New York's Heroes and Katrina's Heels

TheFactIs.com ^ | Sept. 13, 2005 | Duncan Maxwell Anderson

[SamuraiScot]

What's the opposite of heroism?

Maybe it's the spectacle of the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana trying to shift blame for the destruction of a 287-year-old city away from themselves onto the President of the United States, and finally onto each other. Instead, I think they should consider blaming Kofi Annan. After all, the UN was in charge of the world when the levee on Lake Ponchartrain broke and submerged New Orleans.

That would be the same levee Louisiana politicians have resisted shoring up for the past decade. They took half the money Congress gave them for that purpose and used it to build a marina for gambling casino ships, whose owners had been quite generous to political campaigns in the region.

And it turns out that New Orleans had a detailed plan for hurricane evacuation (see it here), last updated in 2000. President Bush called the mayor and governor on the phone on Saturday, August 27, two days before the storm hit, and urged them to implement the plan. Among other things, it called for using school and city-owned buses to evacuate the poor who didn't have cars.

Those would be the same buses you can see by satellite photo (here), still sitting neatly in their parking spaces — in several feet of water. Mayor Ray Nagin did nothing to evacuate his city until Sunday night — eight hours before the hurricane made landfall with 100-mile-per-hour winds. By Friday, he wept aloud to a radio reporter from WWL and cursed the President for his failure to help, demanding . . . buses.

That's almost as rich as Louisiana Governor Kathleen "Good Samaritan" Blanco refusing to let Red Cross trucks carrying food and water into the crowded Superdome — because she didn't want to encourage more people to go there.

Meanwhile, we have just commemorated September 11, a day hallowed by a different kind of reaction to crisis. Four years ago, instead of a mayor who fled to the high ground of Baton Rouge and whined, we saw one who rushed to the scene of the attack and set up his command center so close to the smoking ruins that a building collapse just missed him. Instead of a police force where one-third went AWOL and some were caught looting, we saw policemen and firemen who came tearing in from their days off to sacrifice their lives.

We are not talking about the difference between slugs and perfect people. There were individual acts of great heroism in New Orleans. And as anyone who visits New York can attest, the city's cops and firemen do not appear to be free from original sin. Mayor Giuliani spent the first several months of his administration smacking down police corruption.

But Giuliani also had a plan for achieving the real goal of police work — maintaining order — and he rewarded good results. The effect was amazing. He made morale soar almost overnight, and began cultivating the unique virtues that grow on the rough landscape of manhood. A culture of selfless heroism returned to the NYPD.

More than it needs our $100 billion, New Orleans needs a leader — something the entire state hasn't had in living memory.

I know New York cops and firemen from my gym. They are wiseguys. Quick-witted, prickly, and competitive, they enjoy lewd humor and griping about their jobs. They are frighteningly strong, reverent about their country, generous, and immensely proud of their calling, which is to attack danger head-on. It's no coincidence that many of them come into their work from the armed forces.

Both forces are heavily Irish and Catholic. An Italian-American businessman quoted in The New York Times after 9/11 remarked that as the crowds of civilians trooped down the stairs of the World Trade Center, they kept passing men in helmets and uniforms heading the other way — men with blue eyes.

Officer Stephen Driscoll, who lived in a parish near us with his wife and son, played the bagpipes and marched in the NYPD's Emerald Society band. He joined the NYPD after a hitch in the Navy and served in the tough-as-nails street-crime unit before making the elite Emergency Services Unit (ESU).

As one cop put it, "When civilians get in trouble, they call 911. When cops get in trouble, they call ESU." ESU's job is extricating people from dangerous places and taking out bad guys in unusual ways.

Driscoll eagerly explained to his buddies that ESU is "like Toys R Us for cops." Their trucks are stuffed with exotic saws, guns, radios, generators, scuba gear, and sometimes jet skis; they have hydraulic ladders that shoot 30 feet into the air from the vehicle's roof. Ironically, Officer Driscoll was afraid of heights, but it didn't cramp his enthusiasm for the ESU, where he served three years.

When the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, officers from the ESU, like the fire companies, went to Ground Zero.

Officer Driscoll dismounted ESU Truck 4, and was last seen at the 20th floor of the South Tower, heading up.

Duncan Maxwell Anderson is president of High Tor Media, Inc., which produces family-oriented and educational books and publications. His e-mail address is dmanderson@hightormedia.com.

[SamuraiScot]

The difference leadership makes is. . . just about everything.

[Spirited]

Thank you for this post.
Stark contrast. Someone should take this, read it to NO evacuees and ask, "Who cared?".

[sydbas]

On 9/11 it was originally feared that as many as 50,000 men and woman might have died. If the NYPD, FDNY, Mayor Giuliani and other local authorities had not been so heroic and instead performed like the idiotic, excuse making, blame deflecting Mayor Nagan and Gov Blanco, the death toll probably would have been much closer to that feared mark. Thank God Nagan and Blanco were no where around.