The non-accountable government
Despite the title of this post, I want to be very clear about what I'm about to say - this is not about politicizing the tragedy along the Gulf Coast. It really isn't. This is about asking honest questions and levying serious criticism about what is occuring on the ground in New Orleans.
And the vast majority of that criticism is directed toward the sheer incompentency of federal, and some state, officials to effectively manage and respond to this event. It has been more than four days since Hurricane Katrina has departed the Gulf Coast, and chaos still reigns in New Orleans.
People are dying the streets. Lawlessness rules the day. Rotting corpses drift in the putrid waters. The remaining survivors are combatting the heat in the filthy Superdome and Convention Center.
And aid trucks are finally rolling in. A welcome sight, no doubt, but my question through all of this has been 'where in the world is the leadership?'
Did we not have a plan for this kind of thing? One would think, with a Department of Homeland Security and 9-11 only a few years in the past, there would be some sort of plan to handle what would happen with another large-scale disaster. Even if it was a strike by a terrorist organization that destroyed much of a city, we'd be faced with a large population of displaced people. And one would think we would have developed a system to accomodate these people upon losing their homes, and that such a scenario could easily be transferred to deal with the refugee crisis in Louisiana.
Apparently not.
Apparently there is a vast difference between the reality of the situation on the ground across the Gulf Coast and between those federal and state officials who are 'coordinating' the rescue efforts.
From CNN:
At a news conference in Baton Rouge Thursday, (FEMA Director Michael) Brown bristled when reporters asked him about the criticism of FEMA's effort in general, and the criticism by Ebbert and Maestri in particular. He insisted his agency was "meeting the needs as they are communicated to us."
"I think everyone in the country needs to take a big, collective, deep breath and recognize that there are a lot of people in this state, in Mississippi and Alabama who are living under conditions that, quite frankly, I doubt any reporter in this room is living under -- no food, no water, it's hot, it's sticky, their homes have been destroyed, they don't know where they're going to go next."
But there was perhaps no clearer illustration of the disconnect between how emergency officials view the situation at a distance, and how it is viewed by those actually living it on the ground, than Brown's comments to CNN's Wolf Blitzer Thursday evening about the evacuation of hospitals in the city.
"I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well," he said.
Shortly after he made those comments, Dr. Michael Bellew, a resident at Charity Hospital, where more than 200 patients were still waiting to be evacuated, described desperate conditions. The hospital had no power, no water, food was running out and nurses were bagging patients by hand because ventilators didn't work.
Earlier in the day, the evacuation from Charity had to be suspended for a time after a sniper opened fire on rescuers.
At another local hospital, Memorial Medical Center, a small fleet of helicopters was brought in to evacuate patients and staff after hospital officials were told "by officials on the ground to take the matter into our own hands," said Trevor Fetter, president of Tenet HealthCare Corp., the hospital's owner.
This is the same man who said he didn't know there was a serious problem at the Convention Center on Thursday afternoon, despite the fact that the national news media had been reporting on it since the levees broke.
The local officials throughout the Gulf Coast, but particularly in New Orleans, have been infuriated by the slow response and poor organization from the federal level. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted federal officials Thursday and Friday, joining several others to do so:
You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on man. I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. This is a national disaster. ... I've talked directly with the president. I've talked to the head of the homeland security. I've talked to everybody under the sun.
They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem, or it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get ... on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now. They're thinking small, man, and this is a major, major deal.
Get off your asses and let's do something.
The scary thing is that the Bush administration has apparently been doing things, but to the detriment of New Orleans' situation. Since taking office, funding for Army Corps of Engineers' water projects have dried up and investments for beefing up the city's levee system vanished.
The New Orleans Time-Picayune in 2004 reported:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency shook up its way of distributing disaster preparedness money when it introduced its Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program in 2002. Given the program's criteria, Louisiana appeared to have been a shoo-in for federal dollars for 2003, the first year the program began awarding money. Instead, Louisiana got nothing.
And it isn't like this is something that people don't forsee coming (unlike what the president claimed when he said no one thought the levees would give out). Scientific American reported in October 2001 that a 'major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.' Other reports showed that New Orleans could only weather a Category 3 hurricane and that, contrary to Bush's assertion, the levees were dire need of an upgrade.
Shouldn't this be something the government should be concerned about? This isn't an ideological dispute over systems of taxation. This is about how to take of its citizens - how to protect them - in the face of a natural, or national, disaster. Shouldn't a government think of a way to help protect its people from these types of disasters (as much as they can), provide quick and efficient relief upon the disaster and provide security to quell lawlessness?
These should be automatic things which are executed promptly, not days after the fact ... with the world watching as our fellow citizens die.
And the vast majority of that criticism is directed toward the sheer incompentency of federal, and some state, officials to effectively manage and respond to this event. It has been more than four days since Hurricane Katrina has departed the Gulf Coast, and chaos still reigns in New Orleans.
People are dying the streets. Lawlessness rules the day. Rotting corpses drift in the putrid waters. The remaining survivors are combatting the heat in the filthy Superdome and Convention Center.
And aid trucks are finally rolling in. A welcome sight, no doubt, but my question through all of this has been 'where in the world is the leadership?'
Did we not have a plan for this kind of thing? One would think, with a Department of Homeland Security and 9-11 only a few years in the past, there would be some sort of plan to handle what would happen with another large-scale disaster. Even if it was a strike by a terrorist organization that destroyed much of a city, we'd be faced with a large population of displaced people. And one would think we would have developed a system to accomodate these people upon losing their homes, and that such a scenario could easily be transferred to deal with the refugee crisis in Louisiana.
Apparently not.
Apparently there is a vast difference between the reality of the situation on the ground across the Gulf Coast and between those federal and state officials who are 'coordinating' the rescue efforts.
From CNN:
At a news conference in Baton Rouge Thursday, (FEMA Director Michael) Brown bristled when reporters asked him about the criticism of FEMA's effort in general, and the criticism by Ebbert and Maestri in particular. He insisted his agency was "meeting the needs as they are communicated to us."
"I think everyone in the country needs to take a big, collective, deep breath and recognize that there are a lot of people in this state, in Mississippi and Alabama who are living under conditions that, quite frankly, I doubt any reporter in this room is living under -- no food, no water, it's hot, it's sticky, their homes have been destroyed, they don't know where they're going to go next."
But there was perhaps no clearer illustration of the disconnect between how emergency officials view the situation at a distance, and how it is viewed by those actually living it on the ground, than Brown's comments to CNN's Wolf Blitzer Thursday evening about the evacuation of hospitals in the city.
"I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well," he said.
Shortly after he made those comments, Dr. Michael Bellew, a resident at Charity Hospital, where more than 200 patients were still waiting to be evacuated, described desperate conditions. The hospital had no power, no water, food was running out and nurses were bagging patients by hand because ventilators didn't work.
Earlier in the day, the evacuation from Charity had to be suspended for a time after a sniper opened fire on rescuers.
At another local hospital, Memorial Medical Center, a small fleet of helicopters was brought in to evacuate patients and staff after hospital officials were told "by officials on the ground to take the matter into our own hands," said Trevor Fetter, president of Tenet HealthCare Corp., the hospital's owner.
This is the same man who said he didn't know there was a serious problem at the Convention Center on Thursday afternoon, despite the fact that the national news media had been reporting on it since the levees broke.
The local officials throughout the Gulf Coast, but particularly in New Orleans, have been infuriated by the slow response and poor organization from the federal level. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted federal officials Thursday and Friday, joining several others to do so:
You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on man. I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. This is a national disaster. ... I've talked directly with the president. I've talked to the head of the homeland security. I've talked to everybody under the sun.
They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem, or it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get ... on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now. They're thinking small, man, and this is a major, major deal.
Get off your asses and let's do something.
The scary thing is that the Bush administration has apparently been doing things, but to the detriment of New Orleans' situation. Since taking office, funding for Army Corps of Engineers' water projects have dried up and investments for beefing up the city's levee system vanished.
The New Orleans Time-Picayune in 2004 reported:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency shook up its way of distributing disaster preparedness money when it introduced its Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program in 2002. Given the program's criteria, Louisiana appeared to have been a shoo-in for federal dollars for 2003, the first year the program began awarding money. Instead, Louisiana got nothing.
And it isn't like this is something that people don't forsee coming (unlike what the president claimed when he said no one thought the levees would give out). Scientific American reported in October 2001 that a 'major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.' Other reports showed that New Orleans could only weather a Category 3 hurricane and that, contrary to Bush's assertion, the levees were dire need of an upgrade.
Shouldn't this be something the government should be concerned about? This isn't an ideological dispute over systems of taxation. This is about how to take of its citizens - how to protect them - in the face of a natural, or national, disaster. Shouldn't a government think of a way to help protect its people from these types of disasters (as much as they can), provide quick and efficient relief upon the disaster and provide security to quell lawlessness?
These should be automatic things which are executed promptly, not days after the fact ... with the world watching as our fellow citizens die.
posted by Jmac at 1:49 PM
11 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Couldn't resist a little bush-bashing? I suppose it's the thing to do. Seriously though, if you're going to blame, you should probably blame New Orleans. They're the ones who decided to build a city on a damn flood plain...in the middle of hurricane country! But, if you do think it is likely that someone would have 'beefed up the levees' in the last five years had Bush not intervened, then I'll leave that point be.
Otherwise, the criticism, while perhaps understandable, is kind of strange. This is really a whopper of an disaster, far greater than even the california earthquakes, which are the closest comparable thing. The city of New Orleans is basically gone, there isn't any infrastructure in place anymore to get rescue teams in or coordinate them. I can't really blame the FEMA guy for trying to put a good face on things. That's what the government does, after all. But I do think the sheer scope of the logistical problem eludes many people. Four days just isn't that long, and now we have violent degenerates making things even more difficult.
I will say this though: it was stupid to send national guardsmen to Iraq. Bashing Bush for it doesn't seem right though, since the senate voted to invade iraq too. The hell with them all.
Matt, I really didn't mean this as 'Bush-bashing' though I know people will see it that way. I'm upset with a lot of state and federal officials from all sorts of political persuasions, and the guy in charge happens to be President Bush. And, yes, I do think he's done a sub-par job of handling this crisis.
As far as someone 'beefing up the levees' I think that is a valid point. Both the first President Bush and President Clinton had put that as part of their strategic plan for the region(the fact it would have taken that long is another criticism, I suppose), and this president cut the funding for that program.
The point of my criticism was that there seemed to be absolutely no plan on how to handle this type of situation. Yes it was very bad, but governments are supposed to plan for the worst-case scenario, and judging by what was written and studied prior to Katrina, it was widely understood that an event of this magnitude was quite possible.
There was no plan. A worst-case scenario would have included the likelihood of infrastructure being down. Consider what would happen after a nuclear attack. The infrastructure and communications would be in shambles and large populations would be displaced, hungry and injured/ill. Surely there are contingencies for that, right? Why aren't those models in place for catastrophic natural disasters?
And I disagree with you that four days of response time was understandable due to the circumstances. There should have been a much more efficient and effective response to this, and National Guard troops should have been sent in much faster.
In the mid-1960s, during the intergration of Ole Miss, riots broke out and that state damn near seceded again. President Kennedy mobalized the Guard, and they were in there in force within hours.
I'll grant you that bringing order to a bunch of drunken bigots is a tad different than securing an underwater city, but the point is the response was quick and effective. And that was from something that popped up overnight. Officials from all across the board saw this thing coming, literally for days.
Could it have something to do with the fact that the majority of the people left in NOLA were poor, black people? </conspiracy theory>
It could have something to do with that. I mean, I won't say it's impossible, but I don't see any profit in it for Bush or anyone else to treat the situation in such a manner. At least, not along the racial lines. After all, you're not the first person by any means to make such a connection. It is quite possible that socioeconomic status could have something to do with a lackadaisical response. After all, what good are poor people? They don't pay taxes, although they do sometimes join the military. One nice thing about having a progressive tax system is that we now have a very large contingent of useless poor people--in the gov'ts eyes, that is. But then, what I'm saying here is probably a lot farther down conspiracy lane than what you said.
Now, I'm not really defending Bush, nor did I take your whole post to be attacking him. It was just the one paragraph. And I guess you did attack him for something a little more concrete than global warming and the kyoto protocol. In truth, if Bush's presidency doesn't crash and burn soon, then he's pretty much invincible I'd say. However, the thing about the levees doesn't seem all that solid to me. If it took them ten years to get basically nowhere, then they probably wouldn't have gotten much further with another five. But hey, that's just a lot of speculation, and the fact remains that Bush did cut the funding to the program that at least ostensibly had the purpose of preventing such a disaster. Probably to pay for Iraq. Nah, he has none of my sympathy.
Also, I don't know...the riots may have been bad, but there were still roads in mississippi at the time. New Orleans doesn't even have that. The logistics of it just astounds me; helicopters don't carry that many people, and there's a lot still in the city. Then again, Bush himself admitted earlier that the rescue effort has been pretty pathetic. Now, I don't think this was because it could have actually gone significantly better, but rather I think this was as political as it gets; he knows what people are saying, and that other people will believe it, so better to nip it in the bud now and come out the hero. It won't make the liberals love him, but no love lost there.
Because at the end of the day I just can't conceive of any possible motive that Bush would have had for half-assing this one. This was his chance, his chance to rebound from the slump of the previous months and provide some strong leadership. That he would screw that up would lead me to only one conclusion: that the man is just a bona fide idiot, bereft of all sense. I just can't bring myself to accept that conclusion. I mean, the man did win at least one election, and maybe even two. He's got to have some brains, and it doesn't take much to say "take everything you've got and send it to new orleans."
As usual though, I could be wrong about all of this.
I can't believe I'm still up, but I might as well add that I am also baffled as to why there was seemingly no strategic plan in this case. I mean, the government has had a hundred years or something to think about it. What have they been doing?
From the press:
"WHY DIDN'T YOU DEPLOY THE BUSES DURING THE MANDATORY EVACUATION, MAYOR?...
Louisiana disaster plan, pg 13, para 5 , dated 01/00
'The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School
and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by
volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who
lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating'... "
Link (aerial view of flooded school buses in NO on Sept. 1):
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050901/480/flpc21109012015
**********
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9189916/
"Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday."
**************
The Federal Government's Homeland Security was seen majorly lacking. As was the State and Local Government.
My father, a staunch Democrat, sadly pointed out that 2 of the 3 levels of government that failed the people of New Orleans were Democrat. Bush-bashing is fine as long as you don't mind bashing the others, too. This is bad all the way around.
I agree with our anonymous poster. Bush's failures on this part are just one part in a much larger equation. The state officials, many of whom are Democratic, dropped the ball as well. Again, from every aspect in this thing ... there seemed to be absolutely no plan.
And Matt, thanks for noticing my particular criticism of Bush - that is, the planning aspect. I'm a believer in global warming, but I also don't think this particular hurricane is a direct result of Bush's reluctance to acknowledge the problem.
This was a freak of nature ... possibly from global warming, but possibly not. My criticism is directed toward him and other officials with regard to planning and response.
I just don't know. If we had all been told, a year ago, to picture a "major natural disaster" displacing a quarter of a million people in about 24 hours time, what would we have guessed as a reasonable "reaction" time to stabilize things? I'm guessing that we would have figured it to take at least a few weeks, and certainly more than four days (the elapsed time when this post was originally written).
It's always so easy to play the "blame game." Bad things happen, people are suffering, so somebody must be to blame! But New Orleans--freakin' New Orleans--is under twenty feet of water (in places), and that isn't something you can just pull back together in a day or two.
As to thousands of poor (mostly black) residents being left behind unable to evacuate, if we're going to blame some level of government for that it can't be the federal level.
For now, the most important thing is doing what can be done for the people down there. The blame over how it happened (blaming Bush for the levees not being strong enough) or how exactly the response could have been better needs to wait for another day.
I still think you're missing the point Xon. The point of my criticism is that the federal government should have in place some sort of plan to deal with a large number of displaced citizens, and be ready to implement that plan within 48 hours of the disaster. Instead it took well more than twice that time to even mobalize a response, which is inexcusable.
And I'm not limiting my criticism to just the federal government. Mayor Nagin should have done a much better job in rounding up the needed resources to evacuate his citizens, and he didn't do that. He did the second-best thing, which was get 30,000 people in the Superdome - which, to be fair, is a much better effort than they've done in the past. I believe part of the city's emergency plan was to use that facility as a 'last resort' in case of a hurricane. So they executed the plan very well, but it turned out to be not a good plan considering how powerful the storm was.
I don't buy this playing the blame game thing. It's called accountability, and we are sorely lacking that in today's society. We can still make every effort to help those in need, fix the existing problems and then hold those who performed miserably - like FEMA director Mike Brown - accountable.
I'm hardly one to say we shouldn't hold people accountable. But I am one to question how appropriate the finger-pointing is when we are in the middle of the relief effort. Especially when it's essentially a bunch of different bureaucracies cross-accusing one another. Mayor Nagin is a total blame-pimp, as evinced by his appearance on Meet The Press yesterday. The feds suck blah blah blah, but when Russert asked him hard questions about his own local effort he sounded just like Mike Brown, "Well, we did the best we could with what we had based on what we knew at the time..." but of course, he won't tolerate any such nonsense from the feds, only for himself and his local corruption.
Libertarian that I am, I'm not defending the federal government. Every branch of government has screwed up in countless ways. On that we agree.
But there is a difference between recognizing that the gov't has done a poor job and simply pointing to any hard or ugly situation that comes up and thinking that it is an example of hte gov't doing a poor job. The fact that thousands of people ended up stranded in NO, and that it took four days for the relief effort to fully mobilize, just doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that can be avoided under the circumstances. Or, at least, couldn't have been avoided by the feds.
Again, where does your expectation of "48 hours" come from? Says who? When have we mobilized that quickly under comparable conditions before? Saying that "surely" it could be done in 48 hours is nice because it makes the feds look like they took twice too long, but where does that number actually come from? I never would have guessed that we could have responded that quickly if I had been asked before Katrina hit.
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