The culpability at the state and federal levels in the New Orleans assistance debacle (cont.)

POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Monday, January 27, 2025 15:27
VIEWED: 13072
PAGE 6 of 11

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Originally posted by SevenPercent:

In your little universe, Bush and the federal government get a free pass on everything, don't they? Just like I said, he could gun down a busload of nuns on Constitution Ave at high noon on a Sunday and you'd find a way to spin it.

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Religious zealots who've never held a paying job and have puritanical view on mainstream issues such as sex, capitalism, welfare, and violance; not to mention dressed in gang colors making their way to capital for unknown reasons on a day of spiritual signifigance to their religeon.

The question was about the biggest factor. I certainly agree that FEMA had administrative difficulties not addressed by its planning (I took the NEMS test and studied the National Response Plan, I know). Also there were certain legal issues that prevented effective response by federal military authority until Thurday night and Friday.

But I cannot help but come back to the Mayor of New Orleans lining up people by the tens of thousands outside the Superdome on Sunday and not using city and school buses to get some of those people out. He also directed his officers to concentrate on life saving (a laudible goal) and not looting which lead to widespread violence.

Nor can I overlook the fact that the Governor of LA failed to implement her evacuation until a last minute personal call was made to her from the President. She did not activate her emergency center until hours before the storm hit, she failed to include FEMA in her emergency center, she failed to make a timely deployment of national guard into affected areas, she did not enact an emergency order giving the guard power to confiscate private property (like buses) until Wednesday. She mismanaged the crisis at every level from 72 hours before until 48 hours after the storm hit. I don't know if she's republican or democrat, it doesn't matter, she screwed up from left to right and top to bottom.

The President, on the other hand, was on top of things as much as the President could be. He authorized the redeployment of military and federal assets before and after the storm. He coordinated with FEMA and the National Weather Service to issue the proper warnings and when they were ignored he made personal calls to the Mayor and Governor to get them off their asses. When FEMA's communication and management failed the President began making preparations to turn control over to the military and Lt. General Honore, but was unable to do so till Thursday night. The President directed efforts to coordinate interstate relief efforts and its no surprise that Texas, who emergency plans and capability the former Governor was most familiar with, was the first to come foreward with a state level response.

Lets face it, the President could save millions of people from the hands of a brutal dictator and you would find a way to spin it negatively. For most of you its not about the Hurricane, the war, or even 9/11. Its about 2000 and you can't get past it. I don't even think its the election, I think its that moment, you remember, during one of the debates when Gore is following Bush around and Bush turns, gives him the up and down look and a majority in most of the states all looked at their TV and said 'he just won the election'. I said it and I was right. Once more I thank God we elected Bush. Gore would be curled up in a fetal position right now begging Saddam and Bin Ladden to spare us the wrath of Allah's hurricanes. Kerry would be sailing his swiftboat into the delta looking for Charlie (literally, I'm sure some guy named Charlie is missing down there somewhere).

H

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In case anyone is interested in an alternative viewpoint in the finger-pointing, read this. It is incredible.

http://www.getyouracton.com/blog/

"So many stories of relief efforts being turned away. Wildlife and Fisheries who had a couple hundred boats going into the lower 9th ward for the first two days, rescuing the people trapped in attics and on roofs - until they were ordered to stop. A group of Virginia State troopers who came down with a truckload of supplies to help NOPD - who were stopped at the perimeter of New Orleans and ordered to go away. A US Naval hospital ship with 400 beds, doctors, helicopters, all sorts of equipment - they were in the gulf when the storm hit and were the first to arrive in the area - they are sitting empty, not allowed to help."

This goes way, way beyond "Oh we didn't know the levees would break." The authorities are actively prohibiting help from getting through. They have their reasons of course (violence, health, safety, the usual). But however they spin it, it's wrong.

And what about the boldfaced lie that they didn't know the levees would break? I don't know if anyone remembers the news on Tuesday morning after Katrina. Many parts of New Orleans was still dry because flooding had not yet begun from the breached levees. Per the established hurricane response plan, Mayor Nagin had arranged to drop sandbags on breached levees ASAP to prevent widespread flooding. But those helicopters were DIVERTED for search and rescue missions, and Nagin was furious when he was interviewed on the news. Someone (he didn't say who) had decided it was more important to pluck people from rooftops that day than to prevent mass destruction of the rest of the city and flooding that could take even more lives. Had those choppers been allowed to immediately repair those levees, is it possible that New Orleans could be more habitable now? Who made this decision and why? Why aren't people and media calling for accountability for this deviation from established emergency protocol? Why was this story completely dropped after the first mention?

This isn't just about sins of omission. There are sins of commission here. Katrina did her bit. But people did the rest.

Can't Take My Gorram Sky

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Originally posted by Hero:
Nor can I overlook the fact that the Governor of LA failed to implement her evacuation until a last minute personal call was made to her from the President. She did not activate her emergency center until hours before the storm hit, she failed to include FEMA in her emergency center, she failed to make a timely deployment of national guard into affected areas, she did not enact an emergency order giving the guard power to confiscate private property (like buses) until Wednesday. She mismanaged the crisis at every level from 72 hours before until 48 hours after the storm hit. I don't know if she's republican or democrat, it doesn't matter, she screwed up from left to right and top to bottom.

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...and had you read that link I posted, you'll see that all of these responsibilities (besides one, but I'll get to that) resided with the federal government once she called for help on the 26th, which you must have forgotten from your FEMA course. The evacuation order is a common sense issue - people leaving their homes days before the hurricane hit? That's asking for widespread looting on a scale beyond what even happened. She had to be dead sure the thing was going to hit. That's part of the problem with any evacuation. Did she wait too long? Might have, and if so, she's to blame for some of the problems. I don't deny her culpability. But you cannot sit there and argue that La., even with the best of planning, was prepared to handle a Category 5 hurricane. That's the job of the federal government. It's why we have a FEMA and a DHLS.

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The President, on the other hand, was on top of things as much as the President could be. He authorized the redeployment of military and federal assets before and after the storm. He coordinated with FEMA and the National Weather Service to issue the proper warnings and when they were ignored he made personal calls to the Mayor and Governor to get them off their asses. When FEMA's communication and management failed the President began making preparations to turn control over to the military and Lt. General Honore, but was unable to do so till Thursday night. The President directed efforts to coordinate interstate relief efforts and its no surprise that Texas, who emergency plans and capability the former Governor was most familiar with, was the first to come foreward with a state level response.

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You won't even acknowledge the fact that Bush's incorporation of FEMA into the DHLS and the appointment of 'Brownie,' a man with no experience, was a blunder of epic proportions. How can you defend that mistake? You cannot, so you'll keep ignoring it. Brownie's workin' hard, cause it's hard work to work so hard at stuff (as our fearless leader would say).
Besides that, to match every pic you can show me of the buses, I can match one of Bush playing the goddamn guitar while people were fighting for their lives (and as I've said before, even with telecommunications being what they are in this day and age, the seat of gov't is still Washington, not click-click bloody Crawford *Family Guy ref*) Not to mention Dick the Disappearing. Anyone seen him lately?
I saw a DHLS chief who said he was getting hurricane news from the FRIGGIN' PAPER, as did Brown, but at least Chertoff got the headlines right. They didn't even know about convention center refugees, and claimed their people couldnt get into the area. How can Sanjay Gupta from CNN get in 2 days after a hurricane, but the national guard cannot? I call foul; it's a federal fubar, post-disaster.

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Lets face it, the President could save millions of people from the hands of a brutal dictator and you would find a way to spin it negatively.

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Now it's humanitarian reasons? I thought it was WMD's. Who knows, it changes every week. How's about this spin for ya - The 3 southern states hit the hardest by the hurricane had their national guard responses handcuffed by a lack of available troops and materials. Where were they? Ah, that's right, the middle of the desert, crea

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Some good stuff over at Keith Olbermann's blog. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8514671/#050905a
Here's a snip:

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But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, "we are not satisfied," with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which "we" he thinks he's speaking for on this point. Perhaps it's the administration, although we still don't know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, 'I'll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die'?

I don't know which 'we' Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country's citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to '08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — "New Orleans."

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick "I'm not satisfied with my government's response." Instead of hiding behind phrases like "no one could have foreseen," had he only remembered Winston Churchill's quote from the 1930's. "The responsibility," of government, Churchill told the British Parliament "for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence."

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

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HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Random thoughts in no particular order.

** There are two statements that I've heard over and over the past few days from administration supporters: Now is not the time for blame; It's the fault of the mayor and the governor. I don't vote for the mayor of New Orleans or the governor of Louisiana. I do vote for the office of President. I expect my federal government to respond quickly to a huge crisis that is beyond the scope of what cities and states can handle. Big government handles big problems. Part of the disconnect I see is that many administration supporters do not like big government. They hail from the, "drown it in a bathtub" school of thought. Today, that Norquist quote seems almost prescient.

** We just recently watched Hotel Rwanda and one scene from that movie has been running through my head - the part where Don Cheadle's character exhorts everyone in the hotel to get on the phone and call anyone. He tells them that the only way they're going to get any help is to shame people into helping. To my mind, that's part of the reason why the federal government finally kicked things into gear. They were shamed by the images broadcasting worldwide by the cable news stations. We all were. From Thursday on, for the most part, the response on the federal level has been what I expect of my government. From Monday to Wednesday, not so much.

** I have found, with this administration, that the most truthful statements come in the immediate aftermath (not just in this situation, but in general). Once enough time has passed the party line comes down and public officials close ranks. The current leadership of the Republican party prides themselves on message discipline and we have now reached the point where the party line has been set. Early on in this disaster there was criticism of FEMA's actions from all sides. Today, the criticism is of the mayor and the governor. The attack machine has been reloaded and set loose. And, while they are attacking the mayor and the governor, they decry anyone attacking the President as engaging in partisan politics.

** I was driving back from Los Angeles Sunday evening hours before the hurricane hit the New Orleans area. The news throughout the entire drive was about the disaster that was coming for New Orleans in terms of flooding and the toxic soup of water that would carpet the city. And they had just started evacuating that day. I was floored (in pretty much the same way that Signym has related). There's no way you can evacuate a city of that many people in one day.

** When will the media wake up to the disinformation that they help to perpetuate by covering administration photo-ops uncritically? There's been a couple of examples over the past few days where the need to present a good visual actually hindered the relief efforts. Read this article from the Salt Lake Tribune (it's worth the read just for the more insight into how FEMA is using resources - but the last paragraph is particularly enlightening.
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3004197

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excerpted from "Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA" at http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3004197
Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
...
Firefighters say they want to brave the heat, the debris-littered roads, the poisonous cottonmouth snakes

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