Out of Bush, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, and the LA governor, I’m thinking the answer is literally in the middle. Brown’s one and only job is disaster preparedness. Bush has got stuff like wars and Social Security to worry about. Blancko has stuff like education and the state economy on her plate. What does Brown have to worry about besides responding to epic-proportion crises?
I do. Hurricanes don’t recognize state boundaries. In the case of Katrina, when the local and state governments and infrastructures are swamped with catastrophe, why would we expect the little guys to have the resources to handle the situation better than a federal authority? The feds have more money, more power, more expertise, more awareness of what is happening beyond the state-level, more opportunity to connect the dots, and better access to resources such as helicopters and National Guard units.
The state plays an important role when it comes to the prevention of catastrophe, but they are inherently limited in what they can do after the catastrope occurs. What we saw with Katrina was failures on both the prevention and response side of things. FEMA dropped the ball with regards to response. The state dropped the ball wrt prevention.
I counted over 200 buses in that photo and that wasn’t even the whole busyard.
200 buses x 50 folks = 10,000 people evacuated MINIMUM.
That meant that the Feds would have only had to screw up handling 90k MAXIMUM instead of 100k residents.
I don’t care what side of the fence you’re on, that was a major fuckup. If you said that it wouldn’t have mattered if it was 90k (or less, depending on the TOTAL number of buses that are actually in the busyard) or 100k, you tell me with a straight face which number of people you would have picked (if you were the President, head of FEMA, National Guard, Governor, Mayor, Grand Poobah) needing rescue, shelter and supplies.
Obviously, the overall situation was magnified by the local fuckups multiplied by the fed fuckups. If there were 10k less of people to handle, then the overall situation would have been easier to handle, not the same as others have stated.
Again, I go back to the 200+ buses…a WAG estimate of $5M of value to the city’s school system, the fuel inside them that is now leaching into the water adding to the toxicity of the floodwaters, sitting there because of what? Becuase someone didn’t give the order to use them? Who would that be? :dubious:
I think you could call that a picture of 10,000 names.
It almost would resemble the picture of the inside of the Superdome with 10,000 refugees.
I think you guys are missing the point if you still expect the FEMA director to be the crisis management guy. He’s going to be distracted with a million other problems. It has to be someone who can “drop everything” and concentrate only on the crisis at hand.
As for making the project manager a federal person… Yes, disasters often affect more than one state, but I don’t think you understand the ramifications of turning over all the state employees to federal control. I doubt that any state would agree to do that. Major ports may in fact affect the whole nation, but they are still owned and operated locally.
Now the hurricane is over, houses are under many feet of highly contaminated water, bodies are floating down the streets, and the city is on fire, but still people won’t evacuate.
*Many residents have refused to leave New Orleans despite a mandatory evacuation and warnings from government officials that staying in the flooded city represents a health risk. *
This evacuation nonsense is a smokescreen to deflect the criticism off of FEMA. The people who wanted to evacuate but had no transportation were the ones at the Superdome and the Convention Center.
And do you think that those buses that were in the SAME city could have been used to load the people at the Superdome and take them out of NO before the hurricane hit? Or the convention center?
IMHO, this is no smokescreen…somebody on the local level dropped the ball early on. FEMA has it’s own problems to be accountable for. Do you remember after the storm hit that the mayor was screaming for buses to come and pick up the refugees?
Leadership was missing on all levels here. The bus issue was one that could have kept 20,000 people from experiencing what Katrina dished out in the first place. Just wondering what the distance was from that busyard to the Superdome…maybe 5 or 10 miles at most?
Yeticus, while I admire your efforts at reason, many here will have none of it because it fails to support their preformed conclusion that Mr. Bush is responsible for all that is wrong with the universe. The notion that a distribution of fault isn’t good enough, because when the tar kettle is hot and chickens have been plucked, the mob must have their scapegoat. Why investigate when they have the guilty party identified?
don’t bother pointing out the obvious. The only defense they have for the abysmal ‘performance’ of the administration is this sort of hand waving straw man. god forbid the administration be held accountable for it’s actions/inactions.
This blog does a very good job of explaining the National Response Plan, how and when it gets invoked, and whose responsibility things moving forward from that point is:
I have seen this reported a whole bunch of times, but it simply isn’t true. According to this letter sent from Blanco to Bush on the 28 she clearly states that an emergency was declared on the 26th which was Friday. This is a day prior to all of the Right wing nut jobs on the radio saying she didn’t so anything until Bush asked her. She even had a clean-up budget, for crying out loud. Granted, she didn’t anticipate the levees breaking, but it’s not like she sat on her hands.
OK, even better. She had three (or two-and-a-half) full days to implement her own evacuation plan. She didn’t do it. Nagin had over 200 school buses right there to begin moving people who had no other means of transportation to higher ground. He didn’t do it. Do you really think it’s a “fallacy” that hundreds of school buses went unused in the days leading up to this disaster?
Is it fun being a liar? Almost no one here is supporting the position that the state and local officials screwed up. No one is harping on that because a) it’s uncontroversial at this point and b) they are certain to be held responsible.
But then there’s people like you. Who’s sole purpose seems to be to make sure that the federal response was faultless. And people like you are precisely the reason others get so worked up about pointing out that it was not. Because people like you will offer apologetics while the country burns, and nothing will ever get done to address the problem.