here we are giving money to the Red Cross (the Red Doublecross, according to some), we’re volunteering our services and our apartments and clothes—but is that any use at all when our own government seems incapable of pitching in?
And don’t forget to turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater.
This is truly bizarre. Put food, water, medical supplies, and chemical toilets in the places your going to use as shelters. Hell, any Boy Scout could tell you that. Make sure that, if you call a mandatory evacuation, that you get the people to get the hell out. Sure, New Orleans is a big city, but you couldn’t put police and fire going door to door to get people out and take them to one of the shelters?
Hopefully FEMA will get its ass handed to it. I don’t know how much to blame President Bush (or any president) for this–bueracracy is bueracracy and I get the feeling that they would’ve been this incompetent no matter who was in charge.
According to some random guy
If this guy thinks something is wrong with the way things are going, I think we are allowed to critisize the government’s response.
I think criticism is entirely warranted. Bear in mind that:
[ol]
[li]A major hurricane hitting New Orleans has been on the shortlist of ‘terrible things that are certain to happen in the near future’ for a long long time[/li][li]Having one of more levees fail was pretty much a given[/li][li]What has happened isn’t even a worst-case scenario. What would things be like if Katrina had stayed as a 5 and run straight over the city?[/li][/ol]
This was a long-foreseen event that was not nearly as bad as it might have been, and still a complete catastrophe has ensued. A reasonable person might have assumed that somewhere there existed a big lever-arch file labelled “Hurricane hits New Orleans: Plan A” with fairly detailed, well worked-out list of things that needed doing, stuff that was available to do it with and who should do what. One might even posit the existence of additional volumes titled “Hurricane hits New Orleans while Mississippi is in flood: Plan B” , “Complete Levee Breach in New Orleans: Plan C” and so on… Instead it appears that there were some Post-Its with crayon scribbles.
On top of that, there seem to be considerable difficulties reaching the city because no-one took account of the fact that in the event of a hurricane hit and/or river flood, being able to reach the city easily was important enough to maybe warrant building some extra-beefy elevated roadways there. And maybe locating a couple of above-sealevel warehouses full of food, water and medical supplies IN the city would have helped? In hindsight it’s all obvious, but I cannot believe professional planners couldn’t have worked this out beforehand, so why the fiasco? I know the best-laid plans go astray etc., but surely getting enough components in place before H-Hour and then improvising throughout the chain of command can’t be THAT hard. Instead everyone outside the area seems to have been running around like headless chickens tripping over each other while the city regresses at the rate of approximately one century per day. So criticism of the preparation, execution and leadership of the response seems well in order.
As an aside - I appreciate that tropical heat and humidity don’t make physical exertion easy, but surely some of the able-bodied would have been able to walk/wade out of the city by now, leaving the rescue services to concentrate on the sick/elderly/injured and their carers? I know I can clock up 10 miles or more during an afternoon stroll by the Thames with my girlfriend, and over the course of a couple of days I would have thought I could get 15-20 miles out of the city even in the local conditions. Would that get me out of the immediate disaster area or are things so badly messed up relief isn’t even getting to the approximate area?
As one of the other posters said above, I cannot possibly understand the thinking that is preventing them from just dropping pallets of food and water at different locations around the city.
The statement of “too many chiefs, not enough indians” is exactly right. There should have been 5,000 troops on the ground there at the most 2 days after the hurricane hit to help restore order. Get the stuff there. I’m willing to be that if you get the food, water, and medical supplies to central locations in New Orleans, some smart guy on the ground would figure out how to distribute it.
I do think that the sheer scope of the relief efforts is what is causing the slow response. The smart guys getting paid lots of money are trying to figure out every single problem, and plan it’s solution down to the nat’s ass, rather than just doing something fast. I was heartbroken to see a man interviewed that had been sitting on the bridge right next to the Astrodome state that some woman had just had her baby die the night before. That man could see the damn dome from where he was, the news media is obviousely able to get to that spot, so why could medical assistance get there? Why arn’t ambulance and fire crews from other places in the country being flown in to help? Load a shit load of ambulances on a c-5 and fly them to the airport. Even if they can’t handle everything, at least the people that are in danger of dying because they can’t get a hold of fairly common medicine like insuline would be able to get some help.
I was willing to give them the benifit of the doubt for the first day or two. No way should this level of incompetance been going on for four damn days.
When you have people dying at the New Orleans convention center when photographers and news people are otherwise able to get there and document the event (see this morning’s Washington Post for an example - there’s a picture of an elderly man dead in a lawnchair just sitting there), any criticism of the government is warranted.
Not to go entirely off-topic with this, but you should have seen the head of FEMA being interviewed on Nightline last night. It looked like he got a prison initiation. When your best defense is “We didn’t know anyone was in the Convention Center. We thought everyone was in the Superdome.” there’s obviously a communications problem, which sits at the bottom of this whole mess.
I don’t know if it’s firefox, yahoo or just me but that link is seriously ODD! I get a different version of the story almost every time I reload it. Anyhow, from one version, which it took a dozen attempts to get a second time:
Or to paraphrase Mr Brown for most negative effect:
“We were all ready to deal with the hurricane, butonly if it was small and everything went well”
Nice work there, Mr Professional Disaster-Aftermath Preparer :rolleyes:
And a big round of applause for all those other senior apparatchiks who have stepped up to the mark and helped by all pulling together as a team and using their experience, contacts and training to create order out of chaos. Oh, er, hang on… :mad:
Spot on - improvisation is vital in a situation like this, because you can’t plan for chaos, only anticipate it. I would bet if you just called for volunteers with military/fire/police experience, gave them a radio and a pallet of supplies per group and told them to just improvise their way into the city and help out where they could, it would make a huge difference. No-one’s asking for perfection, just some semblance of authority and coordination, and bottom up would work just as well as top-down. I’d think Joe Redneck the ex-cop or Mohammed Sharecropper the ex-marine would be able to improvise the last few miles if you could just get the supplies to them.
From the AP:
That’s very nice, but today? Why the bloody hell wasn’t this done two or three days ago, when it was obvious to Ray Charles (who’s blind and dead!) that things were bad and getting worse?
Since everything’s pretty much been said already, I’ll just throw out one more point that occurred to me this a.m. –
Do you realize none of these people have not had their coffee? Just think of the crazy caffeine headaches, on top of everything else.
That alone would make me want to shoot at something.
Oh, lordie, but then we’d have to see the reality show, “Redneck and Sharecropper—Disaster Heroes!”
I’ve read this before but is this true? The impression I’ve been getting is that most of the news you got the last few days was from reporters who went there before the storm, to report on the storm. Certainly one of the more active ones I’ve seen on Fox was there being blown away by Katrina when it hit, I saw him being knocked down by a gust of wind in earlier footage.
Many of the roads and bridges have been washed away or are blocked by whole houses that washed upon them.
There’s a lot of failure going on for sure, and the flooding could probably have been prevented, but let’s not exaggerate by saying you can just go ahead and drive up there.
Today’s editorial in the NY Times, The Man-Made Disaster – here is an excerpt
I heard the head of Homeland Security (Chertoff) being interviewed on NPR radio yesterday afternoon (Thursday), and the interviewer kept telling the guy that there were at that moment thousands of people in the convention center with absolutely no water, food, etc., and they had been told to go there, and there were dead bodies on the ground, etc. And the Homeland Security guy kept insisting that they were sending help to everyone, basically trying to make it sound like everything was under control. The reporter kept insisting and asking when help would get to the convention center. Finally the Homeland Security guy said he had no heard anything about any people in the ocnvention center. He sounded like he practially didn’t believe the reporter that anyone was there.
Thank God for a free press!!!
A quote from the Mayor of New Orleans.
:mad: :mad:
Besides, isn’t the Mercy stationed in San Diego? I can see sending the Comfort out of Baltimore, but they’ll never get the Mercy there in time for her to do any good.
While I’m glad he’s tearing Washington a new one, I wish he wouldn’t make this a racial “evil white people don’t care if black people die” issue, which it is not. There are plenty of white people stranded, starving and dying, in Louisiana, too. he’s only making things a lot worse by inventing an issue that doesn’t exist and pitting people against each other.
Here’s a link to the NPR interview with Chertoff (Sec. of Homeland Security) . Click on the link that says “Listen” just under the headline. It’s really worth listening to. The guy is in total denial.