Answer my question first.
The difference being that LA couldn’t have predicted a terrorist attack days in advance and adaquately prepared for it. See how one situation leaves them accountable, and the other doesn’t?
What question?
If you think the Civil war negated state’s rights, you are sorely mistaken.
If you think Al Quada Bombing a leve would have ipso facto imposed federal rule over Louisiana recover efforts,well I would have to ask for a cite.
I think the OP says ten days. Maybe that’s long enough to give some perspective, maybe no.
Reason? Simple – avoiding potentially-unfair and captious armchair kneejerk reactions (BTW, as of last Monday, before the levee broke, there could have been a different kneejerk reaction saying well, those poor SOBs in Mississippi took it on the chin, but the French Quarter looks okay, whew!").
Apart from avoiding undue sidewalk superinteding and divisiveness – no, I can’t come up with an apodictic reason for why people on the Internet absolutely cannot be permitted to start aportioning blame the day after what appears to have been an unprecedentedly-destructive storm within recent memory. All I can do is try to persuade. Partly because I find not-fully-informed faultfinding and evaluations kind of pointless. YMMV, obviously, but that’s what makes for a GD.
So I’m not sure I get your point – is it that people are bound to chatter (and fling blame) no matter what? Acknowledged.
My point is that I do not see what waiting does when discussing the issues as information arises. Discussing it now, as the news breaks, allows folks to interact with others having opposing viewpoints using current information. Waiting some arbitrary number of days means that some people will bookmark stories that push their hot buttons as they pass by, springing them on the board at a later date when searches for rebuttal information will be harder to find in the sheer volume of news stories.
I just don’t see what waiting accomplishes.
Oh well. This sounds like a tactical disagreement at most. The fate of nations doesn’t hinge on what people do or don’t refrain from posting too early.
The tsunami threads in particular struck me as a precedent of a similar waste of time given that most people (I think) eventually concluded the U.S. did what it could. But, if people found value in that (to me, ugly and premature) bickering and blame-apportioning, so be it, likewise here.
The loud and immediate outcry in both situations is precisely what shamed the Bush Administration into taking appropriate action after its initially inadequate response.
I strongly urge you to download and read the Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan. It is 45 pages long. It clearly identifies who is responsible for what, what the risks are to New Orleans in a Category 4 hurricane, and what the escalation procedures are.
To answer your questions above:
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The Mayor of the City of New Orleans is in charge of the city. It is the responsibility of the Governor to declare a state of emergency and ask for Federal assistance. FEMA is a contracting organization, who manages the effects of a disaster at the request of the local officials. FEMA has no jurisdiction unless asked by the Governor to act. The National Guard must be asked by the Governor to act. Standard procedure is that takes 48 - 72 hours for FEMA to mobilize.
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The Superdome was a Last Resort Refuge. The City did not provide any designated shelters. The city was supposed to be evacuated. The opening of the Superdome was authorized by the Mayor of the City of New Orleans. Keep in mind that the City of New Orleans was supposed to be evacuated, except for the Superdome, some hospitals, and some hotels. There were no supplies put in the Superdome for the evacuees. The City of New Orleans did not provide them with water, food, or beds.
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Read the plan to see what the ‘Plan’ was. What actually happened was very different indeed. Who managed the mandatory evauation? Who managed supply delivery to the Superdome? Why didn’t the city use the 250 buses to evacuate residents from New Orleans? Where were the notiousrly corrupt New Orleans police in all this? What provisions were made to house and feed the 2500 Louisiana National Guard in New Orleans during the hurricane?
Read the plan, and compare it to what actually happened. To blame the Federal Government for what happened is like me seeing a fire break out in my kitchen watch it spread from room to room, and after three hours calling the fire department after the fire has spread to every room on every floor. When the fire department arrives, I blame them for allowing my house to burn to the ground.
Read the plan.
Letter from the governor requesting federal attention and assistance dated **AUGUST MOTHERFUCKING 28.
Do you have page 2 of this letter? Page 1 ends with ‘I am specifically requesting:’
You can’t use the fact that Nestle ship over 700 MILLION GALLONS of bottled water each year, using a fleet of over 2,000 trucks to make it look like they could have got water there. But…maybe you can.
Here you go: http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20Relief%20Request.pdf
And while I agree with most everything in your post #68, I take issue with the last paragraph. It’s close, but not quite. Try this, instead. . .
You’re cooking and you notice acrid smoke coming from the oven – obviously there’s a disaster waiting to happen. But you’ve been negligent and don’t own a fire extinguisher, so you immediately call 911 and scream FIRE!!! In the meantime, you panic and forget everything you learned in high school safety class and suddenly fire is licking at the cabinets. Now it’s getting out of control and you’re powerless to do anything about it, but the fire department still isn’t there. Where are they? Well, they’re not out fighting other fires, they’re sitting around the station house debating who’s going to be in charge and generally running around like chickens with their heads cut off. In the meantime, 3 hours have now gone by and your entire first floor is engulfed in flames. You’ve run upstairs to grab your baby from his crib, but on the way down you see that flames are blocking your exit – you’re trapped. Eventually your house burns to the ground, killing you, your child and your pets.
Are you at fault for not owning a fire extinguisher? You’re damn straight you are. But the fire department’s job is specifically to respond immediately to emergencies exactly like this, and instead of responding they sat around playing politics, doing absolutely nothing until it was too late to even save the life of you and your child, even if the house would’ve been a total loss anyway. Now, instead of a kitchen fire requiring some structural repair, you’ve got dead people.
That’s actually more like it.
I can’t understand the governmnet-speak in this letter. It looks to me like the governor is requesting mainly funds for cleanup activities. Can someone who does understand this letter outline exactly how it does or does not request specific manpower and equpiment from the feds on specific dates?
Let’s see …
Huge Navy ship off the coast with ample water helicopters food corps etc. asking what they can/should do. Get no orders. Other mayors offer tanker trunks, ambulances staff, all to be self-suffcient. Offer declined except for one tanker truck. The average doofus watching the tube knows that people are in the Superdome, after all they had been told to go there and it was what the “tabletop exercise” had worked out. But the head of FEMA didn’t know. “No one anticipated that the levees might break” except that it was among the three most important disaster risks and even tour bus operators talked about it for years. But no plan on how to repair breaches if they occurred. Head of FEMA past job was managing a horse show association and he was fored from that. And on and on and on.
This was not a surprise terrorist attack. This was a natural disaster that everyone knew would happen eventually as sure as California will have an earthquake. The levees were known to be unable to withstand this sort of storm, even if upgraded the damage would only have been less. And this is our level of preparedness.
And apologists are making excuses?
There is plenty of blame to go around, that much is clear. From Bush to local authorities to the “you got it!” nature of who is responsible for what when of our current system. But the Feds bear the brunt because while they are not required to provide all the preparedness, it is their onus to make sure that the pieces are in place and that every bit is well articulated with the others. And that is where this ball was dropped especially badly.
Read the letter. Look at what she’s asking for. She knows what she’s asking for. She knows the difference between Federal funding and water.
In the letter of the 28th the Governor was asking for funding for debris removal. She didn’t say “We do not plan to provide any of our citizens with food or water. You will have to do that”. She didn’t say “The New Orleans Police Force is going to vanish, so you will have to provide for the basic safety of our citizens.” She didn’t say “We are not going to evacuate our citizens. You will have to do that.” She didn’t say “You might think we’d use even one of these 250 school buses in this parking lot in New Orleans Wrong! We’re not planning to use them at all! You’ll have to come in and evacuate our citizens by helicopter for us after the hurricane.” She is not yet asking for Federal Troops with shoot to kill orders against her own citizens because the local police are nowhere to be seen.
Click on the link to the picture of the buses above. It tells a big story. Why weren’t those buses used to evacuate citizens before the hurricane hit? Let’s do some math. 250 buses X 60 seats = 15,000 people per each convoy.
Sure, the Feds might have been faster. But nothing can make up for those three days lost due to local incompetence, whether at the city or state level. There were certainly breakdowns at the Federal level. But that is not why so many people who were not evacuated have died.
If a Category 4 hurricane hits New Orleans and a levee breaks and the city has been evacuated, then there is a large loss of property. If the levee breaks and the city is still full of people abandoned by their city, then there is a large, horrible, and very sad loss of life.
Please look at page four of Governor Bianco’s August 28th Request for Federal Assistance for Disaster Relief.
Look at value in the line item ‘Distribution of Emergency Supplies’ What has the State of Louisiana asked for? Zero. At that time, then, the State Of Louisiana was not even asking the Federal Government for money to pay for the distribution of supplies. Let alone asking the Federal Government to do 1st response supply distribution for them.
And yet not a word of that is a direct response to my counter-example, which you completely ignored. I don’t expect you to have followed every thread on this subject on the boards, but please allow me to give you some links to click, and stop presuming I haven’t seen the ones you’re directing me to.
Seems to me that one of us is still playing partisan politics and the other is objectively calling every single person and entity who dropped the ball on the very balls they each dropped, without regard to politics or party. It is possible that the Mayor, the Governor, FEMA, DHS & the President ALL royally fucked up their parts in this disaster. They all had a job to do, with specific guidelines on how to do it, and not a single damn one of them did what they were supposed to do, all the way up and down the line. Why that is so hard for so many people ON BOTH SIDES to fucking grasp is beyond my comprehension.
Might have been faster? The Army Corp of engineers knew about the breach in the canal Monday. It took them 36 hours to begin to respond. They are the ones responsible for the earthworks. If they had done their job in an expeditious manner, we wouldn’t have a flooded out city upon which to hang accusations of local incompetence.
Sorry, I didn’t see where you were asking me for a specific response to your example.
Can you define what doing their job in an “expeditious manner” is? I’m sorry, but I don’t think you have the authority to define that. I could be wrong. It is possible you are an engineer that is familiar with the capabilities and resources of the Corp regarding the levees, but I don’t think so.
From what I understand is that no one was expecting a break. Worse case was an overflow. Even as a layman I am scratching my head on how they could not have foreseen such a possibility. It’s just that your flippant remark that they could have just jumped right in and prevented the flooding right away is ridiculous.
However w do know that the locals had a plan to prevent most of the human suffering that did occur and they apparently disregarded it.