To contradict your thesis, however, is that in Rita, FEMA wasn't there the next day. Or even the next week. Their response, if anything, was even worse that with Katrina.
As I pointed out, Rita was a blip on the hurricane radar. Less than a blip.
It is a major pro football stadium. It is at the nexus of two elevated Interstates. So, while there were challenges, they could have been overcome. The Superdome wasn't just randomly chosen, you know.
Elevated Interstates that were inaccessible from every direction. The I10 Twin Span was out -- totally (while it is open now, reconstruction is still underway). I12 was closed. The Causeway - underwater -- closed. I59 was closed between Hattiesburg and NOLA; US49 was closed from Hattiesburg to Gulfport. The bridge was out on the east side of Biloxi, and the US 90 had casinos sitting in the middle of it.
Downtown NOLA was literally cut off from the world. Not by Katrina, but by the ensuing flood -- a totally different kind of crisis.
They had emergency facilities. The Superdome had been used before.
This is a ridiculous claims. There was inadequate food or water, no provision for waste disposal, and no access to medical care. To say this was an "emergency facility" is absurd. It was a building. Nothing more. There was no planning on the local level for using this as an emergency facility. What they provided was an empty building.
The greater humanitarian crisis, as viewed from the POV of most Americans, occurred at the Convention Center.
I agree that it is hard to get people to evacuate; but you cannot hold FEMA responsible for that. It is the local authorities' responsibility, 100%, to convey the importance of evacuating, and Nagin and the incompetent governor failed to do so. The Administration was all over the locals, trying to get them to be more proactive, and they simply didn't have sufficient plans in progress to allow it to happen.
But, FEMA responded, if anything, worse than they did with Katrina.
RITA was basically a nonevent, and FEMA was snowed under trying to pick up the slack from a failed local policy in NOLA/Biloxi. I'm not saying that more wasn't needed, but in the overall scheme of things, RITA was a minor event and FEMA was properly dedicating its resources to the bigger event.
The tsunami was half a world away. Yet we were airlifting supplies there within 24 hours. New Orleans was a heck of a lot closer. It took closer to 3 days.
Why did Nagin not provision the superdome and CC before the fact? That was the solution, not tying up aircraft that were being used to save lives after the fact. As I watched this unfold on television, it was beyond me why Nagin didn't simply arrangement for a couple chopper-fulls of supplies to be dropped at the CC and superdome. But for whatever reason, he chose not to.
Over 1 thousand days. And it still hasn't been cleaned up.
Have you bothered to visit NOLA since the storm? I've been there 10 or more times since then, and it is clear to me that you don't comprehend what Katrina was versus Rita.
By your lights, Rita should have been an easy case.
Sure, compared with Katrina? Rita WAS an easy case. I'm not sure why FEMA should have been involved with it at all.
This is yet another subject that you seem grossly uninformed about. |
