Response to a guy blaming Bush for Katrina

Eric’s comments that I am responding to are at the bottom.  My response is long but I think you will like it and give you aid if discussing this with some like-minded Bush hater.   BTW, the guy Eric that I am writing too is very smart and the published author of quite a few history books that the US Military actually use and recommend so he is not normally a knee-jerk “liberal” while he would be considered a liberal.

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Eric,

I think you are allowing your hatred of Bush to seriously impair your judgement.  I think that most real analyst will condemn the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of LA for their handling of this debacle.

Could Bush have mobilized the Federal response faster?  “Maybe”.  Sorry, it is not possible for Bush (or any President) to have twitched his nose like Samantha on Bewitched and magically caused a convoy of military vehicles with the requisite support troops, medical gear, food and clothing to appear out of thin air in a Hurricane zone.  If he had decided to preposition those type of forces before the hurricane hit I can just imagine the comments (Cowboy, etc…) you and others would be making about him if Katrina had missed New Orleans like Ivan and the other near misses did.  Why didn’t the Governor preposition the State Police and the National Guard on her own?  She did not need Bush’s approval to do that?  Why didn’t she request help from the Texas Guard if she thought the 3,000 LA National Guard in Iraq had depleted her reserve below the level that was going to be needed?

Let’s see.  The hurricane hits on Monday.  The levy breaks on Tuesday (A situation by the way that not even the Corp of Engineers forecasted – even with the budget for improvements that both Bush and Clinton “cut”.  Of course they did not really “cut” anything.  They just did not approve as much increased funding as the Corp was asking for.).  The Corp just thought that the storm surge would go over the top of the levy instead of breaching it.  Let’s say that they decided sometime on Tuesday morning after the initial assessments started rolling in that the devastation was beyond what had been forecasted and that they would start rolling Federal assets to assist the State.  Well you got to load up those trucks and back them up to warehouses to get food, water, etc..  So lets say they actually hit the ground and start moving late Tuesday and into Wednesday.  Well here we are just three short days later with the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of New Orleans citizens that the Mayor and Governor abandoned to the storm and the flood waters evacuated by the Military and they are now conducting “combat operations” in a major American city against the criminal element from one of the most crime plagued American cities.  That’s right “combat operations”.  Not my words but the words of the Louisiana National Guard Commander (http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php).

This is not the first time that New Orleans was threatened with a Hurricane and the Mayor had issued an evacuation.  He did it last year with Ivan.  And they have used the Super Dome for Hurricane shelter too.  When they used it last time that had an issue with violence and destruction within the Super Dome then too.   Also just like last time the “poor” in the city were not removed but forced to ride out the storm.  They got lucky and it missed.  Maybe they thought the same thing would happen this time too.  Well playing Russian roulette did not work this time.  The amazing thing is that the standing evac plan calls for using school buses and other metro vehicles to remove the poor and those unable to afford transportation by the state preferred means of private personal vehicle.
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Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'...
-------------Well the Mayor did not do that did he?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050901/480/flpc21109012015How many people in the poor neighborhoods could have been saved if the evac order that the Mayor issued had been followed up with the use of those hundreds of school buses sitting in that flooded parking lot?  Remember the flood came after the Hurricane so the Mayor must not have been to concerned about a flood or saving those people either since he wasted additional time and still did not use them.As to the tax incentives that is not really aimed at the person that does not have a job and thus won’t have any income to pay taxes.  Rather it is aimed at Businesses that supply the jobs to bring their business to the area and supply those jobs.  This concept works in inner cities with tax free zones for businesses to bring jobs to people in blighted areas and helps clean up blight.  Don’t believe me contact the Business Development office of any major city and ask or drive into areas where these type of zones have been setup and see if their are not jobs where no jobs had been before.  I guess since the US has the economy the rest of the world looks up to and people are flooding our borders to get in the validity of “one can only imagine what goes through the minds of those not flourishing in the world of cutting edge libertarian capitalism.” probably.  They got jobs and money there and we don’t here – I’m going to the US.  That is the empirical test to your question.

Interesting article on New Orleans failure to heed history and so they got to repeat it.
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AP Warned of New Orleans Disaster

Just last year the Associated Press predicted all of the failures that have became part of the Katrina tragedy – but the story was about another hurricane, Hurricane Ivan.

When Ivan aimed its fury at the Big Easy, the AP detailed what could happen if the hurricane slammed into New Orleans.

In the case of Ivan, serious problems were caused by a lack of planning for a cataclysmic storm, yet with Katrina on the horizon, the lessons of Ivan were all but forgotten.

A feckless state governor and New Orleans’ mayor repeated the same mistakes they made with Ivan, and hundreds of thousands of largely poor people were forced to endure conditions that one associates with the Third World – not the richest nation on the planet.

The disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will come as no surprise to those who recall a September 19, 2004 Associated Press report.

Wrote the AP: “Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter – a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land.”

Eventually, tens of thousands of New Orleanans were directed to the Superdome – where no food, water or living facilities were provided for the massive number of refugees expected to remain there for at least several days. Fortunately few arrived.

Noted the AP then: “New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy’s civil disaster plans.”

Noting that much of the city lies below sea level, only kept dry by a system of pumps and levees, the AP recalled that as Hurricane Ivan approached the Gulf coast from the Gulf of Mexico, the city – warned by forecasters that a direct hit could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city’s levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste – urged more than a million people to flee the wrath of the oncoming storm.

But nobody told them how to flee Ivan.

As happened before Katrina struck, residents who had cars took to the highways while the AP reported others wondered what to do.

“‘They say evacuate, but they don’t say how I’m supposed to do that,’ Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. ‘If I can’t walk it or get there on the bus, I don’t go. I don’t got a car. My daughter don’t either.’

“‘If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can’t evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,'” Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU told the AP.

In the case of Katrina, there was huge fleet of school buses the mayor could have dispatched to aid in evacuating people unable to leave on their own. Instead, the buses sat in parking lots that later flooded, making them unusable when tens of thousands were stranded in the flooded city.

Dealing with safeguarding the city’s population had always been a problem, the AP recalled, adding that the situation was worse at the time of Ivan since the Red Cross had stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes were deemed too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.

In the case of Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then just as they later did with Katrina, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon – with Ivan just hours away – did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public.

Mayor Ray Nagin’s spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome as Ivan approached, but said the evacuation was the top priority.

“Our main focus is to get the people out of the city,” she told the AP.

“We did the compassionate thing by opening the shelter,” Nagin said. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t have a repeat performance of what happened before. We didn’t want to see people cooped up in the Superdome for days.”

Noted the AP story: “When another dangerous hurricane, Georges, appeared headed for the city in 1998, the Superdome was opened as a shelter and an estimated 14,000 people poured in.” But just as happened after Katrina, the AP reported there were problems, including theft and vandalism.

With Ivan approaching, far fewer took refuge from the storm – an estimated 1,100 – at the Superdome, and there was far greater security: 300 National Guardsmen.

Wrote the AP of the Ivan debacle: “The main safety measure – getting people out of town – raised its own problems. More than 1 million people tried to leave the city and surrounding suburbs on Tuesday, creating a traffic jam as bad as or worse than the evacuation that followed Georges. In the afternoon, state police took action, reversing inbound lanes on southeastern Louisiana interstates to provide more escape routes. Bottlenecks persisted, however.

“Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of state police, said he believed his agency acted appropriately, but also acknowledged he never expected a seven-hour-long crawl for the 60 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

“It was so bad that some broadcasters were telling people to stay home, that they had missed their window of opportunity to leave. They claimed the interstates had turned into parking lots where trapped people could die in a storm surge.

“Gov. Kathleen Blanco and [Mayor] Nagin both acknowledged the need to improve traffic flow and said state police should consider reversing highway lanes earlier. They also promised meetings with governments in neighboring localities and state transportation officials to improve evacuation plans.

But it appears that nothing had been changed by the time Katrina made its appearance in the Gulf.

After Ivan, Blanco and other state officials boasted that, while irritating, the clogged escape routes got people out of the most vulnerable areas.

“We were able to get people out,” state Commissioner of Administration Jerry Luke LeBlanc said. “It was successful. There was frustration, yes. But we got people out of harm’s way.”

After Katrina struck, however, escape routes out of the city were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic, leaving some motorists on the road when the Hurricane arrived.

A new photo from AP shows a huge fleet of school buses lined up in a now flooded parking lot – what appears to be enough transportation sufficient to have evacuated many of those stranded in the city and left to endure unimaginable conditions – transportation that the mayor failed to use when there was still time to use it.

The lessons of Ivan were never learned, and the people of New Orleans paid the price.

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As to refusing to compare the response time to Andrew with Katrina is ridiculous on its face.  If you call 911 and need the Fire Department and they get to your house in 10 minutes and a few years later I need them and they get to my house in five minutes would you say we cannot compare to see what the difference in response time resulted from?  Of course not.  You would look at how busy the system was at that time, the time of day and competing surface street traffic, weather, etc….

The foreign press just like the US Press consists of regular people with feelings and attitudes that they bring to the job (one of my good friends is an AP Reporter of the Year and although we are on opposite sides of many political discussions and I think his reporting for the most part is “fair” I can certainly “hear” echos of private conversations that we have had when he is not wearing his “reporters” hat.  They are not “un-biased”. That is not possible.  Rather it is part of their make up and something they bring to the “party”.  They too are blinded by the idea (when they want to be) that the government is some all powerful genie that can make things happen.  Then when the response they are hoping for doesn’t happen within the confines of their one hour newscast or that 24 hours news cycle they start screaming.  Life is not a one hour drama on TV that can have the crime, investigation and the trial wrapped up in a pretty bow between trips to the refrigerator for another snack.

At 11:20 PM 9/3/2005, you wrote:

Quantity changes quality. While the “body count” is still unknown, New Orleans is essentially devastated – literally. Any but the very stoutest building that sits in water for a couple of months will require the wrecking ball – if its still there at all. The city is not damaged, it will cease to exist as people knew it two weeks ago. I think comparison with Andrew or any recent hurricane absolutely misses the point. And the point is that the US government disgraced itself in failing to react effectively to Katrina. (And every country in the world sees this clear as day. Check the foreign press if you want a little humbling.)

I heard the first peep from DOD on the day the levee broke – “states are better prepared for disaster relief than are federal forces.” End of story. Of course it hasn’t worked that way abroad for years. In point of fact the US regular forces have done stellar work in disaster areas across the globe – they were delivering aid in SEA inside a week of the tsunami. Think of it: they have helicopters, vehicles of all sorts, a much stronger chain of command and would only have to answer to the White House. And the White House could have used them at any time – the Insurrection Act (which I looked at yesterday) would have allowed the movement of federal forces into the Gulf the minute Bush wanted it. (A state request is not needed if the President deems the security of the nation is at threat. I should think the refineries alone would have justified bringing order to the area.) Indeed, I can see no reason that the area could not have been put under martial law. But that would have required leadership and I’m sure Rummie and others in Washington didn’t want to touch Katrina with a ten foot pole despite the fact that every expert in FEMA knew what a break in the dike system meant for New Orleans. So they played it by the book: played it safe. But hope is on the way. 10 billion will be dispensed – a good start I suppose on a bill that will hit 200-300 billion minimum. But I also see that Congress is going to prepare tax relief to jump start revival in the Gulf Coast. Should one laugh or cry? Tax cuts for Katrina victims? Heaven help us if our underclass ever gets political. After what we’ve seen in the last week, one can only imagine what goes through the minds of those not flourishing in the world of cutting edge libertarian capitalism. I can’t imagine why the ruling class doesn’t understand that social peace shows up on the bottom line. It may not be true that the poor have been treated intentionally as serfs in the Gulf but they’re going to think so. And so do I. And let’s all hope that the jihadists don’t pick a juicy target now. If the feds couldn’t save one major city from purgatory I can think of no reason they will do better on the second try.

Considering how well Bush, Cheney and Rummie have handled Iraq, I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. This is awful.

Eric

At 10:26 PM 9/3/05, you wrote:

Question:  How does the reaction time of getting aid to the area after this hurricane compare to the reaction time getting aid to the area hit by Hurricane Andrew?  I seem to recall lots of complaints about slow reaction times to that as well.