Thank you, he is mostly an idiot but:
Really bothers the heck out of me also. lets see 100,000 divided by 50 = 2000
I know there were hundreds of buses, were there really 2000 or did he make this up. I know I have pitted the Head of Fema number 1 but I really think Nagin is #2 on the incompetant list. If 2000 buses were left unused to drown, I might bring him up even closer to Brown.
towards the end of his life, dr. martin luther king realized that it’s not black vs. white. malcolm x came to the same conclusion. many (if not, most) other civil rights workers come to the same conclusion. the fact is that more poor people tend to be black. the majority of the population, especially within the affected city are black people. now, if you are poor, you obviously don’t have resources to get out. long story, before getting on a rant is that the issue isn’t racism. it’s the ability of the common person, or even EVERY person, to self preservation. every person deserves a chance to be able to pick up their shit and run if there’s a particularly nasty storm coming. the way to solve this obviously relies on changing the attitude of a few groups of people (MUCH easier said than done). i’m sure the poor would have loved to have been able to leave the city. they couldn’t. i’m poor and white. i’d have been in the same boat (no pun intended). we’re ALL in the same boat. this affects us on so many levels, not because of gas, or the economy, or any other reason. this affects us because this stuff shouldn’t be as bad. if the department of homeland security wants every house and home to have some evacuation plan in case of a terrorist attack, is it too much to ask for the government (that’s government on all levels) to come up with plans to do the same? we are still running once a month air raid sirens, right? when’s the last time we had an air raid? it’s not “us” and “them” in ANY sense. it’s all “we”. united states mean united people. why must we find new and confusing ways to divide ourselves when the divisions don’t exist?
can we all agree that the situation was poorly (either very or slightly, whatever you wish to believe) handled?
I think overwhelmingly we do all agree it was poorly handled.
Its the how badly and who did the worst job that we don’t agree on.
I’m handing out blame personally to all levels of Government, the sheriff that prevented walk out evacuations and nut jobs that were shooting at helicopters.
I agree with the premise that the Federal response was top notch. By that I mean the use of National assets, people and equipment. The flip side of that coin was bizarre in it’s polar opposition. The Federal coordination of private and other-state relief was so abysmal as to defy description.
i’ve got a hard time agreeing that the response was top notch. was it top notch because of the lack of resources we had at our disposal? was it top notch because you don’t believe it could have been handled any better?
You’ll have to raise a specific point before I can address it. What resources do you think were lacking? And why do you think I’m of the opinion it couldn’t be done any better when I just got finished saying otherwise.
I’ve spent a great deal of time researching the processes involved with the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and would love to discuss them.
my bad. you did. apologies.
and, well, concerning katrina, i suppose i’d like to know, first off, what exactly was it that led to the city’s demise (other than location).
i suppose i’ve got a bunsh of questions, just let them filter their way on out. i just woke up from a nap.
amazing how we fight tooth and nail when we’re children to not take naps and then when we get to college, we revert back to childhood with nap time, cartoons, and wearing mittens.
You’re going to need those naps when you get to my age and then you piss away quality sleep time to watch Southpark.
Katrina was a substantial hurricane that would have killed many times more people if it were not for modern technology. What you haven’t seen in the news yet is a discussion about the lack of water control in the canals. If they had functional floodgates on all the canals they would have been able to prevent Lake Pontchetrain from emptying into the city. Had the full force of the hurricane hit New Orleans it would have topped the levee’s anyway but in this case it was the canal levee failure that did most of the flood damage. Instead of just the water from the canal filling the city the entire lake poured in.
From a logistical point of view the delay in rescue was a combination of City, State, and Federal screw ups. Instead of the evacuating people away from the hurricane (where the supplies were staged) the city relocated them to the high points within the city (thus exposing them to levee failure). This wouldn’t have been so bad but the local assets needed to complete the evacuation (school and metro buses) were lost in the levee flood. After that the rescue efforts were slowed due to rioting which was further delayed because the State would not release the National Guard for police work. The final delay in the week of screw-ups was a complete lack of coordination (by FEMA) of donated material and services. FEMA was great at directing military assets but out-of-state doctors had to fill out 60 page forms to qualify for duty. Rescue squads from out-of-state were exposed to the same vetting process. The same applies to people who put together truckloads of goods and drove down. FEMA acted as if they were using the same play-book for a military attack. They treated everything not specifically contracted by FEMA as a threat to the people they were supposed to help. The reaction by many of the people who tried to donate their time was “never again”.
And finally, the tremendous news coverage New Orleans received may have caused a shift in assets out of Alabama (which was hit harder by the hurricane itself). Without intending to do so, Media coverage may be responsible for politically restructuring the rescue.
I just wanted to chime in that this was a very solid and rational breakdown of the breakdown.
the next question then, magiver would be culpability. who’s to blame? should there even be blame assigned?
also, is this the product of creating stronger storms due to global warming?
from an ecological standpoint, how bad is this and will it get worse? i’ve heard about the plans to reset wetlands to pre-storm areas and levels and such and replacing natural barriers, but how long would something like that take?
given everything i’ve been told and what i believe, i think the budget for defense and military expenditures should be slashed. that money should have been funneling into social programs and fixing infrastructure. people ask where they money is going to come from, that they’d pay some higher taxes for a while to get it done, but bush claims he’s got a way to do it. if he does have a way to effectively do this, i’d love to see it. what i hope it ISN’T is just rubber stamping some checks to bounce and increase our wonderful deficit.
this storm is exposing basic ills about our society. it’s become roger ebert and richard roeper all in one when it comes to assigning critique. without this storm, people wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at any of the issues that have sprouted up.
i’ve said it before, i’ll say it again. with commercials playing that “new york city isn’t the target of terror, it’s america” and that “every home needs some sort of evacuation plan in case something should happen” even though the defense from some sort of nuclear blast or some sort of calamity would amount to “duck and cover”. should the city of new orleans, knowing it’s located at/below sea level have had plans to combat this situation? i know they’ve got pumping stations and they flood every once in a while, it’s the nature of the beast, but should this city, and every city, have plans to fix things when shit hits the fan?
The second question is one that scientists should be given full funding to discover rather than being a political football.
There should be blame assigned, not for the purpose of feeling good that we “found” the “culprit” but for the purpose of being sure that there is so much shame attached to the idiotic actions that future politicians and bureaucrats are more in fear of making stupid decisions than they are in fear of making unpopular decisions.
While I do not think this will happen, I think Mayor Nagin should find himself unelectable ever again, particularly after his anti-Federal temper tantrums following his own failure to get his people out of the city. This is more than compounded by his efforts to get people back into the still partially flooded city while there are active hurricanes and tropical storms still moving across the Atlantic and into the Gulf.
I am more ambivalent about the governor, because some of her stupider appearing decisions were based on actual bad things that have happened in the past when the Feds and states tried to “share” authority (and when states have allowed the Feds to hold the authority, only to have the Feds drop the ball). Still, she should suffer some repercussions for having not put more pressure on Nagin to act sooner.
To the extent that either the Federal administration or the Louisiana congressional delegates interfered with the ongoing upgrade to the levee system, begun in 1995 and halted after 2001, they should be held accountable.
(Claims that the proposed levee enhancements would not have survived a Category 5 storm are irrelevant. While Katrina reached Cat 5, the portion that crossed New Orleans was not as strong and the Lake Ponchartrain levee should not have failed.)
FEMA should be shaken up, completely. I have no desire to see Brown tarred and feathered (although he should be made to go find honest work for the first time in his life), but when FEMA solicits help from fire and rescue services around the country for the explicit purpose of handing out fliers with 1-800 numbers to people without phone service, and makes actual on-site volunteers fill out hours of meaningless paperwork and sit through anti-sexual harrassment workshops, that department needs to be overhauled, restoring it to the level of professionalism it had finally achieved by 2000. (And the President should shoulder the blame for putting political lackeys in that department, although I think Bush’s actual actions (as opposed to his photo ops) throughout this period have been fairly good.
I would also be interested in discovering whether the Gretna police violated any laws in their actions toward refugees–particularly reports that they actually entered New Orleans for that purpose. If so, they should be subjected to criminal prosecution.
i believe in science as well. i think our scientists should have free reign and enough monies to do research…and R&D and such. you know, actually performing science instead of, as you put it, playing political football.
i, for one, do want mr. brown tarred and feathered. i sympathize more with the mayor’s desire to get something done immediately after this disaster. you could say that as the government gets “larger”, i sympathize less and less.
i think this disaster really has exposed the system of political nepotism. it’s a bad thing to put lackeys in places where they have actualm jobs to do. i understand and realize that “to the victors go the spoils”, but simpletons can’t be put in places that have actual jobs attached to them.
i don’t know if these are actually bush’s actions. i honestly see him rather inept. i see the entire office of the president as a figurehead anyways, and not so much as a place of power. it can set an agenda and have things it wants to do, but it’s got checks and balances to go through (although the checks and balances get retarded when one party has congress, the house, and the presidency).
i think that in our beauracracy, and i think this is a common complaint whenever we look at red tape, we realize we need to simplify it. easier said than done.
Bush is reported to have called the governor and mayor two days before Katrina hit, asking that they change their voluntary evacuation to a mandatory one.
Despite claims to the contrary (and some foot-in-mouth talk about Trent Lott’s porch), Bush put in multiple requests to Congress for emergency funds at escalating amounts as the size of the disaster unfolded.
Bush specifically called on Nagin to not encourage people to return to the city prematurely–the people you now see in news photos streaming out of the city, again.
I am not one of his fans, but since the Katrina situation developed Bush has not done badly in terms of his actual actions (as opposed to his supposed actions).
Thanks.
Blame? It’s easy for me to pass judgement after-the-fact and I’m guilty of doing that in earlier posts. It’s kind of ironic that we blame the people we elect to do a job that requires nothing on a resume.
Decisions are based on planning, skill and circumstance. The Mayor of New Orleans was a former executive of a cable company. He carries with him the skills to produce a realistic city budget and to some degree he’s use to dealing with unforeseen problems. He was also involved with the hurricane test program (PAM) and had recently participated in a public service announcement on what to do in such an event (another ironic twist because it was supposed to be released this month). He understood the danger and presumably the “plan” as it was written. Reality bites when you have hotels and other businesses begging you not to evacuate the city unnecessarily. Follow that up with an emergency plan that is basically a suggested course of action, absent any real instructions. It’s the perfect recipe for a non-decision.
The next person in the chain of decisions to be made is the Governor. The responsibility to activate the guard is 2 fold: one involves relief efforts and the other police action. They are dealt with separately. Picture her watching the riots on TV while contemplating the use of National Guard troops to stop it. In a predominately black city it was a hot potato. Her decision was pounced on the next day by Rapper Kanye West who said “they’ve been given permission to go down and shoot us”. Ironically he was referring to President Bush.
The third person in the chain of decisions was the Undersecretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response. His appointment (by the President) lacked the credentials needed for the position. His law background led him to jobs in teaching (law), the Chairman of the Board for a power company and a failed run for Congress. His last job before joining FEMA was that of Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. He started out in FEMA as a General Counsel and eventually ended up on the Consequence Management Principals’ Committee. This was the policy coordination group for federal domestic response to attacks (developed after 9/11). This group acted on behalf of the White House. His association with this group may explain why the hurricane disaster was treated like a military attack. The vetting process to screen volunteers and supplies looked like it was designed to prevent sleeper cell activity. He was specifically tasked by the President to identify problems with the federal response plan and correct them. His specific failure in Katrina started hours after it hit. He directed that fire and rescue departments (outside the affected area) refrain from providing trucks or emergency workers without a direct request from state or local authorities. He wanted to avoid coordination problems (HELLO that’s your job) and any hint of federal overstepping of authority.
So there you have it. 4 government positions (including the Presidency). And with all the hemming and hawing over who does what, we still evacuated some 50,000 people from a city underwater and under siege. We had to drag equipment from all over the country to do it. The majority of deaths occurred as a direct result of the hurricane and flood and not from a delay in rescue. The world news outlets produced much opinion on the failure of the United States to care for her citizens. This in a century that saw 13,000 people die in France from a 2 week summer heat wave (it took the French Government 9 days to declare an emergency). Sometimes a little perspective brings things into focus.
Yes, maybe, I don’t know. We act as if we’re Adam and Eve and the World never changes. It will always change and we can’t stop that. We might be able to tweak it a little to our benefit. This is a subject unto itself.
in a roundabout way, i think was getting to the point that it’s almost unrealistic for a city to have to forsee EVERY disaster that comes their way. in new orleans’s case, an entire city with that close of proximity to the coast and being below sea level should have had some sort or definitive plan. obviously, such a plan would require practice.
does anyone know what municipal goverments in california do due to earthquakes or how they do in florida with hurricanes?
hell, i’ll even go so far as to ask if anyone knows what the japanese do when it comes to nasty storms. are they more preventative or reactionary? and how successful are they at it? and lastly, should we do the same, why or why not?
I’m glad that the idea that the WTC victims were mostly rich white plutocrats has already been debunked. I had to avoid this thread for days because of what it did to my blood pressure.
Anyway, now that the more sensationalistic stories about 7-year-old boys being raped and bathroom gangs in the Superdome have also been debunked, it seems other nations are indeed starting to look critically at their gloating after the hurricane. Good article in the Times about the French stand on race and how complex it is:
I kinda feel the same way about New Orleans but then I live in an area that was flooded on a multi-state area and did something about. It was in 1913 and the citizens of that era built a huge flood control system on a local level and it’s maintained locally through a special tax. Just seems like common sense.
I think you’ll find Florida more organized with hurricanes because they’re pounded on a regular basis. By default, the size of the storm dictates that the State involve itself in addition to local efforts.
One of the problems inherent in a disaster is the bottom up layer of government response. It has to be done that way because it would be tremendous financial overlap for larger governments to get involved on a micro level of rescue. Drilling it down to the smallest denominator, individuals have to react to their own situation. We can’t send in a million people to check on a population of a million people. Coordination from the bottom up will always be more efficient in both time and money.
With that said, you will have local successes and failures in a given state and the same for states within the federal government. It will probably break down by wealth because of the individual and the people they elect. Poor people will engage in higher risk to themselves because of a lack of skill and a desire to protect their property. That is a fact of life that you cannot change on a national level.
I’ve watched programs on earthquake preparedness and it was interesting how different towns had different plans for the same emergency. By default, the separation of local, state, and federal governments will maintain individual environments. I would not want it any other way. My local government’s efforts toward flood control are superior to any other and I don’t want state or federal interference.
well, so with that rationale, would fema just be a moneylender or just a force that organizes the national guard into action?
having mutiple goverments (state, county, federal, municipal, etc.) is one of those debates that our country has had ever since its inception waaaaaaaay back with the federal rights vs. states’ rights. i can see an offshoot of this situation transforming itself into the newest incarnation of that debate.
can anyone do some talking for how japan handles their storm disasters or how california handles earthquakes?
by the way, this is my first major involvement in these message boards and i’m pretty impressed by the level of discussion out there. good to hear there are people that do some thinking and help to spread knowledge, not bias.