The backlash begins...
When are elections for mayor and governor? The GOP better have someone with leadership abilities lined up for a shoe in.
nagin is a corrupt fool. blanco is incompetent.
both are dangerously out of their depth.
If the left's reaction to this disaster which is on the scale of the tsunami in January is hysterics, fingerpointing, rants, obscenities thrown everywhere, physical threats made by a sitting Louisiana Senator at the President of the US, complaints that FEMA suspend the laws of physics and materialize in a day, and downright deplorable behavior, then I guess we all know
that
they are not to be trusted in an emergency.
Read the entire interview here.
When evacuees at the Superdome were interviewed by the Houston Chronicle, however, here's what they had to say,
"...Warren Cosey, 41, was less charitable. 'Oh, man, he was crying like a baby,' he said.
Next to Cosey in line was Verdell Berry, who complained that he had not seen the mayor all week. 'He never came in and addressed the crowd or nothing,' he said.
Cosey shook his head. 'If he would have come in here, they would have killed him,' he said."
Read the article here.
In addition, there is some question about Nagin's orders immediately following the Hurricane. In an article in the Los Angeles Times, he was quoted while talking to a radio interviewer as follows:
" 'We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater,' Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.
Nagin evacuated City Hall and ordered everyone who was still in the city - including police officers who were not considered 'central emergency personnel' - to leave."
Read the article here. Nagin, who has been exposed as a "Good-Time Mayor" was way...way...way over his head in this crisis. He had absolutely no clue. As is typical of so many Democrats, his desperate attempts to rewrite history and tweak the timeline involve exaggeration, embellishment, and outright lies. He knows he failed. He knows that people died because of his inaction prior to the storm as well as his disappearing act immediately afterwards.
We'll see how this plays out over the next few weeks but, with the majority of the LSM acting as a pre-emptive PR firm for the DNC, I am not confident that facts will play a significant role in analyzing this tragedy and preventing future replays.
ping for reference
I think the total submerged bus count from the aerials in 576 now.
New Orleans had 364 Transit Authority buses, and at least 430 school buses available, and failed to use any of them, except the one the kid stole????
Simple...It's better for a Black mayor to throw a hissyfit in the press than do what is right. Those that died will no longer be voters anyway.
Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period.
"Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. 'Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."
I love our military. I think it is amazing that they accomplished so much in such a short time, actually. If the left had their way, we wouldn't even have much of a military. My question to them: if not the military, than who? Can you imagine any other organization doing the job that they are currently doing in the Katrina ravaged cities?
A couple of Freepers have said that Nagin didn't want buses that didn't have bathrooms on them. I'd like to see some sort of confirmation on that. If it's true, considering how who is left is wading in raw sewage....
aerial of your pic:
and a huge aerial, showing more buses:
http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/storms/katrina/24426968.jpg
ZOOM in on the very lower right corner. MORE buses underwater, empty.
ZOOM bottom left-center - more buses.
Taken from: Hurricane Katrina Base Map Index Page
The people running La. and NO need to be lynched.
Where are the aldermen of New Orleans? Those gentlemen should have been right there in the Superdome, taking charge and showing some leadership. I didn't see any of them being interviewed on TV. I suspect that they followed the mayor's example and departed the area posthaste, along with the other rich black and white folks.
They and their families are no doubt holed up in luxury far away from New Orleans, waiting for the mess to be cleaned up so they can go back to business as usual.
The photos show that the in-bound lane to New Orleans was unused and NOT OPENED TO OUT-BOUND TRAFFIC. This is significant as it severely impacted the spped of the evacuation.
The Freeper does not know how to get the images posted.
Does anybody have a secure web site and a Hotmail address he can send the photos to so they can be posted?
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FreepMail to Polybius...........
Well, here is some more information on those pictures. The time stamps were in military time, so, here are the times.
These picture of the causeway, and other live webcams anyone could have seen in New Orleans before, during, ( I don't know now ) maybe, after the storm. These pictures were taken in ( I guess, 3 min or 5 mins apart) .
The first pictures cleary shows all of the vehicles coming out from NEW ORLEANS, and the inbound lanes wide open with no traffic at all ( either way ) on it.
1 # Picture time stamp. 8 / 28 / 2005 - HR : 16:21:02 PM
2# 8/28/05 - HR : 16:25:25 PM.
3# 8/28/05 - HR : 16:34:31 PM.
4# 8/28/05 - HR : 17:04:34 PM.
5# 8/28/05 - HR : 18:52:19 PM.
I was mistaken before, these pictures were taken last Sunday evening.
From picture 1 to 3 , you can see many vehicles getting out of New Orleans, and there are very dark ominious cloud in the sky, and from picture 3 to 4, the traffice starts to clear to a trickle, and the clouds clear up some, but, in the last picture, there are no vehicles on the N.O. causeway.
I just checked some of the pictures, only in one picture, do I see only one vehicle going inbound back into New Orleans.
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1. Nagin did NOT order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans until late Sunday morning, just hours before tropical storm force winds came in to the city. By then it was too late to get many folks out. This is important. President Bush declared a disaster area early on Saturday and urged immediate evacuation, but did not have the power to order people to leave. If Nagin had ordered a mandatory evacuation Saturday and gotten those buses rolling, thousands might have been saved from death and misery.
2. By the time the mandatory evacuation order was given, everyone with a TV knew it was past time to go, including probably most of the bus drivers in the city. They were apparently never told to stand on alert in case they were needed to get people out. This should have been standard procedure when any hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico. Pay them an extra $500 if you have to, but you have to make sure you have the drivers or the buses will not do you much good.
It would have been relatively easy to open up contraflow on I-10 to only city and school buses at first. They could have made several trips at least to Baton Rouge, and the last buses out could have kept going on to Texas. LSU has a large basketball arena, field house, student center, and other facilities that could have been used as shelters for thousands. Baton Rouge lost power but not water, so those people would have had water and sanitation. If the evacuation had first focused on the sick and elderly, they could have been taken to hospitals throughout the state. I simply cannot fathom that the City of New Orleans had nobody capable of figuring this out!
