I read the following paragraph in this NY times article before Katrina hit Florida.
This article details the preparation for the four hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004.
What exactly was Bush’s preparation for Katrina hitting New Orleans? Were there prepositioned supplies and troops? Is there a discrepancy between how Bush gets involved in Florida hurricanes and how he reacted to Katrina in NO?
Not sure but National Geographic did a pretty good job describing the storm a year before it happened. Too bad nobody, including the Sate and Feds did much to prepare for it.
There were 10,000 National Guards troops sent and available on Friday, but they were not put into the city until the following Thursday, well after the young hoodlums had broken into the gun shops.
In San Francisco after the '89 earth quake, they were all over the Marina District and other strategic locations in less than 48 hours after the quake. (cite: personal observation; they may have been there in 24 hours but I hadn’t circulated then.)
I have seen increased police presence in areas in anticipation of civil unrest.
Law enforcement professionals and disaster management professionals are aware that disasters are frequently followed by civil disorder.
Unfortunately for New Orleans, neither DoHS nor FEMA seem to employ disaster management professionals.
According to the Red Cross, in this item from their web site, the Red Cross had relief supplies for people in New Orleans. The Louisiana National Guard and local police would not allow the Red Cross to enter the city to distribute supplies. Interesting.
Bush? Bush? What the hell did the state of LA and the city of NO do for the last 150 years or so to prepare? Why would anybody build and/or live in a city below sea level when it is common to have hurricanes and floods on the Mississippi every year, and then not have a viable evacuation plan?
Next the liberals will be blaming Bush for not stopping Katrina or diverting it to Mexico!
That’s the old “junk yard dog” approach to a question.
Don’t answer it-just redirect it away from the subject,speak through clenched teeth and hope folk forget what the question was!
But,above all,-do NOT answer it!
MOved this one to Great Debates from General Questions.
Somehow I just knew that political threads can’t be answered in a GQ setting.
samclem GQ moderator
No. That’s pointing out an obvious bias in people’s comments. Why is everybody jumping on Bush and ignoring the mayor and governor, whose actions and inactions are at least as responsible for the tragedy as Bush’s, and likely moreso? (Why, for example, was the Louisiana National Guard preventing people from leaving the city and preventing aid from entering? Could the state government have been hoping that a little more time might help them to get rid of a few more undesirables?)
Why doesn’t Diceman read the other posts in the thread?
It would certainly be inaccurate to claim that only the Bush administration and federal agencies are responsible for mismanaging the disaster. But there’s nothing wrong with focusing a debate specifically on the topic of what the feds did wrong.
If you feel it’s so important to balance this debate with a discussion about what state and local organizations did wrong, by all means feel free to start a new thread about it. But if you insist in hijacking this debate—which clearly is specifically about Bush’s actions—you definitely give the impression of an apologist attempting to deflect attention from awkward questions, as Ezstrete pointed out.
Because Mr. Bush sold himself as the responsibility president:
President Bush Pushes for Homeland Security Department
President Marks Homeland Security’s Accomplishments at Year One
The Department of Homeland Security
No one can sell themselves as the responsibility president, and then get off scott free when those responsibilities are badly muffed.
But don’t the local and state officials bear some (if not most) of the responsibilty for making sure their own state is buttoned up?
New Orleans had a disaster plan in place, including how to use buses to evacuate those without transportation. It was not followed. The day after Katrina hit, the Coast Guard had already rescued 1200 people.
Blame Bush for appointing an unqualified person to head FEMA. But you cannot ignore the incompetence at the local and state level.
Sure they do, but most of us americans never heard the governors of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and the mayors of southern cities tell us over and over that their most important responsibility is to protect and defend the American people.
The blame goes a lot further than that. A robust emergency response system should be able to tolerate a few incompetents at the top. FEMA clearly can’t, and yes, the governors and mayors should have done better too; but when disaster comes to my city, I’d like to have some confidence that my competent mayor won’t be fucked over by an incompetent federal bureaucracy.
What should he have personally done to prepare for Katrina?
So why it is that when a FEMA report from before September 11, 2001 detailed:
“the three most likely catastrophic disasters that could happen in the United States: a terrorist attack in New York, a strong earthquake in San Francisco, and a hurricane strike in New Orleans”
that FEMA was shown to be so incompetant recently?
Do you consider Nagin to be competent?
if the state or local gov’t was acting in a manner that would prevent aid from getting in then it is the job of the commander in chief to over-ride that decision. bush has shown himself to be willing to step in an steer state legislation (e.g., schaivo case) and to either be unaware or silent in the case of NO is inexcusable.
or am i misinterpreting the duty of “commander in chief” which appears to presently mean “ignore the details and delegate to incompetent nepotismically-appointed friends”?
It is not that simple for presidents to “step in” as you say. President Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act to take control from Gov. Blanco.
The Schiavo matter was not a state vs. federal issue. It was a private matter that got dragged through the courts, and while the federal gov’t tried to get involved, courts ultimately decided they had no jurisdiction (IIRC) in the matter.
As you said in xtisme’s thread, he’ll probably lose the next election. Perhaps he should, but that means little to me a thousand miles away as I am. He can’t keep the red cross out of my town, or whatever, but Bush, Homeland Security, and FEMA can. That makes their screwups more important to me than Nagin’s screwups. I think we both agree that there are plenty to go around.
Not sure if this has been cited yet in this debate, but thought I’d give Factcheckers take on the levee failure aspects of Katrina.
Anyway, I just wanted to add this to the mix if it hasn’t been already.
-XT