New Orleans - Non Politically Correct View

The federal response to Katrina was not as portrayed

Sunday, September 11, 2005

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

"Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.

But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.

I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.

A better question -- which few journalists ask -- is why weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

Sure, unless you mean the Canadian government:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4841892

John Kerry was the alternative. John freakin' Kerry.The Democrats need to come up with a worthy candidate for once.

Euro Observer wrote:

You all obviously know shite about politics so go back to making left turns around the track and stop embarrassing yourselves.

There is one thing I would add to this debate, a discovery of sorts. The whole Bush thing explains the success of the American movie industry.

As even an amoeba would recognize that Bush is such a stupid dope, the fact that 50+% of americans actually voted for him explains a lot of things.

It is therefore obvious that Americans, as a nation, are stupid people. But deeper than this, it explains why Americans like stupid things like obvious hollywood movie plots, deep fried food, and cowboy hats.

I am on to something.

The truth wrote:

John Kerry was the alternative. John freakin' Kerry.

The Democrats need to come up with a worthy candidate for once.

John freakin' Kerry? Al freakin' Gore? Who cares? Anyone with half a brain still working knows that even Snoop freakin' Dogg or Al freakin' Bundy was a better choice that than George W. freakin' Bush.

Article Last Updated: 09/11/2005 11:10:32 AM

diane carman

U.S. leaders flunking Disasters 101

Until last week, I didn't even know the academic field of disaster research existed. Maybe FEMA director Michael Brown didn't either.

The National Hazards Center, headquartered at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been studying disaster responses and how to predict and reduce the effects of disasters for 30 years.

In November 2004, as part of its Disasters Waiting to Happen series, it outlined what would occur if a Category 4 hurricane hit New Orleans.

In its newsletter, the Natural Hazards Observer, it predicted that evacuating the city would be extremely difficult; that it would take nine weeks to pump the water "contaminated with chemicals and toxins" out of the city; that the disaster's cost would exceed $100 billion; and "survivors would have to endure conditions never before experienced in a North American disaster."

The Hurricane Katrina catastrophe was not just entirely predictable; it unfolded like a script for a cheap horror movie.

Everybody saw it coming, said Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at CU and director of the Hazards Center. In fact, in the disaster research community, "all eyes were on New Orleans."

So with all this knowledge and expertise at her command - much of it funded by the National Academy of Science and FEMA - it seems that Brown would have had Tierney on speed dial.

Not a chance.

The only federal official who sought the center's help in the wake of Katrina was Janet Benini, deputy director of emergency transportation in the Department of Transportation.

Chances are Brown and others at FEMA ignored Tierney's expertise because they didn't want to hear what she had to say.

Last June, she gave a presentation to the FEMA Higher Education Conference in Maryland on how ill-prepared the U.S. was to respond to a natural catastrophe.

"This is something we knew in the disaster research community, the civil engineering community and the environmental science community," she said.

"We recognized that there was a failure to take the actions identified well in advance that would have mitigated the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans" - things such as reinforcing the levees, replenishing the wetlands and developing evacuation plans for the poor, the elderly and the disabled.

Instead, the nation's emergency system had what Tierney calls "9/12 Syndrome."

"There was nothing

on the radar screen of Homeland Security except terrorism," she said. "Absolutely nothing."

This is not an opinion, she said, citing Homeland Security's own budget documents. "This is a fact."

So when she saw Hurricane Katrina on the weather maps last month, Tierney said, she experienced a feeling of "absolute helplessness."

On the day it made landfall, she filled her car with gas, arrived at the office early and assigned her staff and graduate students to begin documenting what she knew would be "the largest catastrophe in our history."

Less than two weeks later, with data still streaming in, Tierney confirmed the obvious: It was a massive failure of our emergency response system, she said.

"This is absolutely unacceptable."

Now, she and her colleagues across the country are demanding that an objective, independent commission be empaneled to "answer the question that everybody in America is asking: What on earth happened and what does this say about our preparedness for future extreme events?"

Such a commission reviewed FEMA's failures during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. "Yesterday I pulled out that report and I couldn't believe how much was similar in what's going on now," she said.

Former FEMA director James Lee Witt "tried to implement those recommendations" but everything changed after 9/11.

Tierney said a commission with no connections to the White House or Congress must be convened.

If there's anything we've learned from Katrina, it's that there's no place for politics in disaster management.

Too many lives are at stake.

to NOW HEAR THIS--

Jack Kelley is The Blade's running joke (and The Blade itself IS a joke). If GW Bush was exposed as the Anti-Christ and it was proven he drank human blood, Kelley would still defend him and cry out against the liberal media bias.

NOW HEAR THIS wrote:

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

Actually ths USS Bataan followed right BEHIND the storm and used its helicopters to pick up some of those stranded. Unofortunately it never got authority to use its 600 bed hospital or to treat the 100,000 gallons of water it can each day.

BarryP wrote:

It would also help if you knew a little history about FEMA.

Here's more:

January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.

April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management.

March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.

2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.

Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence.

i like how he calls himself Geraldo...and the Rivera part still makes me laugh

do ya think if he used his real name he would get press time at all?

This is why we have reporters. You can't rely on information being reported from someone who has an interest in making his own organization look good.

If it was so difficult getting equipment down there....why didn't the media have any problem?

In addition, for all of the previous hurricanes mentioned, a slower response was acceptable......because very few people were in danger AFTER the hurricane left.

And again, even if this were true, it still does not excuse the fact that BUSH was busy playing golf, eating birthday cake, playing guitars, making war speeches, and getting photo ops while people were dying due to the FEMA debacle (not to mention Rice's night out at Spamalot and her shoe shopping spree).

One woman featured on the news was 29 years old, had 11 children and was pregnant with her 12th. A perfect example of the welfare catch-22.

Not only would she need to have a job to match the $400 check but also be able to pay for child care for all those children. Not likely. And there's no incentive to stop having children, because the government will keep supporting them.

What's more frightening to me is it would get far more press if the gov't tried to pay for sex ed, birth control or an abortion before such a woman had her first unwanted child. Sheesh.

These women DO have abortions. Quite a lot of them.

They still have tons of kids.

BarryP wrote:

(not to mention Rice's night out at Spamalot and her shoe shopping spree).

Excuse the ignorance of this Canuck, but what exactly is the Secretary of State supposed to do for a domestic situation? What kind of authority and command capabilities does that position have for internal matters?

smiley wrote:

One woman featured on the news was 29 years old, had 11 children and was pregnant with her 12th. A perfect example of the welfare catch-22.

Not only would she need to have a job to match the $400 check but also be able to pay for child care for all those children. Not likely. And there's no incentive to stop having children, because the government will keep supporting them.

I'm curious to know what the actual additional welfare benefit is in Louisiana for having an additional child. Perhaps "Been There" can tell us. If it's more than $100/month I'll be surprised. For the record, my baby's diapers cost about $60/month (10 diapers/day, $0.20/diaper). Throw in the additional food and other costs of another baby and, [sarcasm] you're absolutely right, that woman will be able to easily support her child with government money [/sarcasm].

I made about $10,000/year for the 5 years I was a graduate student, and I can't imagine trying to live on the $400/month welfare provides, let alone doing it with children.

herewegoagain wrote:

Everyone bitches about taxes...liberals, conservatives, whites, blacks, mexicans. Do you realize how much of your tax dollars is going to pay for people who refuse to look for work because they're living off of government checks?

Runners are NOT smart people as a whole.

this must include you.

See if you can find the figure of how much of your hard earned weekly dollar goes to making shiny objects that sometimes blow up in the atmosphere - just to check and see if there are green people on Mars.....or the subsidizing of Exxon Oil who had their largest profit margin in history last year. Or maybe you should check into the Highway funds that get filtered into landscaping the Ronald Reagan highway.

Can't bitch about one, without bitching about the other.

I don't know exactly how much you get for welfare for each additional child... around 100$ a month sounds a little low.

It was enough so that women would deliberately have MORE children to get a bigger check.

Unless you have experienced a welfare community firsthand, you have no idea how much people will depend on the government.

Again, I'm not complaining about taking government money. As someone pointed out, we use government money for all sorts of stupid and expensive things we don't need.

I'm saying that the government MAKES PEOPLE DEPENDENT ON THE GOVERNMENT. It doesn't hurt the government at all, but it totally screws up the poor people. Ask someone who was on welfare how hard it is to get off.

ExxonMobil made over One Hundred Million Dollars Per Day IN PROFITS the last quarter. I hope the free marketers out there aren't whining about $3 a gallon.

Legally blonde,

Your response does not even pertain to the original thread. If you want a complete political debate about your own agenda please start your own thread. In my post I am referring to the people who cheat the system and you and I out of tax dollars. If you'd like to start another thread so you can show your burgeoning intelligence please feel free.

Nothing brings a bigger smile to my face than uneasy liberals who have no power.