Resolved: We Will Not Slam/Praise Adequacy Of Disaster Response Immediately

Great Debates
1

What I’m seeing a lot of is like the self-righteous types who couldn’t scramble to their keyboards fast enough to blame Bush and the U.S. for their “shameful” and “pathetic” response to the tsunami (which didn’t take place in America, BTW). The U.S. ended kicking in what most people (except those who think we need a systemic redistributive transfer of wealth to the Third World on general principle) would agree was an ample, generous, in some cases excessive (as in, incapable of saving any marginal lives, as in, we read stories of relief workers without a whole lot of relief work that needed doing) response in terms of manpower, money, and materiel.

I’ve been through a Category 5 hurricane. I know the unpredictability of these things – a storm that’s churning with 70 mile winds toward Miami one day can be menacing Galveston, or the Yucatan, or Pensacola, with 160 mph winds 36 hours later (not too different to what happened with Katrina). You can’t post a ton of materiel and soldiers in every city on the coast. You may prepare for one thing, and get another (in Andrew, the evacuation and preparation were directed largely to flooding, of which there was very little, but not to intense wind). It’s difficult to imagine, till you’ve seen it, just how hard it is to assess damage and triage and plan for response in inherently-unique circumstances coming from each disaster. But, be that as it may. We will posit that there are “adequate responses” and “inadequate responses.”

So my GD here is not over whether the “Bush response” to Katrina was or will be “adequate” (and I don’t want to get down in the gutter with freaks who want to think that Bush has forced blacks to resort to systemic cannibalism). I don’t even want to debate whether the fed. govt is “supposed to” prevent or cure every harm from natural disasters.

I just think past experience indicates that those of us who are not actually in moment-to-moment command of disaster response (these people might hence have a real immediate need to find fault and address it in the short term) do not need to, and cannot with accuracy or fairness, begin assessing, lauding, damning, or flouncing about in moral superiority, with respect to the adequacy and good-intentions and could-we-have-done-better issues in a particular disaster. So – can we suspend judgment for – let us say – 10 days? Yes, we need to monitor our public officials but, really, most of of us are not disaster relief experts, civil engineers, or epidemiologists, and our kneejerk reactions are neither likely to be helpful nor particularly informative. That, at least, is my proposed conclusion.

2

Knock yourself out, but when POTUS speaks patent untruths (“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”), when the head of FEMA is less informed than your average CNN viewer, when the DHS clearly does not live up to the expectations any normal citizen would have in its first real test of emergency responsiveness, I say we’re obliged to have our elected representatives know our grievances immediately.

3

I’d say that the response and just sheer breakdown of our relief coordination over the last couple of days is more than clear enough for some criticism, even from laypeople. We may indeed not know all the specifics. But we do know that having a serious and professional disaster and national security threat response system in place was supposed to be priority #1 after 9/11. And there seems to be precious little evidence of it. What if this had been a terrorist attack? The actual cause of the disaster hardly seems to matter. The ability to mobilize the necessary resources immediately and professionally is something I think it’s pretty obvious most Americans expected. They aren’t seeing it, and they have every reason to complain. It’s already been days now.

4

A-fucking-men.

When the water is pumped out, a lot of journalists will make their careers by exposing people and agencies that have screwed up; they will do this by drawing on the expertise of people well acquainted with disaster logistics, and with a full understanding of the facts. They will make people on both sides of the political aisle look bad, and gore oxes at the city, state and federal levels; and this will be a very good thing.

But what’s going on now is simply ignorant, useless fault-finding based more on prejudice than knowledge.

5

[tearful wail]Won’t somebody think about the government.[/tearful wail]

6

Right now it is in the mayor of New Orleans political best interest to demand that the “feds get off their asses”, regardless of the reality of the relief effort. He gets to appear to be “fighting for the people” and “kicking some ass”.

And an aside to the looters…perhaps the relief effort would be a little faster in coming if aid workers weren’t fearing for their lives and in need of time consuming security arraingments.

Of course we’ll need a volunteer to break down the above sentence to a few simple phrases and share it with them orally. I think they might have trouble with some of the words.

7

Bullshit. It is five days after the fact. Why weren’t they in there on Wednesday with Zodiacs and johnboats getting the sick, weak, and elderly out to one of those “shallow-draft barges” they were so fucking eager to get back into the Port of New Orleans (and for which they reopened the Port on Wednesday?) Where were the amphibious APC’s? Where were the 65% of Louisiana’s, Mississippi’s, and Alabama’s National Guard units that still remain at home and on call? Why weren’t they there at least by Tuesday? This is a national fucking disgrace, and I will NEVER forgive this lax, blase administration for holding back-slapping press conferences praising each other’s work while somebody’s fucking grandma died of dehydration in a wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center.

8

In addition to trying to get a handle on the worst natural disaster in this country’s history, he has had his ass on a helicopter overseeing levee work and sometimes helping rescue people out of attics. He’s overwhelmed and desperate, and I’d like to see any human being on this planet do better in his situation.

9

Bullshit. Consider the soon-to-be-infamous “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees” mentioned by ArchiveGuy. Why would Bush say that? It’s obviously, blatantly false, even to the most ignorant viewer. There’s only one reason he should say it: He’s preemptively trying to avoid blame. And someone doesn’t preemptively try to avoid blame unless he knows there’s something he can be blamed for.

Bush and his team have royally fucked up, they know it, and they’re desperately trying to spin themselves away from the bullseye. There’s no other way to look at it. His statement is simply revelatory.

Right now, of course, the priority is not to roast the Chimp King for his obvious and inarguable failures. Right now the priority is to get hundreds of thousands of people the food and shelter they need to survive the next day, and week, and month. The priority is to regain control of a completely lawless city and end the reign of terror being perpetrated by thugs and lowlifes. The priority is to formulate a plan for recovering a crippled metropolis.

And then we roast the Chimp King, because he deserves roasting.

10

We had 36 hours notice for this event and this is the response we get. A terrorist event won’t have any notice.

People died of thirst in the street. The head of homeland security for Louisiana said that our response was inadequate. The administration cut the flood control budget for New Orleans. His own agencies warned of this scenario.

If I can’t criticize my government under these circumstances, it looks like I can never criticize it. I hope you remember this when a Democrat is in office.

11

Aside from the “Chimp King” rhetoric, you nailed it. I nearly screamed in rage when that arrogant, self-aggrandizing prick had the BALLS to mention Trent Lott’s fucking beach house, calmly, smirkingly assuring us that the Gulf Coast will be just fucking peachy soon enough. People are DYING, goddamn it. Stop thinking about mint juleps and sea breezes nad fucking DO something. GODDAMN IT.

12

Huerta88, you can’t let facts, reason, and rationality get in the way of a good old fashioned Bush bash! Why, these threads only come along once every…15 minutes or so. It would be a shame to see one torn away from us in it’s prime.

Never mind that the brunt of the blame lies squarely at the feet of the mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana for not deploying rescue efforts quickly enough, removing the emergency vehicles and schoolbuses instead of letting them get washed away and flooded like everything else, and mainly having NO plan for how to deal with such a catastrophe. It’s a lot easier just to blame boogeyman Bush.

I implore you, as a conservative Republican, please don’t deny me the entertainment of watching leftwing moonbat nutballs foam at the mouth.

13

This is a royal fuckup of monumental proportions and there are fewer and fewer true believers still swallowing enough KoolAid to actually believe that the Bush administration has shown some minimal level of competance in dealing with this tragedy. Wake the fuck up!

14

I gave up last night when report after report, including from non-news sources, came in of people dying where they were for lack of basic supplies.
The first water - THE FIRST WATER - was delivered to the Superdome last night. That’s 9/01, a Thursday, for a catastrophe that happened on Monday. The Superdome was where they told people to go. Those citizens had a right to expect that, having followed the advice of the authorities to shelter there, that they would get the stuff they needed to survive at that place.
They didn’t. People died as a direct result. That is a failure.
Making excuses for it is abonimable in the extreme.

15

Out of curiosity, has there been a precedent as to what is a reasonable timeframe to respond to an entire city being inundated with water and a population of half a million people or more being displaced? I mean what is the expectation? That the government should have swept in after the last clouds had parted and put people up in Westin Hotels around the country?

How long does it take to organize and assemble the hundreds of truckloads of supplies that are needed and then drive it to where it needs to go?

The Gulf Coast is not “like a Third World country”. It has essentially become a third world country overnight. Complete with lack of power, communications and transportation infrastructure.

And then there’s the people of New Orleans. Did people shoot at rescuers and mug tourists during the tsunami? Did any NYC cops desert the force on 9/11? I understand that it sucks living in a stadium for any length of time, but it was designated as a “shelter of last resort” for a reason.

That is not to say that things couldn’t have been planned for and organized better. But I think people need to realize that it really is almost impossible to plan for this level of destruction even what you suspect it’s coming.

16

I dislike Bush and have many substantive quarrels with his policies. The only place I part company with these insta-engineers is that I don’t think he, or the government, possess (quite literally) supernatural powers great enough to undo in one day what was done in several hours by a storm that expended [insert however many hundreds of Hiroshimas the meteorologists eventually tell us was the megatonnage of energy exerted by Katrina].

As noted in my OP, I was present in a Category Five hurricane. As with Katrina, it didn’t hit exactly where, or how, or when, had been predicted. Fair to say we were all taken aback. Fair to say we were without power for 12 days, without phone service for I forget how long, no running water for three days. The streets were covered with glass and metal shards so you’d get a flat tire about every third time you’d try to drive. Hell, I literally got lost in my own neighborhood because all the trees, signs, and other landmarks were gone. If the National Guard or the President had come looking for me (and they didn’t), they’d not have found me for days either. I don’t know if anyone ever did a damage assessment of our place – certainly not in the first three days. It was six weeks before we saw the insurance adjustor. I wasn’t looking to the federal government to save my bacon (it’s not the most intuitive thing to think that someone in Washington can or will handle these things, and there is no significant history of Washington effectively guaranteeing that Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen. What did (or could) Polk do when that really bad blizzard struck Maine in 1848? But . . . assuming that is the role of gov’t – they didn’t, and couldn’t, react much faster to an unknown, unpredictable, and evolving situation than they did. That there were not more fatalities in our case was due largely to the fact we weren’t living adjacent two and 8 feet below a gargantuan lake, and we didn’t have much rain-induced flooding.

Oh, by the way, Bill Clinton was President when that happened. Certainly I didn’t slam him for not coming out to personally pluck every endangered citizen off of their roof or whatever, though I had no particular liking for him. The response was what it was, and cost billions of dollars.

There is little doubt here that the U.S. will spend billions here too, as effectively as it can (which may in the short run seem frustratingly slow and ineffective).

I’ve been there. Most of the know-it-all disaster planners (unless they tell me otherwise) haven’t, and don’t know just how chaotic the situation is, just how poor communications are, and just how little incremental benefit can be gained in the short run by indulging in the hysterical urge to JUST DO SOMETHING – figuring out WHAT to do, and WHO of the dozens of federal and state and local officials will do it, and WHERE doing it will do the most good (rescue this guy from a floating cooler? Or send the manpower down to patch the levee? GOTCHA! We’re gonna second guess you from hindsight no matter which you choose!) is by no means as easy (even on the small scale of securing your family, home, and belongings in the midst of this confusion, let alone doing so for a whole city) as it seems from the armchair.

As someone noted, the blame game can and will be played ad infinitum later.

17

Oh good. The “not so hard on my Bush” cry gets its own Great Debate.

With the complete absence of personal responsibility on the part of today’s Republicans, all this really is is a stalling tactic. Wait a moment until we can get our story straight, throw a little mud in the water, forget the facts, and then point and cry that you all are still upset because you just hate Bush.

Remember, Bush resisted having any sort of 9/11 commission until the families forced him to. Then the Republicans were able to keep the focus away from the Bush administration’s use of intelligence in making the case for war.

This is the group that promised to deal promptly with the person who revealed the name of a covert agent. We’ve waited, and yet that accountability has not happened yet.

This gutless administration will never accept responsibility for anything.

18

Oh please stop this stupid shit. How the fuck long does it take to load some Polish Spring onto a helicopter from someplace, anyplace at all, and deliver it to the Superdome, where the people were TOLD TO GO???
How long? How long would it take you, if you were the President or the Governor?
That’s not second-guessing: that’s calling for common sense and common decency. This bullshit about engineering is a total and complete smokescreen.

19

If my OP didn’t make it clear (and it did) that I am calling for POSTPONING judgment rather than NEVER IMPOSING VERY HARSH JUDGMENTS, EVEN IF THEY LATER PROVE WARRANTED, my subsequent post about my dislike of Bush (hell, fifty other posts I’ve made on that topic) should have been a minor clue for you.

You reading this, or just letting the knee jerk as it will?

20

I read it, and I’ve read it a hundred times before, although, no, not necessarily from you. I look forward to the time you choose to provide us all with your critique of Bush’s planning for this disaster.