Looking for a facual answer.
Does anyone know Bush’s actual schedule from last Friday (August 26, 2005) through today (September 2, 2005)?
There are unconfirmed reports that Bush was in Arizona on Monday playing golf while the hurricane victims cried for help.
Any online cites?
Bush was in Arizona on Monday pushing his Medicare drug plan at a golf resort. I think it’s easy to imagine how “at a golf resort” was spun into “playing golf”.
It is even possible, I suppose, that he played a round of golf while there. I’m not sure what relevance that has to anything. The president has no magical powers to abate the winds and on Monday night there was nothing anyone could do but hunker down and hope for the best.
I don’t know. But I do know that he took time out from whatever he was doing to make a personal appeal to the Governor of LA and Mayor of New Orleans to make the evacuation mandatory instead of voluntary. Typically these things are voluntary and some sources I have seen indicate that may have been the case here as well if not for the president’s intervention.
I just heard audio of the mayor of NO that was asking why the Feds weren’t saving the day RIGHT NOW! It’s all Bush’s fault. Imagine the stress level of a job such as being blamed for everything that happens. Hell, I’d live on a golf course. :rolleyes:
You think that’s bad? You try wearing God’s shoes for a couple of days!
Even after the fact, there’s not a lot that can be done quickly. I’ve lived through a hurricane. I’ve seen what goes right and what goes wrong. Yes, a lot went wrong but you can’t rationally blame it all on the President.
The biggest problem is New Orleans city government had no effective plan to evacuate the city. An effective evacuation would have prevented the widespread suffering we’re seeing now. Basically all the city said before the hurricane was to get out. It didn’t provide needed transportation or housing outside the city for those who have no car or place to go. How many people is that? According to the latest estimate (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/22/22071.html) 27% of the city lives below the poverty line. 469,032 lived in the city which means about 127,000 people probably didn’t have transportation to get out of the city or didn’t have the money to afford a motel when they got there.
127,000 people that the city conveniently forgot about. Had they done proper planning they’d have figured this out and either had some way to transport these people out or had better and more numerous shelters set up and prepared for the potential influx of so many people.
As we’ve seen on CNN, the Superdome appears to be the main shelter. Was it designed to hold so many people for so long? Doubt it. Except for the main floor (the part with the Astroturf or whatever it is now), there’s not really a place for people to sleep. Think about the last time you were at a ball game or concert: could you sleep in those seats? (I didn’t take into account the main floor because New Orleans is below sea level so I’d expect flooding would remove the it from use.)
Does use of the Superdome as a major shelter sound like part of a plan or something that was pulled out of someone’s a** at the last minute? What else could the city have done since it knew it didn’t have a good evacuation plan?
They could have called the Feds for help prior to the storm. (example: the mayor in Charleston was on CNN asking for assistance days before Hugo hit.) Because of the way things are, it takes time to get a major recovery effort going. The President or mayor or whoever can’t ask for aid and realistically expect it to be there in 2 hours. Roads have to be cleared of debris so that the trucks can get through to the affected area. How long does that take? It also takes time to find the trucks, pack them and find available drivers to bring in the massive quantities of water, ice, and food from surrounding areas. Wish we could break the laws of physics to speed up the process but even the President can’t veto those laws.
There has to be a plan in place to distribute the food. (example: no distribution plans in Homestead after Andrew; donated food rotted under the humid Florida sun while people went without.) The places to pick up food and water have to be publicized before the disaster so people know where to go. Remember, after the disaster there usually isn’t electricity so you can’t rely on TV or radio to spread the word.
The Feds rely on the local governments in these cases. Washington doesn’t know the situation as well as the mayor and other local officials. The local government should know their city well enough to make rational decisions about disaster recovery, even if it means turning it all over to Washington to handle. New Orleans’ government didn’t prevent the suffering by effectively evacuating the city, nor did it ask for assistance prior to the disaster when it should have known it had no disaster recovery plans.
I hope you understand why you can’t rationally blame the President for the entire mess in New Orleans.
PS: I’m not blaming the current administration in New Orleans. New Orleans’ mayors have known they’re below sea level and Lake Pontchartrain for a quite some time. Disaster recovery plans should have been in place for decades with periodic updates to accommodate changes in the area.
Those are some excellent points. Apparently, FEMA didn’t know that the Convention Center was being used as a shelter until days afterward. But from what I’ve seen, it sounds like the Convention Center was declared a shelter at the last possible minute. The refugees who were interviewed said that there were no supplies there. Probably, no one in the city government ever told the feds about it. And others have questioned why busses weren’t made available to move the poor people to the shelters. Even if they could only run for a few hours before you had to stop service, they’d probably still have moved thousands of people to the shelters.
There’s lots of blame to go around, but it looks like a large portion of that blame has to land right on New Orleans City Hall.
It amazes me how people refuse to read the OP. 
This one is off track but I think answered.
Closed. samclem GQ moderator