Where is FEMA?

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I just watched the news this morning, showing live rescues from attics and roofs, STILL occurring 6 DAYS after this event. After rescuing one group of people, the aid worker, who was in the boat with the rescue squad, heard a noise and looked across the way -- some man was knocking on a window, trapped on the top floor of his house with water up to his chest, begging and pleading with them not to leave...he's screaming that he has 6 children inside and one small baby and that they can't hold on any longer. The aid worker broke down trying to tell this story... for they had no more room in the boat and had to leave them.

How many more hundreds of people are trapped in houses that people don't even know about? 6 days??? All levels of government should and will be held accountable for this nightmare. One day of visitation, complete with shaking hands and patting heads doesn't even begin to make up for the insensitivity and incompetence displayed here.

 

@Cernak, prehaps I didn't word my post properly. I did not say that Bush was not responsible for what he did or did not do but State and Local governments share in the blame.

Good statement from Spellbound.

 

Although I WAS wrong about the starting point of Katrina (most hurricanes start in the Atlantic), that does not the path would follow like a map along the path it did. You may want to look at the paths of a few hurricanes:

historic hurricanes

These are really just a small fraction of hurricanes which have hit the gulf -- Ivan (near the bottom of the page) is particularly interesting.

State and local governments share responsibility for emergency assistance. The city should provide immediate assistance, the state within 48 hours, and the federal government within one week. The only entity that responded reasonable WAS the federal government -- NO and LA failed miserably.

The levees were a known problem WHEN THEY WERE BUILT. They were designed for a CAT3, the state did not want to spend the extra money to upgrade them. Sorry, but poor planning on the states part does not make it the federal governments fault. As I've said before many states put millions of dollars into their levees, but not LA. Replacement of the CAT3 levees to CAT5 would have taken at least ten years -- it certainly would not have been done by now even if the illustrious Mr Clinton would have authorized the funds (which he did not).

One additional item, FEMA is a training and advisory organization. Fine, blame the teachers when the students fail -- we do it all the time in America.

 

Where the hurricane came from is quite irrelevant at this point, although Katrina will no doubt hold an honored place in any future list of historic hurricanes.

I like your timeline for emergency assistance. By your reckoning the federal government arrived a day early. They were actually ahead of schedule. Another reason to be proud of our leaders, as I'm sure the many dead in New Orleans would be, were they still capable of emotional response. This sort of papering over of tragedy is both callous and repulsive.

To expect New Orleans to respond in any meaningful way is naive since the city, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist. Louisiana is a poor state, with limited resources, and the greater part of the state National Guard, which might have helped maintain order and vital services, has been shipped to Iraq by order of the President. In fact I doubt if there is any state in this Union that could deal adequately with the total obliteration of its largest city. Consider for instance that much of the infrastructure to deal with such events would be located in that city. Only the Federal government has the means to deal with disaster on this scale. To seriously argue that the Federal government didn't have to respond for seven days because it says so on a piece of paper, and is therefore in no way culpable, is putting cosmetics on a corpse.

The question--the only question--is whether the federal government's response was timely and effective. It was not. Only on the fourth day, Thursday, when it had become obvious to the entire world this this was indeed a very great disaster, and also when--perhaps more to the point--criticisms of the lack of response began to appear, did the administration finally begin to move.

FEMA did not do what it is supposed to do, which is to respond to large scale disasters; exculpatory excuses about it being only a "training and advisory organization" notwithstanding. They neither advised nor co-ordinated. They did nothing. If you prefer to argue that FEMA's functions have been taken over by the Department of Homeland Security, then THEY did nothing, although their charge is to deal with sudden and unexpected emergency and disaster. Even with notice that disaster was coming, they failed; and they failed totally.

The levees: As I noted above, the Times-Picayune pointed out in series in 2002 that the levees were at risk, and required upgrading and repair. It's true that nothing was done by either the city of New Orleans or the state of Louisiana to deal with this, and for this they must bear responsibility. It's also true, however, that projects of this nature are usually undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The appointment today of James Lee Witt, Clinton's director of FEMA, to coordinate all disaster relief efforts, can hardly be seen as anything other than this administration's admission of failure.

EDIT: My apologies. This last paragraph is apparently incorrect. I can find nothing on the news stating that Witt has been appointed to anything, although I was told this had happened. However, a number of high ranking officials will be making appearances in the stricken regions. I'm sure that will help.

[ September 05, 2005, 07:31: Message edited by: Cernak ]

 

Way to plug White House Talking Points (or at this stage, Damage Control). The strategy is:

Blame State and Local governments. Show Gov Blanco, Senator Landreau, and Mayor Nagin on TV all the time to make people think that LA is run by Democrats. Hope that people forget that LA is a red state, with one out of two Senators and five out of seven Representatives being Republican. Switch attention over to Gov Barbour of MS, a Republican busy atm kissing Bush admin @ss, and try to say how much better prepared MS (with its Repub gov) is than LA (with its Demo gov), say they were hit more directly by the hurricane, but don't bring up the relative sizes of say Biloxi and NO, and don't point out that in general MS, also a red state, is in even worse shape that LA in terms of education, poverty, etc. Again, try to make it purely a Demo governor vs a Repub governor, avoiding mentioning that it's an own goal anyways as both states are red states. Think about arguing that all the looters are Democrats, but decide that would be even too far for you.

Avoid avoid avoid mentioning deals with developers that destroyed wetlands, *federal* budget cuts to levee repairs (yes, I'm afraid that money for the levees does come from the fed), and especially that some of this money in the past year went to Iraq. Pretending that the gov't had nothing to do with pulling money from programs monitoring int'l terrorism right before 9/11 worked; the American people have a short enough attention span it should work again.

Also, pretend that the Port of New Orleans, and the vast refinery network in the gulf, were completely state interests.

Argue that the fed takes a week to act, even tho its budget, with $41 billion for the DHS alone, dwarfes state budgets. Make sure people don't ask the obvious question: imagine the uproar if it had taken a week for the feds to react to 9/11.

This is not to say the state and local gov'ts don't share the blame. It just seems absurd and grasping to me to argue that the feds are blameless here, and that federal budgeting and organizational issues have nothing to do with the depth of this tragedy.

 

Where was FEMA? The Hattiesburg (Mississippi) American has an answer,of sorts:

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050915/NEWS05/509150304/1002/NEWS01

 

I am disgusted. That is really all I can say since anything else is unprintable.