Betsy's Page
We're starting to get a bit of a clearer picture on how Katrina became the "perfect storm" of a catastrophe. And there is plenty of blame to go around.
There almost couldn't have been a worse place for the hurricane to hit. New Orleans was particularly vulnerable and there was a higher proportion of poor in the city than in most other major cities. Geography, history and politics conspired against the people of New Orleans.
Here is Emily Metzgar, a Shreveport columnist writing in the Los Angeles Times. She asks how it could have been that there wasn't a comprehensive transportation plan in place to move the poor of New Orleans out of the city in such an emergency, especially since they have known for a while what could happen in the event of such a disaster.
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THE ANSWER HAS to do with the Louisiana government's long-standing lack of interest in the state's neediest residents. By nearly every socioeconomic measure available, the gap between our "haves" and our "have-nots" is stark. A few examples: The state's indigent defender program is in desperate need of reform, but change is being blocked by powerful political players with a vested interest in maintaining the system as it is. The high school dropout rate — already tied for worst in the nation — is rising despite much-touted accountability efforts that still fail to keep kids in school. The per-capita prisoner incarceration rate is the highest in the country without the accompanying high rates of crime, recent events in New Orleans notwithstanding. Kids Count, the annual ranking of child well-being, ranks Louisiana 49th for its overall performance, and no wonder: Nearly 50% of the state's children live in poverty (as do 15% of its residents over 65). In New Orleans, the Census Bureau reported that 27.9% of the population lives in poverty — more than double the national average.
In Louisiana's most recent legislative session, the state saw an influx of tax revenues from the oil industry, increasing the state budget by more than $1 billion over the year before. But despite being flush with new money, somehow there wasn't enough to provide a much-needed salary increase for the state's public schoolteachers. Instead, state money went to legislators' pet projects, a nonsensical reservoir creation program and construction of a convention center hotel in the northwest corner of the state.
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Jason, at Generation Why dug up an article from September 19, 2004 that shows their awareness of their problems.
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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.
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.
Much of New Orleans is below sea level, kept dry by a system of pumps and levees. As Ivan charged through the Gulf of Mexico, more than a million people were urged to flee. Forecasters warned that a direct hit on the city could send torrents of Mississippi River backwash over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste.
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And they were slow with the same problem they had a year ago.
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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.
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I remember watching the news on Sunday last week and seeing pictures of the traffic all crowded in the northbound lanes and no one at all in the other direction. At the time, I commented to my husband that they should open the other lanes just like most communities have learned to do in bad rush hour or for big football games. I think it took a good long while for that to happen this time.
I'm not excusing FEMA. Michael Brown has been so very unimpressive every time he's been seen in public commenting on the situation. How could he have been so clueless not to have known that this could have been a bigger disaster than just a "typical hurricane" and what that meant to the city?
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"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."
But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.
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That he was unaware of the possibilities is unbelievable. This is what happens when a political appointee is put into a crucial job that demands vast organizational skills and experience. It also was probably a mistake to fold FEMA into Homeland Security where its focus became more to deal with terrorism than natural disasters.
I think the local government officials were still deeply at fault in some ways. However, it was also the responsibility of the federal government, if they're going to be the ultimate help in such disasters to know if there are emergency plans in place for such a catastrophe and if those plans are adequate. Knowing what could happen with such a big storm, there might have been more military assistance that could have been prepositioned to go in. I know that FEMA got to New Orleans much quicker than aid got to Florida 13 years ago for Andrew. And local officials are told not to expect FEMA aid for about three days. However, you don't expect the top official to not have had a clue about the magnitude of what could happen.
Michelle Malkin has a roundup of examples of Brown's ineptitude and more bad reviews plus a story about FEMA equipment being stolen by looters(links below). Bush didn't help things by saying "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," unless he meant "heck" literally.
Also, read Bryan Preston's advice to journalists about questions they could be asking local officials. I've yet to hear a question to a local leader about those unused school buses or why they waited to order a mandatory evacuation. Have you?
michellemalkin.com
UPDATE: I'm not saying that I think Brown should be fired now. You don't do that in the middle of an emergency. It's not like a baseball game putting in a new pitcher. We don't have time for a confirmation hearings. I would expect that in about six months, he would discover a need to spend more time with his family.
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latimes.com
texasrainmaker.blogspot.com
washingtonpost.com
michellemalkin.com
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