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Pastimes : Hurricane and Severe Weather Tracking -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (3300)	9/4/2005 11:48:52 PM
From: energyplay	Respond to of 26015

Aid witheld to force evacuation : Times of London ** How did a natural disaster turn into a national fiasco? One theory was that Katrina exposed the US military’s over-extension in Iraq: the Pentagon did not have the resources to respond promptly and fully. Others blamed Bush’s decision to give the Homeland Security Department, which focuses on terrorism, responsibility for natural disasters. There were also indications of a more damning failure of political judgment. According to aid sources, senior officials at federal, state and city level took a deliberate decision not to mount a relief operation inside New Orleans because they wanted people to leave the city. “They are not bringing in massive food and water, because they want everyone out, period,” a senior aid co-ordinator said early in the week. “They don’t want people thinking they can get comfortable and be fed and watered indefinitely. It’s going to take months to clean up this place and they can do it easier if nobody is here.” Another aid official agreed that the first response to the crisis was to order evacuation. “The federal government is now in charge and does not want anyone here. If you bring in food, people will say, oh this is fine, we can stay in our house,” he said. If so, it was a fatal error because many poor black residents failed to leave and were then stranded by the flooding. Their plight was compounded by shambolic communications between government agencies that appeared to leave them in the dark about who was doing what. Nobody was in command. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not even have a senior figure in the city. **