Hurricane Katrina

[Balta1701]

I'm not sure we have the luxury to forget about the politics. We certainly need to prioritize getting help to these people, but we have to examine what happened and what didn't happen here.  We could have another natural disaster, or man made disaster, next week.  We have to get on this and fix it, asap.

Also...if there were people who badly screwed up the jobs they were supposed to do (yes there were)...these same people will be the ones who's job it is to continue fixing things and rebuild that disaster area.

 

If they couldn't do 1 of their jobs...who's to say they won't screw up the next one?

[whitesoxfan99]

I don't think this has been posted, but this story is incredible.

 

LINK

[Gene Honda Civic]

I don't think this has been posted, but this story is incredible. 

 

LINK

He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.

 

How did they come up with the spelling "Darynael", "Tyreek," and "zoria?" --

 

Little Kid: This is my cousin Darnell

Rescuer: How do you spell that?

 

EDIT: I shouldn't respond before I finish reading the article.

Edited September 6, 2005 by Gene Honda Civic

[Balta1701]

Oh sweet mercy...this is from the Shelbyville Times-Gazette in Tennessee

 

A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.

 

"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.

 

His partner, Dan Hicks, of Paducah, Ky., was deployed Monday. Buckner, of Dickson, is on standby. Their funeral home is one of several collection sites for donations to be taken to the Red Cross in Fayetteville on Wednesday for transfer to places in need.

 

The 40,000 estimate does "not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from ... mausoleums," Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday.

 

Let's all hope he was just being overley pessimistic in the number.

[SoxFan1]

Not to make light of the situation but....

 

"George Bush doesn't care about black people."

[Balta1701]

Running under the AP tagline...

 

The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

 

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Edited September 7, 2005 by Balta1701

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Let's forget about the politics and just help these people...

 

 

Thats what Ive been saying all along.

[Rex Kickass]

Apparently, sadly, it may never have been about anything but the politics.

 

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_3004197

 

I really really really hope that this part is wrong.

 

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

[FlaSoxxJim]

I also find Michael, Brown's revisionism, in an apparent attempt to save his ass, to be sickening:

 

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he [brown] said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

 

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

 

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

 

That’s unbelievable.

 

That is excerpted from an open letter to the President posted on nola.com. A must read for all except the 12% of Americans who think this has been handled well from the top.

[Jimbo's Drinker]

Our president was sitting in the sun and doing nothing, i mean running the nation from his summer home.

[Rex Hudler]

Our president was sitting in the sun and doing nothing, i mean running the nation from his summer home.

 

And your point is? The President can do anything necessary to run this country from anywhere. The Oval Office does not give him special powers that he can't use elsewhere.

 

Look, any time we have a major catastrophe there are going to be situations that can be handled differently. Sure mistakes were made, communications broke down, etc. I would be shocked if that were NOT the case.

 

I just think it is a major crock to be politicking all of this. Why does the blame game have to start now? Someone mentioned because there could be another catastrophe next week? If you don't think that behind the scenes heads aren't rolling and they aren't already working on what went wrong, you are naive.

 

I just don't see the purpose or need for a partison roast through the media. Sometimes, things need to be worked out behind closed doors rather than for all to see and critique.

 

Unfortunately, this country has to blame someone and it all starts with the media. All the media does is turn things into a bigger circus.

 

We have just witnessed the single biggest catastrophe in American history. It has basically wiped out a whole coastline. The magnaminity of this is almost beyond comprehension. No matter what the role of government is, and how many "fire drills" are done to have a plan ready, something of this enormity is bound to be a clusterf***.

[bmags]

And your point is?  The President can do anything necessary to run this country from anywhere.  The Oval Office does not give him special powers that he can't use elsewhere. 

 

Look, any time we have a major catastrophe there are going to be situations that can be handled differently.  Sure mistakes were made, communications broke down, etc.  I would be shocked if that were NOT the case. 

 

I just think it is a major crock to be politicking all of this.  Why does the blame game have to start now?  Someone mentioned because there could be another catastrophe next week?  If you don't think that behind the scenes heads aren't rolling and they aren't already working on what went wrong, you are naive.

 

I just don't see the purpose or need for a partison roast through the media.  Sometimes, things need to be worked out behind closed doors rather than for all to see and critique.

 

Unfortunately, this country has to blame someone and it all starts with the media.  All the media does is turn things into a bigger circus. 

 

We have just witnessed the single biggest catastrophe in American history.  It has basically wiped out a whole coastline.  The magnaminity of this is almost beyond comprehension.  No matter what the role of government is, and how many "fire drills" are done to have a plan ready, something of this enormity is bound to be a clusterf***.

 

If we don't call for action, it may not change...i see no problem with the fury of complaints, if this fury was all placed for terry schiavo, they took notice, when its to question the federal procedures for major catastrophes , we should be quiet? Give me a break.

[Rex Hudler]

If we don't call for action, it may not change...i see no problem with the fury of complaints, if this fury was all placed for terry schiavo, they took notice, when its to question the federal procedures for major catastrophes , we should be quiet? Give me a break.

 

If you think they don't realize what is going on, then you are naive. To think that we have to complain for them to make changes is nonsense.

 

The problem is that it is now more about placing blame on others to make yourself look good. Dems attack Bush not so things change, but so he looks bad and they shine. Don't think such motivations are as pure as just wanting to "get things right".

Edited September 7, 2005 by Rex Hudler

[kapkomet]

If we don't call for action, it may not change...i see no problem with the fury of complaints, if this fury was all placed for terry schiavo, they took notice, when its to question the federal procedures for major catastrophes , we should be quiet? Give me a break.

There's a difference between legitamate questioning and wanting things to be better, and then there's politicking every single f***ing move someone makes, just to make each other look bad. Unfortunately, we are trained in this country to look for the worst and skip the best. It's DISGUSTING.

[Balta1701]

Thank you Jon Stewart...as usual.

 

 

Classic show tonight by the Daily Show folks. If you haven't seen it...go watch clips when people post them.

[Balta1701]

Why God...why are we cursed by these people...

 

Seriously...out here in CA, I'm going to start stockpiling extra water. If that crack in the ground moves, I've lost any confidence in the ability of this government to contain the situation.

A South Carolina health official said his colleagues scrambled Tuesday when FEMA gave only a half-hour notice to prepare for the arrival of a plane carrying as many as 180 evacuees to Charleston.

 

But the plane, instead, landed in Charleston, West Virginia, 400 miles away.

 

It was not known whether arrangements have been made to care for the evacuees or transport them to the correct destination.

 

A call seeking comment from FEMA was not immediately returned.

 

"We called in all the available resources," said Dr. John Simkovich, director of public health for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.

 

"They responded within 30 minutes, which is phenomenal, to meet the needs of the citizens coming in from Louisiana," he said.

 

Simkovich said that the agency had described some of the evacuees as needing "some minor treatment ... possibly some major treatment."

 

"Unfortunately, the plane did not come in," Simkovich said. "There was a mistake in the system, coming out through FEMA, that we did not receive the aircraft this afternoon. It went to Charleston, West Virginia."

[Balta1701]

This quote appeared in an early AP version of this story.

 

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said the administration is "getting a bad rap" for the emergency response.

 

"This is the largest disaster in the history of the United States, over an area twice the size of Europe," Stevens said. "People have to understand this is a big, big problem."

Ted Stevens, by the way, is Senator for a state that is about to build a $500 million bridge to an island with 50 inhabitants.

[KipWellsFan]

And your point is?  The President can do anything necessary to run this country from anywhere.  The Oval Office does not give him special powers that he can't use elsewhere. 

 

Look, any time we have a major catastrophe there are going to be situations that can be handled differently.  Sure mistakes were made, communications broke down, etc.  I would be shocked if that were NOT the case. 

 

I just think it is a major crock to be politicking all of this.  Why does the blame game have to start now?  Someone mentioned because there could be another catastrophe next week?  If you don't think that behind the scenes heads aren't rolling and they aren't already working on what went wrong, you are naive.

 

I just don't see the purpose or need for a partison roast through the media.  Sometimes, things need to be worked out behind closed doors rather than for all to see and critique.

 

Unfortunately, this country has to blame someone and it all starts with the media.  All the media does is turn things into a bigger circus. 

 

We have just witnessed the single biggest catastrophe in American history.  It has basically wiped out a whole coastline.  The magnaminity of this is almost beyond comprehension.  No matter what the role of government is, and how many "fire drills" are done to have a plan ready, something of this enormity is bound to be a clusterf***.

 

 

History will show that the media tried to do it's job and criticized and questioned all involved while makings mistakes of its own and learning a great deal about really how important the race issue still is. History will also show that aid could have been given quicker and the blame probably at least lay somewhat at the top. 20 years from now are people going to be able to think wow the administration sure did all they could, I wish the media hadn't been so darn liberal and Bush hadn't been villified like he has (I'm yet to see an actual media outlet blame Bush).

 

Where's Dick Cheney? Where was George Bush? What the hell was Condie doing? FAIR questions to ask. And if these are questions the media is not supposed to ask, and this is a consensus among Americans, which it isn't, then what is point of the news media anyways?

 

""Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable"

 

-Thomas Jefferson

Edited September 7, 2005 by KipWellsFan

[KipWellsFan]

This quote appeared in an early AP version of this story.

 

Ted Stevens, by the way, is Senator for a state that is about to build a $500 million bridge to an island with 50 inhabitants.

 

Twice the size of Europe

[Steff]

And your point is?  The President can do anything necessary to run this country from anywhere.  The Oval Office does not give him special powers that he can't use elsewhere. 

 

Look, any time we have a major catastrophe there are going to be situations that can be handled differently.  Sure mistakes were made, communications broke down, etc.  I would be shocked if that were NOT the case. 

 

I just think it is a major crock to be politicking all of this.  Why does the blame game have to start now?  Someone mentioned because there could be another catastrophe next week?  If you don't think that behind the scenes heads aren't rolling and they aren't already working on what went wrong, you are naive.

 

I just don't see the purpose or need for a partison roast through the media.  Sometimes, things need to be worked out behind closed doors rather than for all to see and critique.

 

Unfortunately, this country has to blame someone and it all starts with the media.  All the media does is turn things into a bigger circus. 

 

We have just witnessed the single biggest catastrophe in American history.  It has basically wiped out a whole coastline.  The magnaminity of this is almost beyond comprehension.  No matter what the role of government is, and how many "fire drills" are done to have a plan ready, something of this enormity is bound to be a clusterf***.

 

 

Rex.. I don't care where the breakdown was, just fix it. Bush to a degree is admitting there was a eff up simply by calling for and apparently heading an investigation. If he's willing to admit it I think American's have the right to question it. Maybe they, myself included because I do think he should have been visible before he was, are jumping to the wrong conclusions, but until all the facts are known that's all that can be done.

[Rex Kickass]

The Majority Leader of the House has now determined that hearings on what went wrong with Hurricane Katrina aren't necessary. They've been cancelled. For Congress.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/07/kat...ress/index.html

[Texsox]

And your point is?  The President can do anything necessary to run this country from anywhere.  The Oval Office does not give him special powers that he can't use elsewhere. 

 

I've been saying that for a week, then thought, wait a minute, I could run my company from a cell phone and a laptop, but I am far more productive from my office. All the resources are there in Washington. There is no way the White House set up is duplicated on the run from the Crawford Ranch. It's about effeciency. He would have been more efficient from Washington and hasn't effeciency been the biggest problem in this cluster f***?

 

This is one way he shows how important he thinks the problem is. The President sets the tone for the nation. When he thinks so casually of the problem, he heads west to a fund raiser, how are the people suppose to feel?

 

A strong leader takes charge, the buck stops here.

[FlaSoxxJim]

The Majority Leader of the House has now determined that hearings on what went wrong with Hurricane Katrina aren't necessary. They've been cancelled. For Congress.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/07/kat...ress/index.html

 

A Republican representative stood up and said, "All of you deserve failing grades. The response was a disaster," CNN was told by lawmakers emerging from the meeting.

 

But DeLay countered that assessment later in a news conference by saying that the onus for responding to emergencies fell to local officials.

 

"It's the local officials trying to handle the problem. When they can't handle the problem, they go to the state, and the state does what they can to, and if they need assistance from FEMA and the federal government they ask for it and it's delivered," DeLay said.

 

And here's the heart of the matter. There apparently was no mechanism in place to assess ahead of time or in the immediate aftermath that this crisis obviously was exceeded the threshold to be considered catastrophic in the largest sense of the word, and since a coordinated, centralized (i.e., federal) response was absolutely imminent anyway it should have been THE primary response.

 

The traditional strategy, where local officials try to control a situation, and fall back on state, regional, and federal support is certainly the preferred method for manageable situations. Wildfires, at least in the early stages. Unruly mobs, tornadoes, etc. Officials at all levels knew this was huge once the city evacuation orders were given, and that try/fail/ask for more help reiterative strategy should have been thrown out the window.

 

It's easy to say it's all hindsight and how could anybody know etc. But we've spent BILLIONS of dollars on homeland security precisely so we would know how to handle response to catastrophes of this magnitude. None of us here were part of any of that preparation, but we don't have to be to be able to question how effective it all was as we see the results.

 

It's been said before, but saying, 'who could have predicted the levees wouldn't hold' is as incredible a statement as Condi saying, 'well who would have thought they'd fly jet planes into buildings?' In both csaes, Plenty of people with expertise in those areas hade precicely those concerns.

[Controlled Chaos]

TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

By Robert Tracinski

 

 

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

 

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

 

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

 

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

 

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

 

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

 

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

 

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

 

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

 

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

 

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

 

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

 

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

 

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets," she said. "They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

 

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

 

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

 

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

 

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America . "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

 

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

 

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

 

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

 

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

 

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

 

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

 

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans . And that is the story that no one is reporting.

 

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[southsider2k5]

And here's the heart of the matter.  There apparently was no mechanism in place to assess ahead of time or in the immediate aftermath that this crisis obviously was exceeded the threshold to be considered catastrophic in the largest sense of the word, and since a coordinated, centralized (i.e., federal) response was absolutely imminent anyway it should have been THE primary response.

 

The traditional strategy, where local officials try to control a situation, and fall back on state, regional, and federal support is certainly the preferred method for manageable situations.  Wildfires, at least in the early stages. Unruly mobs, tornadoes, etc.  Officials at all levels knew this was huge once the city evacuation orders were given, and that try/fail/ask for more help reiterative strategy should have been thrown out the window.

 

It's easy to say it's all hindsight and how could anybody know etc.  But we've spent BILLIONS of dollars on homeland security precisely so we would know how to handle response to catastrophes of this magnitude.  None of us here were part of any of that preparation, but we don't have to be to be able to question how effective it all was as we see the results.

 

It's been said before, but saying, 'who could have predicted the levees wouldn't hold' is as incredible a statement as Condi saying, 'well who would have thought they'd fly jet planes into buildings?'  In both csaes, Plenty of people with expertise in those areas hade precicely those concerns.

 

The ironic thing is dispite the supposed heirarchy outlined in that quote, there is still a power struggle going on between the Governor and the President over who is going to direct operations, which is dividing resources and personel, and I am sure that isn't helping to end all of the confusion. Heck it even took until yesterday for the mayor to order out all of the remaining people in New Orleans... why did that take so long? Why are there still 3 layers of government giving orders and directing operations? And we wonder why there is still a mess of things down there... There needs to be one group in charge, and everyone else needs to work for that group, and out of the three layers of government, FEMA is the closest thing to being ready for this, dispite their response so far. Once again everyone is so busy trying to look like their care and are doing the right thing in front of the cameras, that they people are suffering for it. This is a big enough mess by itself, 3 different responses to it are too many cooks in the kitchen.