So notes John Cole, in a post long on common sense.
Cole also links to this AP report that at first blush seems to make a pretty damning case against the timeliness of FEMA’s response:
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.
Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.
Brown’s memo to Chertoff described Katrina as “this near catastrophic event” but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, “Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.”
[…] “FEMA response and recovery operations are a top priority of the department and as we know, one of yours,” Brown wrote Chertoff. He proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security Department employees within 48 hours and 2,000 within seven days.
Knocke said the 48-hour period suggested for the Homeland employees was to ensure they had adequate training. “They were training to help the life-savers,” Knocke said.
Employees required a supervisor’s approval and at least 24 hours of disaster training in Maryland, Florida or Georgia. “You must be physically able to work in a disaster area without refrigeration for medications and have the ability to work in the outdoors all day,” Brown wrote.
The same day Brown wrote Chertoff, Brown also urged local fire and rescue departments outside Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi not to send trucks or emergency workers into disaster areas without an explicit request for help from state or local governments. Brown said it was vital to coordinate fire and rescue efforts.
Upon closer inspection, though, I’m not sure what’s so damning about this—though the AP writer tries his best to imply all type of subtle incompetence (the emphasis on Brown wanting FEMA representatives to portray a positive image; the mention of Brown’s politeness, suggesting he wasn’t taking the disaster as seriously as he should, etc.).
Now, maybe I’m being obtuseâ€â€and please, if anyone knows better, please correct me, because I’m certainly no expert on logisticsâ€â€but doesn’t it make sense to see precisely where and with what force a hurricane hits before making the final request for FEMA personnel?—particularly when the plan calls for the local government to take control for the first 3-4 days? Isn’t that 72-96 hour window designed to allow for these kinds of post-assessment decisions?
Well, of course it makes sense to see who and what you need before you order it up. But the hang-Bush crowd believes that there is a magic button somewhere on the great FEMA-OZ computer that you push for a “Cat-4-NewOrleans-just-East-with-levee-breaks” incident, which of course will cause pallets of bottled water and diapers to gently parachute down to a four point water landing.
See, it’s all so simple. Bush should have anticipated (pick your number) residents to ignore a mandatory evacuation order. Bush should have known that the Mayor would leave 400 buses to drown, along with a few thousand residents.
In fact, if FEMA had been on the ball, they would have planted little robo-FEMA-bot seeds which the rain deluge would have fertilized which would have instantly produced 100,000 FEMA-bots, one for each resident that Nagin refused to evacuate as his plan said he should have.
Other questions….
What roles were these people supposed to fill once they got there?
How does this response compare with previous hurricanes?
How does it compare with the guidelines or benchmarks or goals that are (I assume) in the laws or regulations for FEMA and Homeland Security?
I’m sure there are plenty more…
We need to know what blame should go to individuals and what blame should go to the laws, plans, and regulations that they had to work under, so we can change them.
TW: response
You put these words in manually, don’t you.
I’d be curious to see the actual FEMA document.
Not to say the AP story isn’t right, its just that at this point, my trust in AP is right down there with my trust in FEMA.
Hey not to mention that the Feds should have swooped in an evac’d the Superdome Wed.
How? Where would the buses come from? How long would it take to drive them? Where would the fuel come from? What about clearing the roads, repairing the washed out bridges etc?
I dunno.
Some dude on the other thread thinks they should’ve done it.
He must be right.
Um, another thing I seem to remember, though seemingly no one else does. For nearly 24 hours after the hurricane left N.O., everyone thought that N.O. had narrowly escaped the big one. Lots of damage, certainly, but not the “worst case scenario”.
I remember.
Jim,
Yes, I do think they should have done it sooner. Nagin, despite the fact that he drowned the 500 busses he had IN the city was specifically calling for someone, ANYONE, to get some buses down to the Dome and get at the very least those at the Dome to safety on Tuesday. The situation at the Dome was never in control.
FEMA was able to drive to the Dome by Wednesday. But no one was proactive enough to realize that by then there would be 20,000 people who had been living in a dome with no food or water or plumbing for three days, so maybe bring some buses with you as well as the food and water.
Yeah, I know, crazy, just like a magic carpet ride.
mph,
It wasn’t “the big one” as they say, but even by Sunday before it hit land the NWS was predicting it would overtop the levees.
Sunday the 28th–“COASTAL STORM SURGE FLOODING OF 18 TO 22 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDE LEVELS…LOCALLY AS HIGH AS 28 FEET…ALONG WITH LARGE AND DANGEROUS BATTERING WAVES…CAN BE EXPECTED NEAR AND TO THE EAST OF WHERE THE CENTER MAKES LANDFALL. SOME LEVEES IN THE GREATER NEW ORLEANS AREA COULD BE OVERTOPPED…. “
Some buses?
The local and state governments tried to tell people they would be on their own for 2-3 days, knowing that’s how long it would take FEMA to respond. Of course FEMA can’t put 1,000s of volunteers in place before any impending/possible disaster.
The problem is, leaving people to fend for themselves looks a lot better when it is a plan on paper than when it is a mass of humanity stuck on an overpass or in line at a convention center.
Everything that happened was something the press reported in advance would happen. No comfort, air conditioning or plumbing in the Superdome, 2-3 days with no chance of being evacuated, 2-3 days without food, people that stayed in their homes dying, and contaminants in the water. None of those things were surprises.
But once it actually happened, the OUTRAGE set in, and it was somebody’s fault.
Suddenly, when the numbers on paper become real people you can put on camera, any amount of suffering becomes unconscionable. In America.
Yes Jim, some busses. Soree foer teh misspeling.
I agree that one should be prepared for 72 hours. But I also feel that once FEMA knew that Blanco and Nagin had screwed up so badly by telling everyone to get to the Dome, they should have begun working towards getting them the hell out of there. It’s called EMERGENCY DISASTER MANAGEMENT. It’s what you do when the plans break down. And it’s what $6 billion a year should get us from FEMA. If not, let the DOD take care of it.
FEMA only has 2500 full-time employees.
The vast majority of them are bookkeepers and managers and trainers, and are only there to assess how much this is going to cost, hand out checks (#1 job), and make sure the other Federal departments can talk to each other (and to the state and local folks). They hire part-time disaster workers, but they have to make sure they’re re-trained before they go in.
The very few FEMA folks you see in the early stages of something like this are just the point men, and are just there to call (or quite often drive) the information in. The upper level FEMA officers, and folks like the National Guard and the Department of Transportation (and the other 20+ parts of the disaster relief effort, plus the Red Cross) then figure out what to do, and then do it.
The vast majority of planning during the disaster, by the way, is not done by FEMA either, but by the individual agencies that have control over different segments of the plan.
If this is not done, then things just sort of go off in all directions, instead of ending up in a hundred different points, all basically at once, with enough people to make things work the way they’re supposed to.
The result? You can look at, plan, and plug a levee in a few days, while simultaneously supporting a rescue operation with 400 helicopters and 1000 boats in a flooded city (while not running completely out of fuel or having a dozen midair collisions a day), get food and water for a few hundred thousand evacuees, help clear roads, all the while bringing order to a region that lost its mind a couple of days earlier.
…and this is supposed to be a “failure.”
Ah, the Blanco and Nagin screwed up, but that’s the feds fault too meme. TW-talk, as in talk about an impossible standard to live up to.
Really, I think I may see at least part of Tman’s gripe here. He sees FEMA, and maybe DHS as well, as a hideous boondoggle from the get go. Truth be known I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But none of us should let our desire to destroy the program lead us to tar and feather the people appointed to the program. Facts still matter, and so do human capablitites. Right now Tman is holding FEMA to a standard no one can achieve.
Thanks, Cirby. Excellent points, all of which put the effort it into better perspective, I think.
Tman,
Yes, the day before the storm hit, it was predicted to be near cat 5, and make a direct strike on New Orleans. Hence the “mandatory” evacuations, etc. But, when the storm hit, it had weakened and moved farther east than had been predicted. The levees weren’t overtopped and didn’t fail during the storm (if they had the fatalities would have been even worse). For the best part of a day, it appeared that the biggest damage and loss of life was in MS and AL, and that New Orleans had escaped.
Tman, look dude I’m asking about the logistics
I know I’m an obnoxious sob.
Fine, Tues or Wed they realize that the people in the dome can’t just be supplied with food and water, they have to be brought out pronto, which btw would seem to take folks away from helping the truly sick and dying.
Where do the buses come from? The disaster areas the size of GB. Presumably that means they come from at least 200-300 miles away
Can they be moved on the roads? Which roads? How fast can they travel? Where can they refuel? If nowhere how much extra fuel has to be brought for them in trucks? How fast can those trucks travel. Can they make it on the roads?
How long does all that take to get organized?
A guy over at the site I mentioned who’d trucked in generators from Georgia thru Alabama and Miss said the nearest fuel coming west was in Tuscaloosa and that the big trucks couldn’t make it on the roads. I’m guessing that if only small trucks could make it then fully loaded buses might be trouble too.
How long does that take? I’d say that sounds like a 48 hr job given the conditions. How bout you?
I should add 48 at the very least to find them, get everything together and get them to NO.
For those who haven’t see it, T Bevan at RealClearPolitics issues a report card on Katrina.
His conclusions are fairly typical of all those right-leaning types who wish to look “balanced”—plenty of blame on the local level; the calling for Brown’s ouster because, well, everybody else is doing it, and besides, he looked dumb at a press conference, which made the lefties howl and made some conservatives embarrassed, so let’s just fire him, ‘cause hell, it ain’t me losing a job; Bush more or less exonerated except for sticking by Brown blah blah blah.
Personally, I find this kind of thing of showy “consideration” (I use the scare quotes because the facts aren’t in, so calling for someone’s head at this point seems downright evil, in a René Girard’s Scapegoat kinda way).
I think history will show that we’re witnessing a rather remarkable effort in the face of an unprecedented catastrophe. I could be wrong, but so far, I’m not convinced otherwise by any of the criticisms I’ve heard or read.
Slow response bewilders former FEMA officials
As the first National Guard truck caravans of water and food arrived in New Orleans Friday, former FEMA officials and other disaster experts were at a loss to explain why the federal government’s lead agency for responding to major emergencies had failed to meet the urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the most dire of circumstances in a more timely fashion.
But many suspected that FEMA’s apparent problems in getting life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from New Orleans, delays even President Bush called “not acceptable,” stemmed partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have long warned that the moves would weaken the agency’s ability to effectively respond to natural disasters.
FEMA’s chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department that is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All this has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say.
The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for apparently mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
TMan —
There are folks tripping over themselves for all the cheap grace criticism can buy them right now. After all, they saw Shep Smith and Anderson Cooper and all those horrific pictures.
But there is nothing specific in that story. Just more people “outraged” and suggesting that, had they been in charge, things would have been done quicker.
FEMA doesn’t do evac. Thats the National Guard. Controlled by the Governor. At least, I think that’s how it works.
Tman can’t admit to the fact that the hurricane gave people a brief period of relief before the levees failed because that would undermine his theme on Brown.
And who are these “former” FEMA officials? Maybe James Witt and his employees in his consulting company now working for Gov Blanco?
One of the “early” jobs during a disaster is roads clearing/bridge inspection.
Read those last two words again.
“Bridge inspection.”
Any moron can push stuff off a highway with a bulldozer, but you have to make sure that the major and minor bridges are still okay. So someone has to run along major roads (or minor roads that are going to see a lot of heavy truck traffic), climb all over each bridge, and make sure they’re not going to drop a couple of trucks and a hundred tons of supplies into a river (while making the road impassible). Note, for example, what happened to the eastbound I-10 bridge in New Orleans, or that other I-10 bridge during a hurricane last year.
If the bridges are damaged, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Transportation come up with solutions.
…and you need to do this before anyone brings in any major loads.
As several has commented above, we’re looking at the decisions at the top of the chain of command assuming that if they had done “A” or “B” at the right time, that this disaster would have been mitigated.
But we also have to look at things on the ground, that even IF the decisions by Brown or Chertoff or Blanco were timely, the problems transporting the supplies over torn up roads still made things problematic.
From here in L.A. (that’s lower Alabama for you unelightened readers), I can’t see how FEMA of DHS or DOD could have moved the amount of material into New Orleans (and elswhere) much faster than they did. Perhaps they could have gotten more through on Thursday, but not enough to make any appreciable changes in the conditions on the ground. Gulfport, Biloxi have been destroyed. The I-10 highway (4 lanes) was severely damaged and essentially unusable for several days.
The one area where it’s possible that Washington failed was in getting some type of security forces – the 82nd Airborne? – into New Orleans on Wednesday to prevent the looting. It seems to me the security issue is the one failure from the Feds that warrants examination.
SMG
…who, while working in previous years, took the same time or longer to handle disasters a third this size.
That’s great, but none of those people were on the ground.
What is the size of this disaster area compared to the others? That’s one thing I’d like to know
How bad is it on the ground compared to other storms?
None of that is covered in the story.
Look, I know its fashionable to bash the Feds, but until I see something more then “they just should of” and “people who weren’t on the ground are puzzled” I’m going with the Florida national guardsman who’s worked hurricans for the last decade or more and who concluded that the Fed response was “faster tha Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Charley, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”
Jim,
You ain’t no SOB, and you’ve made me look very close at what I’m complaining about and I appreciate that. Your blog is excellent by the way.
I believe that by Monday, yes, they should have started expediting a process to evacuate the residents holed up in the Dome. My agents in Louisiana I spoke to stated there was a means in, and large Nat Gaurd trucks were moving on these roads by Wednesday.
So we are talking about a days difference. No big deal, right? Well, it wasn’t until late thursday, Friday morning that buses had arrived. By then we have people dead from various chaotic situations at the Convention center and the dome.
Not my blog Tman. Just a dude I’ve been reading for a few years, who I think knows what he’s talking about.
Where we differ is that I don’t think the problems in the Dome became apparent til the flooding situation became clearly catastrophic. And that seems to have Tues morning no?
Given that time frame, late Thurs seems about right to me.
SteveMG,
I agree except (maybe) for your last paragraph. Should anyone have forseen the breakdown into anarchy in NO? During 9/11, we saw incredibly dedicated first responders, and just generally people helping people. In NO, we saw total abdication by local authorities, and a criminal element that suddenly found itself free to rape and pillage. Maybe we should have seen it coming, but I myself have an unfortunately higher expectation of humans. Guess I was wrong.
I would like to point out also there is a huge difference in levees being overtopped and complete failure. If say a 20’ levee gets overtopped by 22’ flood levels, you have water coming in until the flood recedes to 20’, then the levee starts working again. But the water coming over the top, according to all the reports I have seen, eroded the dirt and undercut the footings, so the wall collaspsed and you have 20’ flood waters in the city. It is also worth noting that this would constitute a design flaw, and maintenance would not be an issue, if this is indeed what happened.
Tman – but do we have “various chaotic” deaths at the convention center? Or, do we have a few deaths of older people who were in precarious health as it was? From what I’ve read today, tales of dead bodies in the ‘dome are a bit exaggerated.
Jeff –
I’ve been searching for the FACTS why Brown is supposed to be so bad and incompetant, but all I’ve found is that:
1 – He used to manage some sort of Arabian horse organization
2 – He was was fired due to supervisory issues (not sure what that entails)
3 – He didn’t know there were people in the Convention center.
Regarding number 3 – I’m not sure why it’s so conclusive that he was at fault here. If he wasn’t made aware by the locals that people were in the Convention Center, then he is in the clear. If he had been told and forgot or something like that, then he deserves the criticism.
In my research, I found a FEMA Failures blog site, but all I found in there were editorials that were a lot like the one you reference in your post, with nothing that proved anything to me about Brown’s failures.
I’ll make my judgement when there are more facts.
I like to be fair.
Here are a few questions:
Was the Superdome competely surrounded by water?
I ask because I am wondering why people couldn’t go to nearby stores and such for supplies.
The way I see it FEMA and whoever…National Guard were so focused on rescue and recovery those first few days that they didn’t even think about the food and water situation of people on dry land and in a shelter. Am I wrong on that?
We all know now that they were told to have 3 or 4 days of food and water, so maybe the FEMA people assumed that?
Also, Does FEMA have no one watching the news? When Shep Smith was having a meltdown on that highway in New Orleans I kept thinking “Someone in govt has GOT to pick up a phone and get some water dropped on that highway before Smith explodes.
Doesn’t it seem that FEMA and the rest were following emergency plans set into place and not “reacting” to the situation on the ground?
That seems to me to have been the whole problem.
I am not into logistics, but consider what it would take to keep a fleet of 1000 search
& rescue boats going:
1.first you have to find 1000 air boats or shallow draft flat bottom boats.
2.next you have to get them there, when all the roads are shut down
3.where do they launch?
4.how to get fuel to them?
5.where do you park all these boats while the crew rests?
6.where do the crewmen rest and get chow?
7.how to maintain communication with all the boats out on the water?
8.navigational channels: remember, we are running boats up and down flooded neighborhoods.
You can’t just pick a straight line course and set sail.
9.how do you figure out where to send them?
10.how do you keep track of grids that have already been searched?
11.what do you do with the people you rescue?
12.what do you do when the people you’re trying to rescue shoot at you?
The expectation (by some) is that this is up an running within 24 hours after a major hurricane has just destroyed the coastline of 3 states.
Re: design flaw vs. upkeep, try this.
Via Commissar.
You know, when I was watching Shep’s (and Geraldo’s ) meltdown, I was thinking – ‘Do you really think your job is so important- why don’t you take whatever vehicle you used to GET there, and go get some water.’ Honest to God – I was thinking they had taken an oath similar to those from National Geographic who are willing to watch an elephant die of dehydration “because it’s the will of nature.”
I definitely think each of the rescue organizations could benefit from having someone in their staff watching what’s going on the media during the disaster.
I commented about this earlier. Look here. This is the applicable quote, on Tuesday.
If FEMA was getting the same information and trying to do triage on a rapidly deteriorating situation, they would probably think that the folks at the Superdome were safe and secure, “for as long as it takes”.
As I said, with all that was happening, that situation would be WAAAAY down on my list.
The biggest problem I have with Brown is it seems to me that being the public face of FEMA is a big part of his job. He should be able to communicate, consol, and instill confidence in the herd, and he seems to have failed miserably at that.
Jeff,
This is scary if accurate.
It has been out there since this morning, I originally saw it on Hugh Hewitt. I have tried to find it on one of the MSM sites, but so far no one else is reporting it. That makes me somewhat leery of the accuracy. If this is so, I can’t imagine that it is not all over Fox, MSNBC, & all the other alphabets.
<a href=”http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09.html#077196
“>Additional speculation on the levee breaches</a> (including possible barge involvement).
NOLA had about 7,700.
Think globally, act locally.
A good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite point in the future. General George S. Patton
I think I’m leaning back towards the “wait and see” what the hell went wrong phase.
I still think Brown made some comments that were downright frightening, and give me little to zero confidence of his ability to handle a bigger disaster, but as many have noted due to absolute clusterfuck that Blanco and Nagin created by ignoring various agencies screaming bloody murder maybe there was simply no way for FEMA to act any faster.
And maybe I should like, I dunno, throw around some ad hominems to make people feel more at home. It’s almost got downright civil in here.
Hey Jeff, you smell funny.
Jim in Chicago, at least, has a perspective on the logistics. Seems people think manpower, trucks, supplies, water, food, clothing, shelter, and going to arrive–out of somewhere–and automatically show up where these supplies are needed–in the proper quantities necessary for the exact number of affected people.
And then there are those that think the feds are all-knowing, and all-seeing, so that after the feds figure out that the locals screwed up, then the feds need to respond sooner, but then if the locals screwed up, it’s too late. The federal gov’t doesn’t have back-up plans for local screw ups. Then there’s the little detail that FEMA is not some federal uniformed service waiting around to do the job in place of local first responders. Not their job. Good description by Cirby.
But when you ask for a sped up response, they still need to be staged hundreds of miles away so they don’t become become part of the problem, rather than the solution. Logistically, you can’t speed up response.
Oh, yeah, when the locals don’t execute a plan, or don’t have one–like NO–then it becomes a rescue operation, instead of disaster recovery, so all of the logistics planning for manpower, supplies, vehicles, helicopters, water-borne craft get diverted from recovery to rescue.
But the local response, by local first responders, is responsible for evacuation to safe and secure shelters, and rescue operations. That what police and fire departments are responsible for–that’s what the county sheriff and state police are responsible for–that’s what mayors and governors are responsible for. Why is this so hard?
Oh, and mph, levees fail because the pumps, used to keep soil and subsoil from saturating, failed. Hydrostatic pressure from water saturates the soil, and subsoil below levees, so pumps are required to prevent erosion from below the levee. The power went out and/or the pumps failed, so the levees were compromised, and failed.
Also, it’s not clear that the “big one” missed NO. It can take several days or weeks for the full upstream effect of the hurricane rainfall to impact the downstraem levees in the NO/Lake Ponch/Miss R. system.
maybe some marine snipers should weigh in on this? ;D
The Brown article is a good insight into the major weakness of the levee system, but all the preliminary reports I have seen indicate the water cascading over the top undermined the footings. This could be prevented with larger, cantilevered footings and/or making them much deeper.
After reading his report I seriously wonder if maybe we should just rebuild the old city, which seems to be able to withstand the floods fairly well after all, and then go way outside the box for the industrial side. Either build artificial islands far enough above sea level to be relatively safe or put the shit on stilts.
Or both, it is just an interesting scenario for a civil engineer: “We need to build a complete city in an impossible location, here is a sack of loot, have at it.”
Jeff,
I owe you (and Robin) an apology for not responding to you last night. Things happen.
The info I was getting was coming mainly from Brendan Loy (http://www.brendanloy.com/) and Instapundit. Having reviewed that and some other stuff, I’m going to back off a little on my judgement. IMO, Brown’s not a fool. I stand by my characterization of him as sub (at best) competent.
Brown is hardly the first goodbuddy of a politico appointed to a job above his level of competence. The whole system is geared to working around such people when they show up. His errors and misfeasances wouldn’t have made a fart at landfall if Nagin and Blanco had done what they were supposed to doâ€â€and they’re both elected, not appointees.
Regards,
Ric
Thanks, Ric.
If the rest of you guys are interested in an alternate universe examination of this very issue, go visit Cole’s comments section.
For 5 days now, in every thread, there argument has been exactly the same: “How can you not blame Bush? Did you not see the suffering?”—rewritten in 70 different ways and mixed in with abuse heaped upon anyone to the right of Joe Biden.
Me, I’m going to finish watching the Rockies blown a 6-run lead in the 7th inning.
I’m with Goldstein. In hindsight, unless rank partisanship completely devours the nation, the effort should look pretty impressive. Katrina v. Ivan comparison here.
BTW, did the Rockies win? And how can you not blame Bush?! Did you see the suffering?!
And to echo others who’ve made this observation, that we look bad or weak in the eyes of the world is a product of our media and their myopic, sensationalistic coverage.
When all is said and done, Shep Smith and Anderson Cooper should be where Brown is now.
Just my two cents.
Yep. In the next disaster, the first thing the authorities—Fed, state, and local—need to do is get and keep the broadcast media out.
Something along the lines of, “it’s too dangerous here now, “X” could happen at any moment, we’re evacuating everyone, and oh btw Shep, you and Anderson are first. Bu-bye.”
Game’s still going, Karl. They’re up 6-4 heading into the 8th.
And before any of you make cracks about the Rocks, they’ve won 5 of their last 6 series and are coming off a sweep of the Dodgers.
Wait til next year!
Ric, I appreciate the comment but you never owe me an apology for not responding. Unlike the more juvenile, I don’t think you “owe” me any more of your time than you feel like sharing and I don’t have the right to dictate to you when you are to respond to me. I don’t tolerate that kind of attitude from others toward me and won’t do it to others.
I wish I could be as optimistic about the Royals.
tw:million. Million to one they win next year.
You’re more optimistic than some of us. Leahy sounded like one of Cole’s commenters today and, then there’s Lieberman,
Other Dems have also already identified the executive branch of the federal government as the main culprit.
The response on the left is unified and I don’t have much faith in weak-kneed Republicans, like Collins and Chafee, to avoid letting these inquiries devolve into a series of Bush-bashing fests rather than searches for the truth.
Me, I’m going to finish watching the Rockies blown a 6-run lead in the 7th inning.
Shyeah. Like that’s any different from every other game this season.
And before any of you make cracks about the Rocks, ….
Too late.
BTW, did the Rockies win? And how can you not blame Bush?! Did you see the suffering?!
Oh, come on. He’s not even an owner any more. The Rockies aren’t his fault.
Robin,
I don’t feel especially obligated to you, as such; I feel obligated to myself, to finish what I started. That’s especially true if I’m going to back off or retract. If I just don’t post it looks like I’ve bugged out.
Jeff, you might also take a short trip through Totten’s place (http://www.michaeltotten.com/) re Brown. What I see there doesn’t really have much to do with Brown himself, although I’m Navy enough to blame the skipper by default when one of the crew effs up. But what it really is, is a fairly typical bureaucracy in action—doesn’t matter what does or doesn’t get done, it only matters if the paperwork is filled in properly and submitted through the proper channels.
And the astonishing thing about that, to me, is that there are actually people around who can see that happening, and still propose that all our affairs be turned over to the bureaucracy for management.
Regards,
Ric
Turing word: ago, as in long ago and far away. I think the earlier poster was right. Those words are chosen in advance.
Interesting press conference today by Rummy and Myers:
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2005/tr20050906-secdef3862.html
The press conference Jim links to is interesting. The press questions demonstrate a press uninterested in learning the facts. They are only interested in asking questions designed to get a particular answer that they want to hear.
Abyssmally bad reporting.
I was fortunate enough to catch that press conference live today and was going to link parts of it tomorrow. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so convinced that the relief operations are going along as they should, with the usual minor bureaucratic missteps (which, you have to account for those dispassionately, especially given the collapse of the first responders and communication breakdown).
Jeff-
I agree with that last assessment.
The only thing that happened at the Superdome that was unexpected by state and local officials was the way it looked on television.
The story became very, very political when the pictures being shown of the Superdome survivors weren’t being accompanied by tales of survival, but by accusations of racism and squalor.
I’m willing to look at what went well and what did not. But what I can’t for the life of me figure out is why the local officials and James Witt are being treated as unbiased news sources.
It seems every single news source has become one big Outrage! editorial cesspool. Perhaps this has been a while in the making and the dam just broke.
It might feel good to the media sources, but the country isn’t being well served by them.
None of your trolls have anything on Cole’s. I felt bad for you yesterday, having to sift through some of the garbage. Oh, and don’t get your Rocky related hopes up too high. They swept the Dodgers.
The Rockies are a good young team with the no. 1 rated minor league syste (Baseball Weekly). They’ve been playing very well since the All-Star break, and—barring early season bullpen meltdowns—might actually be in this division race. Every one of their starters spent significant time on the DL this year, too.
And they outscored the Dodgers, like 29-13 in that series.
Hmm, Baseball America called my Dodgers the #1 minor league system in Baseball. I ACCUSE BASEBALL WEEKLY OF INCOMPETENCE! By the way, enjoy Carvajal, you prospect poaching bastards.
Here’s what I’ve learned, or already knew…whatever…
Bush is not to blame for the disaster.
FEMA is not to blame for the incompetent reaction of the state officials- Nagin and Blanco…
This being said, I want to see a FEDERAL system in place that is prepared for the STATE levels to fail..that should be the lesson.
1.)Yes, states rights.
2.)Yes, individual responsibility.
3.)Yes, a back-up plan in case the above fail.
NO, the Department of Homeland Security nor FEMA provided the third option in this particular scenario.
As Mark Steyn said-“The comparison with Sept. 11 isn’t exact, but it’s fair to this extent: Katrina was the biggest disaster on American soil since that day provoked the total overhaul of the system and the devotion of billions of dollars and the finest minds in the nation to the prioritizing of homeland security. It was, thus, the first major test of the post-9/11 structures. Happy with the results?”
I’m not. Nor should anyone with any sense be either.
Sobering, isn’t it?
I think your list is right, Tman, IF there was a land route, passable to busses or trucks, before Thursday. If there wasn’t, then I don’t think it’s fair to say that the back-up plan failed. The people did get out; if they got out as soon as was possible, then the plan didn’t fail, it just sucked because there wasn’t a way for it not to. Unless there could have been a passable route, and whoever was in charge of making one didn’t deliver as soon as practicably possible. I don’t understand why the press hasn’t asked anybody when a passable route was cleared. That seems like the first question from which all damnation of post-flood action must follow.
Nobody mentions trucks, so I assume there’s something wrong with my theory, but people can ride in the backs of trailers. It isn’t comfortable (and they’d probably have to cut holes in the sides for air; FEMA seems to have a pretty hefty check book though, and trailers aren’t that expensive), but it wouldn’t be any less comfortable than sitting in filth w/o water or food. There are lots of trucks (w/ 200 gallon fuel tanks), with drivers, everywhere. That it doesn’t come up makes me wonder whether gathering busses with drivers was a bottleneck at all. Especially drivers, since driving a bus is easier than driving a truck; if DOT was relaxing regulations, it would have made a lot of sense to let Class A’s without a passenger cert. drive unpiloted busses.
Or I could be wrong.
Tman,
Although I wish that the feds could have intervened sooner, the experience of my somewhat long life dictates that fairy tales are fairy tales. I just don’t see how anyone could realistically expect the number of people and the amount of supplies needed to aid NO could have possibly gotten there safely any sooner than they did. I am as outraged and heartsick as anyone who has witnessed this catastrophe, but physical reality intrudes. The blame lies squarely on the people who allowed this situation to become what it did, and, sorry, it wasn’t the feds. Of course the feds could have dropped food and water into the Super Dome, but have you considered the consequences? With the lack of security there, how many people would have died in the scramble for the supplies? There is no way that a simple air drop of supplies would not have turned an already anarchic situation into a killing field. Perhaps someone near the top of the chain of command (apparently not a KosKid) was smart enough to see this. It may sound cold, but it’s just another brush with what so many people in this country have chosen to deny – the bounds of reality. If I was in command, I would have done exactly what WAS done, and that was to wait until there was sufficient force available to insure that delivering supplies would cause no more death and injury. My argumanent remains the same – that the feds did not, and do not, have any sort of magic wand whatsoever. If anyone can prove me wrong, I will apologize.
The other thing I don’t get is: why are there people still in shelters? ABC News tonight had a story about one woman who’d gotten a $1,500 Mastercard debit card from the Red Cross. Isn’t that a really good idea? Get them each a card (I’m not married to $1,500; more seems better, here) and a ride to the Airport. Obviously the injured or ill should be taken to hospitals, but they should be taken to hospitals, not a cot in the Astrodome. The Astrodome isn’t the Superdome, but it still seems like a crappy place to be. And, anyway, how much more of their lives do most of these people need to live under the care of others? There’s lots of money floating around, wouldn’t direct aid be better?
Re: TBone’s #3.
I have no problem with the Feds providing backup, but that backup then needs some time to be implemented once the other plan goes wrong.
I live in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone cities. I invite every American disaster-prone city planner to come see what they have done here to prepare. It is amazing. It is reported they have drinking water supplies hidden under the city in several locations. I know what I’m supposed to have on hand, where I’m supposed to go and when I’m supposed to stay home, there are evacuation routes displayed on every block, and I know that I may be on my own for up to 3 days. The preparation given each citizen (and in my case, guest) is amazing and thorough.
I’ll admit that if the big earthquake hit right now, I’d have enough water but I’d be living on Tostitos, poptarts, and peanuts for a week. The city or national government here won’t come help me even if my family has to use a box for a toilet. The American consulate won’t come save me, either. It isn’t about personal responsibility, or them trying to punish me for not being prepared- they are simply unable to promise that they can get to everyone within 72 hours. Period.
What happened in NO is very sad. It is tragic.But we need to ask ourselves what we expect in the case of a natural disaster. No death? No suffering? No confusion? No discomfort?
Did what happened there really go against our expectations? Or was it just too hard to see people struggling right in front of our eyes?
I don’t see how a federal system could replace a competent local response. You would have to analyze every possible scenario in every town or city of any size, develop responses, and then have people ready to instantly drop what they are doing at a moments notice and race to the scene.
I think the planning and the initial response can best be handled by the locals who know the terrain, rescources and people far better than anyone else. What is actually being said now is because New Orleans fucked up, and a slightly less fucked up federal response team would be better, the entire country should have a fucked up federal response instead of, in most cases, their perfectly competent local government.
Sound familiar?
I guess I meant Tman, not Tbone. Sorry to turn you into a piece of meat.
I think there is a real difference in the “mindset” of people like me and the left.
In the case of an emergency I would hope the govt would do it’s job and help, but it never occurs to me to DEPEND on them. I will do what I have to do to prepare and do what I have to do to make my family safe.
And one thing that folks often forget…it’s not the job of these people to take unneccessary risks themselves. It’s already a dangerous situation, going into a place where most normal folks are trying to get away from. When you think about it, you have to be half-crazy just to go in there. They are not required to rush in and possibly injure themselves so that they now have to be rescued.
Yea, and in survival terms, the 72nd hour without food and water is known as the golden hour. Hardly the hour you would want to be organising a review on how you are going …. unless you have already managed to meet food and water needs for the survivors, of course.
You would expect Brown and the DHS guy to know that as a minimum requirement for their roles.
A quick reality-bite:
1 – “Brown waited five hours before…”
fwiw, five hours after Katrina made landfall, there were still four or five hours before Katrina’s winds subsided to the point over New Orleans where you could move trucks and other equipment within the city.
The storm was 400 miles wide. Katrina was moving at 10-15 miles per hour. Five hours after landfall. Using nothing other than basic math, I can deduce that the 400 mile wide Katrina had only gone 50-75 miles inland. Even taking into account that landfall is based on the eye wall reaching land, that left 200 miles worth of storm with which to contend.
Also, the path Katrina took prevented land-based help from reaching New Orleans until after the hurricane cleared out of their approaches. So the clock for aid reaching New Orleans ought to begin once Katrina cleared out far enough so that it was safe for trucks to eave from, say, Baton Rouge.
boko:
Because they were able to get their satellite vans/trucks and supplies in for themselves, they believe that there was a passable route all along. Here’s just one example:
I’m sure it wouldn’t take long to uncover many other examples.
WASHINGTON – For the next few days, federal help to Katrina-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast will be a matter of life and death. It’s a “golden 72 hours” with the clock ticking for dramatic rescues of people stuck in high water or trapped in rubble.
TW: anything – you’ll say just about
Bushazzar’s Feast. LOL
FEMA is and has been a relatively small agency, primarily responsible for training and organization. At actual incidents, they interact with other local/state/fed/private agencies and assist with the overall organization of events.
90% of what FEMA does is planning and training. It is hoped that the training and planning can be deployed by agencies involved in a crisis situation. This hope was partially unrealized by agencies and individuals at all levels.
From FEMA’s website:
Goal 1. Reduce loss of life and property
Goal 2. Minimize suffering and disruption caused by disasters.
Goal 3. Prepare the Nation to address the consequences of terrorism.
Goal 4. Serve as the Nation’s portal for emergency management information and expertise.
Goal 5. Create a motivating and challenging work environment for employees.
Goal 6. Make FEMA a world-class enterprise.
Note the goal words. Reduce (not eliminate or prevent). Minimize. Prepare. The only word that implies immediacy is serve, in communications.
FEMA and the feds implemented their part of the plan, working on the assumption that the first 72 hours were being handled locally. That didn’t happen, and the unanticipated backlog of duties overwhelmed FEMA’s initial response (a crude analogy – they expected to join the play at act III (evacuation completed, S&R mostly complete, mitigation underway), when in fact act I was still not done.
TW – union, as in lots of future jobs.
Having scanned through yet another incredibly long thread, I’m not sure if others have already addressed these or if what I’m about to say will look foolish next to meta-replies I haven’t seen because clicking links tends to make scanning take longer than I can spare.
Mph asked:
That’s why you make disaster preparedness plans. You have to have some idea what you are going to do if faced with things that have never happened before—and what happened to New Orleans qualifies. The problem here isn’t that it wasn’t anticipated, because they did have a plan.
The problem is that critical parts of the city’s plan weren’t implemented. Evacuation in the face of a Category 5 hurricane needs to happen before the hurricane hits, not during or after. In this case, we’re talking about before Katrina degraded to a Cat 4.
The city’s own plan says they should have geared up, used those city-owned buses, and gotten people out of the city, not just to the ‘Dome.
B Moe said:
Not so. Levees have this nasty habit of eroding when water starts flowing over them. If they actually, honestly thought that overtopped levees wouldn’t ultimately fail as a result, their planning was deficient.
I just wanted to get that off my chest. Y’all may resume ignoring me now.
Mike C: …and they shared these wonderously clear routes with the authorities, right? Including map coordinates and such?
Emphasis mine. From FEMA’s 2003-2008 Strategic Plan.
Hey, that’s not their job. They’re chroniclers of events not participants.
FEMA arrived in LA State and asked for LA State’s disaster plan and the LA State government replied:
“Hey, you’re The Man we expected you to bring The Plan besides, we spent all our levee money on holiday decorations for the LA State Governor’s mansion. The Gov couldn’t decide which bulbs to buy so we bought them all. Anyway, nobody ever told Gov. Blanco that the notorious city below sea level would actually flood. We are not to blame! And, since Texas is right next door we should be allowed to steal all their resources because all those bulbs we bought were expensive!”
FEMA response was “Get out of the way, we are trying to save the lives of thousand of Louisiana’s suffering people.”
I posted this in a different thread…to be a broken record….
I guess FEMA had control of the hundreds of NO School and Municipal buses that have been reported and photographed sitting in NO parked in neat flooded rows? I do believe these were under the control of the MAYOR of NO who, if he gave a damn about his citizens and was doing HIS job, he would have had those buses evacuating those who got left behind, BEFORE the storm hit, as it is easier to evacuate before your streets and bus parking lots get flooded.
It
I think it’s also important to remember two things, in any discussion about federal agency response times post-hurricane:
1) It takes time to assess the damage, as has already been noted.
2) Katrina did not clear the New Orleans area until Monday afternoon and was still moving northward through the region. Try coordinating relief efforts in the middle of a raging storm; I’m sure it’s not an easy task.
Splitting up FEMA and Homeland Security was discussed frequently on the talkers yesterday. I think you’ll conservatives shy away from agreeing with that notion, simply because liberals will use any revelation by conservatives that something could have been “done better” as damning criticism of Bush and his inability to manage himself out of a paper bag.
Thats the unfortunate problem the administration is facing- even if it has the best intentions in saying “ok here’s what didn’t go well, here’s how we make it better next time”, they’ll be accused of incompetence directly leading to the death of high proportion of black citizens.
The left is convinced this country is doomed unless they are put back in charge. THats their sole goal, sole motivation.
CPT Tom,
How dare you imply that the responsibility lay with Ray Nagin, international celebrity and hero.
Bottom line: People were cynical and decided to tough out the storm. It happens in every hurricane. These people made a mistake. Now, the question is, what should be done to ameliorate their mistake. Should the mayor/governor go house to house and round up the stay-putters? How much time would that take?
Answer: If there are 150,000 dwellings in NO, assuming it takes five minutes to search/evacuate each dwelling, and there are 1,000 people available to do the search–don’t ask me who–that’s (5 minutes x 150,000 dwellings) / 1,000 = 750 minutes = slightly over 12 hours to forcibly evacuate assuming there are some 1,000 people available for this task.
Just for the sake of curiosity, let’s take a look at what was to be done under the state’s emergency plan:
a. Risk Area Parishes:
1. Coordinate evacuation orders with State and other risk parishes.
2. Instruct persons living in designated evacuation zones to leave.
3. Impose traffic control to funnel persons to designated evacuation routes.
4. Designate staging areas and other facilities as last resort refuges. People at these locations who cannot be evacuated in time to avoid the storm will remain and take refuge in the designated buildings.
5. Assist persons with mobility limitations to find last resort refuge. Mobilize all transportation resources and request assistance from the state as needed.
Needless to say, none of this was done. It was never even contemplated. The best the mayor came up with was “hobble over to the Superdome and act like you’re camping.”
So we have two things going on: (1) tragic stupidity and/or cynicism on the part of some of the citizenry; and (2) an inability by the city to follow its own plan for dealing with elderly, frail and carless citizenry.
On top of this are the extraordinary problems associated with accurate hurricane forecasting, the need to balance an evacuation against tourism revenues and a total lack of communication and foresight. How you tag the head of FEMA with all that is beyond me.
Wad—that article you linked by Seth Borenstein, liberal Knight-Ridder reporter—have you seen Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,” because I think old Seth might be auditioning for the stage production.
C’mon, Jeff – fess up. Wadard is really you, isn’t it? You’ve become addicted to the 100-comment-plus threads! The blogads revenue is just pouring in, and you need a new pool table. Baby needs a new pair of shoes…
We need an intervention.
SB: building
and food.
Ray Nagin doesn’t care about black people.
There. I said it.
TallDave
We’ve all been thinking it. Thank you for your bravery. In addition, he doesn’t care about white people either.
Thanks D-Guy. Someday, when I’m recognized as the Rosa Parks of the Katrina Hurricane and you’re reading about me in the history books, you can tell your kids you were the first person to respond to my comment.
Cliff May on NRO
As fao mr, I’m on tenterhooks just waiting to see how President Genna Davis is going to deal with her variant of this tragedy.
Turing word: place, as in Peyton.
TallDave
I have taken a screenshot of this moment. For posterity.
Hark! I hear the cry of the bleeding heart! It’s ALL OUR FAULT!
“I blame the system. I blame all of us. From the cries of the people stranded in New Orleans you can tell they expected to be taken care of.”
http://theglitteringeye.com/?p=1324
Well, they were freakin’ WRONG, huh? Guess what, folks – I don’t owe the people of New Orleans (who were too stupid to get the hell out of a slowly flooding deathtrap) a damn thing. Stupidity is a universal capital crime, and one that imposes it’s own penalties, all without human intervention.
The idiots will get help anyway. That’s what America does. But not as a requirement – I DON”T OWE A DAMN THING!
And fuck you if you think I do.