Maybe her faith is misplaced, but her anger is placed exactly where it belongs.
I am pretty sure there are a few people in Mississippi, Alabama, and to a smaller extent Florida would probably like to educate you. If you want to give a pass on those ultimately responsible, you have to give the same on those whose mandate is for support purposes to those you give a pass on. Just because LA couldn’t handle it on their own, does not mean they abdicate responsibility to the feds. It means they must ask for federal help.
I don’t give either any slack. This is a * clusterfuck of biblical proportions * and I don’t feel like patting anyone back over this.
Stephe96 is a real jackass, but he is right that there’s plenty of blame to go around for this on a multitude of levels. From just a few hours of watching the Dicovery Channel, I, a Denver native and life-long resident, have known that New Orleans was seven ways from fucked if their levee system failed because the entire city is below the water level of Lake Ponchatrain, the Mississippi river, etc. I heard about the evacuation order on Sunday morning, and the first thing I assumed was that every available public vehicle was being used to shuttle residents out of New Orleans. When I saw Mayor Nagin’s press conference and he read the declaration of a state of emergency, I assumed that this meant that the state would be commandeering private bus lines, etc. as well. None of this fucking happened. All of this occurred well before the Fed’s could have reasonably been expected to respond, and people died because of it.
This was the fault of Governor Glanco and Mayor Nagin. The atrocious response to the disaster afterwards? The Federal Government and in some ways including the Shrub in Chief.
The local government is supposed to have the recources in place for this type of activity. Do you honestly think the federal government has personnel and equipment located in every city of the US in order to handle disasters? Of course not. The cities themselves do
Imagine you survived the blast. Your house is damaged and your children are trapped in the rubble. Your cell phone, miraculoulsly, is still working. You need to call for help. Whom do you call: The local fire dept,local police dept, or Washington DC?
In the case of an atomic bomb, the feds would need to be involved immediately for several reasons:
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The use of a radioactive material in the commission of a terrorist act, which would violate several FEDERAL statutes. The material itself is a federally controlled substance.
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The terrorists might have international connections, which further gets the Feds involved.
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Radiocative material posing a countrywide danger.
None of these issues are applicable in a hurricane.
Prior to 2001, one of FEMA’s support roles was Project Impact which provided mitigation plans for communities to help assess their weakest points and specifically plan to address them. Project Impact had several notable successes in the late 1990s. It was one of the first departments within FEMA that was disbanded under the current administration.
As a substitute, FEMA directed states and cities to compile their own mitigation plans in conjunction with existing FEMA departments. The Louisiana director of the concerned state organizations has noted that the requested funds to carry out that planning was slashed out of the Federal budget.
This, of course, does not give a pass to the governor and mayor. They may have not had the funding to plan and prepare for relocation centers in advance of a storm, but they sure as heck could have arranged to have the RTA and/or Board of Education busses organized to pick up as many people as possible and move them out of the delta. Even if that fleet had run out of fuel with no adequately prepared destination, the people aboard would have been away from the flood waters with roofs over their heads.
While reduced funding is often claimed as a reason why X, Y, and Z didn’t happen, it’s a poor excuse, at best. Many programs have been offered at the National Emergency Training Center in Emmittsburg, MD since the property was acquired during the Carter administration. Both the National Fire Academy and Emergency Management Institute provide training for firefighters, first responders, fire officers, and those tasked with planning responsibilities. Courses range from weekends through multi-week resident sessions in addition to online learning opportunities. Had the NO parties responsible felt sufficiently motivated to have a working plan in place, they could have done so at a minimal cost. It’s easier to cry that they were left holding the ball by the Feds, though.
Wonder if Stephe96 will respond to this technical glich in his thesis.
BTW, according to the New York Times the Director of FEMA has admitted that he and the other feds didn’t even know about the starving and the dying at the Convention Center until Thursday. Something makes me think they just weren’t paying attention.
I’m certain that there are things that could have been better on the local levels – there always are. I just don’t know yet what those things are. New Orleans has a large population that lives below the poverty line and Louisiana is a poor state. You can’t just will the people to be able to leave.
It is also hard for me to hold the people who are within the area that is devastated 50% responsible for providing food, water, medicine, and rescue operations. Where was the food, water, and medicine to come from – the local grocery stores? the corner drugstore? the next county? a neighboring state?
The area that was devastated is the size of Great Britain.
You’re correct-you don’t will people to leave, but your plan has to determine:
How many people will need to be moved?
Of that number, how many are special needs? How will those needs be met?
How will they be moved? Vehicles/vehicle support/operators?
To where will they be moved? Location and route?
Alternates if aspects of above aren’t plausible at emergency ops rollout?
Along with all of the above, there’s an exhaustive list of who what when where howquestions. Based on your location and a worst case scenario, if it will take the Feds 72 hours from request to deployment, your plan better contain everything necessary to keep things from turning to shit for 96 hours, because something will go wrong. If that means bottled water, porta johns, pallets of MREs, and toilet paper from 5 different vendors, you put it in your plan and get it rolling when things start to look ugly.
It is the responsibility of the local officials to keep things from falling apart. It’s a trite saying but true: Failing to plan = planning to fail.
The federal government has an essential role in disasters like Katrina because it has resources the cities and states don’t have, like hospital ships, aircraft, and large amounts of money. What the city and state did is a separate issue. It’s clear to almost everyone that the federal government stumbled badly, and much of the blame leads directly to the cronyism and stupidity that history will condemn the Bush administration for. The excuses and the bullshit have finally worn thin on the American people. That sonofabitch in the White House puts the “lame” in “lame duck”. He’s got a million people with nothing left to lose who hate his guts now. That’s not a particularly safe position to be in.
I’ll say it one more time. Had the mayor and Governor Blanco implemented and enforced their own evacuation plan then the federal response screw-ups would have been irrelevant.
That’s a complete load of bullshit. Even if state and local officials had performed flawlessly, there would still be large numbers of people in dire straits for FEMA to fuck over.
Just want to call out the point that you are saying all **local governments ** should have the resources in place for a nuclear attack. Yeah, right! Somebody better tell the good folks un Puxatawney, I don’t think they have their missle shield up yet.
Have you actually looked at the DoHS web site? Take a look at this page and tell me what you think. Here’s an excerpt (bolding mine):
So basically, you’re entire argument is wrong from top to bottom.
Your confused. The Federal Emergency Management Agency - a former independent agency that became part of the new Department of Homeland Security in March 2003. Meaning that when DoHS annexed FEMA, they also became responsible for their duties.
That is from the same site you linked to BTW. Notice my quote says “assist”. Legally the feds cannot assume primary responsibility over the state. Posse Comitatus forbids the Federal Government from using the military for law enforcement in the US. Only national guardsmen under the authorities of their governors can. And then you get into a bunch of State’s Rights issues too many to count.
Even though your quote does not make it clear who’s responsibility it assumes after that date. It could only be the ones FEMA already had before it was adopted into the DHS.
Huh? How am I confused? This is exactly what I’ve been saying since my first post in this thread, where I said “the DoHS is supposed to direct FEMA in the case of hurricane disasters like Katrina.”
Nothing you’re saying contradicts anything I have said. The DoHS failed to provide assistance for several days. They were supposed to have a plan in place for precisely this circumstance; if they had such a plan it was not executed upon. They are the ones ‘primarily responsible for ensuring that the emergency response professionals are prepared, and a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large scale crisis.’ The emergency professionals were not prepared, the federal response was not comprehensive or coordinated, and it was also late.
We really, really need an effective Department of Homeland Security. I was under the impression we had one. Obviously we do not.
Not only is the Bush Administration starting to blame the locals, but they are doing it in their same style - they are lying their weasely asses off.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_04.php#006418
This is why we have had shit-sucking posters here calling for a delay in the valid criticism of the Bush administration. They needed time to get their lying smear messages out. It’s all the same MO - a senior White House official, on background, lies his fat little ass off, the press mindlessly licks it up, and the right wing propaganda machine disseminates it happily. Eventually, we get fuckers like the little brainless turd burgler Stephe96 spouting these lies as fact, and public opinion is swayed.
Fuck you, you weasel ass sucking GOP cock whores. There is ample blame for the outcome of this disaster to go around, and you share a part of it. Your support for this neoconman administration allowed the looting of New Orleans (and FEMA) to begin many years ago.
How could it possibly be irrelevant? If the locals failed, that’s one thing. That’s a local clusterfuck. But when the feds, the very same feds who have been going on for years about how 9/11 changed everything and we created an entire Cabinet level department to deal with major threats and disasters: when THAT proves to be little more than a wet blanket, that’s a pretty big deal for our entire country. Get it now?
I wonder if any of this was implemented:
http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdf
While I agree that the local gov’ts should have done more, I think this disaster was beyond the capabilities of the state of Louisiana to handle on their own. I don’t think that if Nagin and the governor had done what they were supposed to that they wouldn’t have needed the feds, but they might have lessened the fallout.
It takes time for the fed gov’t to get moving. That’s why New Orleans and Louisiana should have been better prepared to hold things together until Washington could arrive.
Hmmm. You yourself said in posing the hypothetical that “the effect would be similar” to the hurricane. If that’s not true, then what good is your hypothetical?
As pointed out by AFAIK, you are extrapolating well beyond the text of that manual. You make it soulnd like the local authorities can just sit back and watch in the event of a disaster as the feds come marching in to save the day.