Copied this off The New York Times Forum

[Blaise (imported)]

FEMA Brouhaha

Suddenly FEMA is a hopelessly incompetent. Last year it dealt with four major hurricanes, including a category 4 with wind speeds of 150 mph: Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne.

Charley caused $14 billion in damage.

Frances, cost $8.9 billion and killed 23 people.

Ivan, $13 billion and 25 deaths.

Jeanne, $6.5 billion and 12 fatalities.

FEMA handled it all brilliantly. No one at that time suggested that it had been inefficient or crimped or reflected Bush's inadequacies.

Now it exudes lethal ineptitude.

Well, something did go wrong. New Orleans is a tragedy. Everything is not honky dory. Of course not. The ship of state did run up on reefs. There is a gash in the hull. Certainly, but we don't know how and why. It is too soon for public hangings.

Bobby Herbert is rabble rousing. He is demagoguing. He aims to incite and inflame. He does not want to know or understand. He already knows whom he wants punished. And he is busy stampeding public opinion to that end. He wants the administration convicted now before any investigation establishes what really happened.

Rich Lowry makes some points that Minnie didn't think about:

--“The mayor and the governor are negligent and incompetent. The administration has tried to smooth out the chain of command, but she won't do it. The constitution says that the governor is in charge of the Guard.” (The Washington Post wrote about this on Saturday--and KJL excerpted the relevant bit in here.)

--“None of those poor people were moved prior to the storm. They were told to go to the Superdome, but they had to walk there. Whose responsibility is that?”

-- “General Honore in one day got 20,000 people evacuated from the convention center with a ground and air evacuation. Have you heard about that in the media?”

--“The DoD has been tasked with 40-50 missions here. DoD is the go-to organization for DHS. DHS is trying to build the capacity, but doesn't have it yet. DHS is all brain power and no brawn.”

--“Michael Brown has not done a good job and is in over his head. But, in fairness, FEMA is not organized to handle a catastrophe of this size.”

http://corner.nationalreview.com

[A-1 (imported)]

Softee,

Isn't the Governor of Louisiana supposed to be the one to activate the National Guard if it is needed?

A-1

[radar (imported)]

Softee,

Isn't the Governor of Louisiana supposed to be the one to activate the National Guard if it is needed?

A-1

Governor Blanco was contacted by the Bush administration and urged to evacuate New Orleans more than 48 hours before the storm, and she equivocated, waiting 12 hours before ordering a VOLUNTARY evacuation, and 24 more before ordering a mandatory one. Then, after the disaster when FEMA was coming in, a power struggle began over who was going to run the show. She wanted control over the rescuers, but had no clue how to administer it. Finally, when a plan was proposed to resolve the standoff (this according to Nagin, the NO mayor), she stopped the whole show for 24 hours while she tried to figure out what the plan was. it was apparently too complicated for her quick understanding (this according to her own account). And remember, it's HER job to call out the National Guard.

At the same time, the mayor was operating under an evacuation order, and had an emergency plan that clearly authorized him to commandeer any and all transport to get people out of the city. Instead, he sent everyone to the Superdome, leaving more than 400 school buses sitting empty in a lot, waiting for the floods to come.

Yes, FEMA could have done better, but the emergency was spread over a HUGE area, not just New Orleans. The shrieking about how Bush should have made them move faster is just stuff and nonsense. They weren't allowed to. By the governor. We have a government that functions from the bottom up, and the local governments are the first responders, not FEMA, which is just a mop-up organization. If there's any criminal neglect in this case, it lies with the governor and mayor, not with the federal government.

[Blaise (imported)]

I do not know. I had not read or heard any of Radar's report. Time will reveal what happened and did not happen.

Little things come to mind. One wonders, for example, why school buses did not take people from the storm. However, they would not have handled many people.

The Red Cross and St. Vincent de Paul do not set up shelters in the path of the storm--in such places as the Superdome. That would have been foolish.

Relief is now working, I suppose. We have many problems, but we will handle them.

[Robby (imported)]

Governor Blanco was contacted by the Bush administration and urged to evacuate New Orleans more than 48 hours before the storm, and she equivocated, waiting 12 hours before ordering a VOLUNTARY evacuation, and 24 more before ordering a mandatory one. Then, after the disaster when FEMA was coming in, a power struggle began over who was going to run the show. She wanted control over the rescuers, but had no clue how to administer it. Finally, when a plan was proposed to resolve the standoff (this according to Nagin, the NO mayor), she stopped the whole show for 24 hours while she tried to figure out what the plan was. it was apparently too complicated for her quick understanding (this according to her own account). And remember, it's HER job to call out the National Guard.

At the same time, the mayor was operating under an evacuation order, and had an emergency plan that clearly authorized him to commandeer any and all transport to get people out of the city. Instead, he sent everyone to the Superdome, leaving more than 400 school buses sitting empty in a lot, waiting for the floods to come.

Yes, FEMA could have done better, but the emergency was spread over a HUGE area, not just New Orleans. The shrieking about how Bush should have made them move faster is just stuff and nonsense. They weren't allowed to. By the governor. We have a government that functions from the bottom up, and the local governments are the first responders, not FEMA, which is just a mop-up organization. If there's any criminal neglect in this case, it lies with the governor and mayor, not with the federal government.

Please see Jesus' post... Click on me! (http://www.eunuch.org/vbulletin/showpos ... stcount=28)

[Blaise (imported)]

Thank you. I am tired and getting even more careless than usual. I am stressed out because I just retired and suddenly realized today that I do not have a job! I know I grasp things slowly.

[JesusA (imported)]

There is a lot of official finger-pointing going on – usually with a tie to some specific event at some specific time. I've been looking for a detailed timelime of as many of the relevant events as I can find.

So far the most complete list that I've found is on an anti-administration site. I would like to find a pro-administration timeline to set against it, but haven't been able to locate one yet.

Anyway, here is ONE detailed set for those who are interested:

http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline/

[Blaise (imported)]

Again, you put me in your debt. Thank you.

The images from New Orleans break my heart. The city is not the city without people. They are here in Baton Rouge, making us rich with their presence.

[Blaise (imported)]

Another reality check from Bob Herbert.

September 8, 2005

No Strangers to the BluesBy BOB HERBERT

The tragedy in New Orleans did not occur in a vacuum. There is no way, even in the face of a storm as violent as Katrina, that a great American city should have been reduced to little more than a sewage pit overnight.

The monumental failure of the federal government to respond immediately and effectively to the catastrophe that resulted from Hurricane Katrina was preceded by many years in which the people of New Orleans (especially its poorest residents) were shamefully neglected by all levels of government.

New Orleans was not a disaster waiting to happen when the screaming winds of Katrina slammed the city with the force of an enemy attack. The disaster was already under way long before Katrina ever existed. The flood that followed the storm, and the Bush administration's ineptitude following the flood, were the blows that sent an already weakened city down for the count.

The public school system, for example, is one of the worst in the nation. Forget about educating the children, 96 percent of them black. School officials, enveloped in a bureaucratic fog and the toxic smoke of corruption, do not even know how many people are employed by the system. The budget is a joke. Money had to be borrowed to pay teachers.

The classroom environment has been chaotic. About 10,000 of the 60,000 students were suspended last year, and nearly 1,000 were expelled. Half of the high school kids fail to graduate in four years. To get a sense of the system's priorities, consider the following from a Times-Picayune editorial last fall:

"When it was still unclear which way Hurricane Ivan would go, school system employees on school system time driving school system vehicles using school system materials were sent to board up the superintendent's house."

That superintendent left (and not a moment too soon), but the abject neglect of the young remained. Long before the hurricane, the children of New Orleans had been failed by the adults responsible for them, starting in many cases with their parents and going right on up through their teachers, city officials, state officials and a national administration that sees the kids mostly as objects - totems - to be hugged during campaign photo-ops.

Crime in New Orleans is another issue that has gotten a lot of attention in Katrina's aftermath. It should have gotten more attention before the hurricane hit. A great deal of the mayhem reported or rumored to have occurred over the past several days appears to have been exaggerated. But New Orleans has long had a serious crime problem. And it has never been properly dealt with.

A couple of days ago I was talking with a woman named Julia Cass who had fled the flood and settled temporarily in Montgomery, Ala. It turns out that Ms. Cass, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, had just completed a paper for the Children's Defense Fund, which is concerned about the effect on children of the chronic violence plaguing New Orleans.

Ms. Cass noted that as of Aug. 19, there had been 192 murders in the city, an increase of 7 percent over that period last year. (You can get a decent perspective on the violence if you note that New Orleans, with a population of 500,000, had 264 homicides last year, compared with the 572 homicides in New York, which has a population of 8 million.)

Ms. Cass wrote that in homicide cases in New Orleans, witnesses frequently refuse to come forward, or do not show up at trials. "The general explanation is that they are afraid," she said, "and with good reason, since the perpetrators too often are not arrested or get out on bail or are never prosecuted or are not convicted. A person who murders another in New Orleans has less than a one in four chance of being convicted."

New Orleans had has high rates of illiteracy and high rates of poverty, and long before the hurricane blew in, high rates of children and families with extraordinarily low expectations. In short, much of the city was a mess, and no one was marshaling the considerable resources necessary to help pull its stricken residents out of the trouble of their daily lives.

Those were the residents who, for the most part, were left behind to suffer and die when the people of means began sprinting toward higher ground. They are the ones who are always left behind, out of sight and out of mind, and I'd be surprised - given the history of this country - if that were to change now.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

[Blaise (imported)]

September 8, 2005

Before the Flood

By SIMON WINCHESTER

THE last time a great American city was destroyed by a violent caprice of nature, the response was shockingly different from what we have seen in New Orleans. In tone and tempo, residents, government institutions and the nation as a whole responded to the earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees a century ago in a manner that was well-nigh impeccable, something from which the country was long able to derive a considerable measure of pride.

This was all the more remarkable for taking place at a time when civilized existence was a far more grueling business, an age bereft of cellphones and Black Hawks and conditioned air, with no Federal Emergency Management Agency to give us a false sense of security and no Weather Channel to tell us what to expect.

Nobody in the "cool gray city of love," as the poet George Sterling called it, had the faintest inkling that anything might go wrong on the early morning of April 18, 1906. Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore - who both happened to be in town - and 400,000 others slumbered on, with only a slight lightening of eggshell-blue in the skies over Oakland and the clank of the first cable cars suggesting the beginning of another ordinary day.

Then at 5:12 a.m. a giant granite hand rose from the California earth and tore through the city. Palaces of brick held up no better than gold-rush shanties of pine and redwood siding; hot chimneys, electric wires and gas pipes toppled, setting a series of fires that, with the water mains broken and the hydrants dry, proceeded over the next three dreadful days and nights to destroy what remained of the imperial city. In the end, at least 3,000 were dead and 225,000 homeless.

Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock and took charge.

A stentorian Army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own - his superior officer was at a daughter's wedding in Chicago - and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours scores of soldiers were marching in to the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and 20 rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45 a.m. - just 153 minutes after the shaking began.

The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: "San Francisco is in ruins," the cables read. "Our city needs help."

America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshalling yards by 11 o'clock that night. The Navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the Army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.

Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse Code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00 a.m. on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, assembled in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.

Millions of rations were sped in to the city from Oregon and the Dakotas; within a week virtually every military tent in the Army quartermaster general's stock was pitched in San Francisco; and within three weeks some 10 percent of America's standing army was on hand to help the police and firefighters (whose chief had been killed early in the disaster) bring the city back to its feet.

To the great institutions go the kudos of history, and rightly so. But I delight in the lesser gestures, like that of the largely forgotten San Francisco postal official, Arthur Fisk, who issued an order on his personal recognizance: no letter posted without a stamp, and that clearly comes from the hand of a victim, will go undelivered for want of fee. And thus did hundreds of the homeless of San Francisco let their loved ones know of their condition - a courtesy of a time in which efficiency, resourcefulness and simple human kindness were prized in a manner we'd do well to emulate today.

Simon Winchester is the author of the forthcoming book "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906."