Officials Shifting Blame For Delays

The Buffalo News ^ | 9/4/2005 | MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA and SPENCER HSU

[markomalley]

NEW ORLEANS - Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country's emergency management. The White House dispatched 7,200 more troops to the area, bringing the total in the stricken region to more than 40,000 National Guard and active-duty soldiers.

[TASMANIANRED]

Total failure of local leadership.

[bronxboy]

I can not believe this. What a waste of life.

[atomicweeder]

Not true. She declared a state of emergency on August 26th.

[Mike Darancette]

I think the President told the Governor and mayor to get someone on the state team that knows what he is doing. Thus Witt was hired.

[Travis McGee]

I hope that sooner or later the MSM discovers that New Orleans did have a written emergency plan to cover the evacuation of the poor, but that the idiot mayor of New Orleans ignored it, and allowed the evacuation buses to be ruined by the flood, forgotten.

The city leaders had at least two full days to use these hundreds of buses to evac the poor, exactly as their own emergency management plan called for.

Here's the southeast Louisiana evac plan supplement, most recently revised in 2000. Go to page 13, read paragraph 5. It states:

5. 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.

[cardinal4]

Two of our pilots and their families, being white and affluent were able to escape Katrina.../sarcasm

The two we havent heard from lived right downtown. The consensus is, however, that they just havent made contact yet. The two familes that did bolt in time are in ATL and Rome, Italy. The Fathers (pilots)have been told by flight managers to stay away from work and do what is needed, but there is nothing they can do. While they have been pulled offline, they are doing line checks and picking up open time. They both want to go back to flying the line, and probably will this week. Both families lost everything..

[gandalftb]

Latest report on demographics, given the known popoulation of the areas sustaining over a 5 foot storm surge, 75,000 people are unaccounted for in shelters or on the ground. Many of course left town and are with friends and family and can't be accounted for yet.

Still, there will likely be many more than a few thousand deaths. Two of the dead are New Orleans police officers that committed suicide.

The weather channel's top hurricane expert predicted this devastation 12 hours before Katrina made land. I saw his report and he said that the barometric pressure was much lower than Camille and was a record low. He said also that the physical size of the storm meant that the water surge would last much longer than people could survive. FEMA was warned, many kinds of aid should have been dispatched days earlier.

All of the cruise liner, Navy hospital ships, Marine assets, hovercraft, and rescue ships should have left Norfolk as soon as Katrina went level 4. All of those ships could have been 12 hours behind the eye following from the south of a known-to-travel-only-north hurricane.

Posse Commitatus doesn't apply to evacuation and medical assistance. FEMA/our administration blew it. The Coast Guard however threw all their assets in early on, before it hit, they were ready and are real heroes in this mess.

[camas]

in one picture i saw the buses look like they are OK. the water is below the engines.

[G.Mason]

ping

[markomalley]

I would agree with your statements at first blush, but it appears to me that the assistance was offered, but there was apparently no command and control structure to effectively employ it.

I make this statement because it appears that the system is working quite well in Mississippi and has been for days. Same federal structure, same forces, but different local C2 structure.

As to the Navy ships, had the city and state worked to their plan, there would not have been the size of the evacuation that we saw and they wouldn't have been necessary.

All the forces in the world are all well and good, but if they aren't employed, it just doesn't matter.

[Rokke]

"All of the cruise liner, Navy hospital ships, Marine assets, hovercraft, and rescue ships should have left Norfolk as soon as Katrina went level 4. All of those ships could have been 12 hours behind the eye following from the south of a known-to-travel-only-north hurricane."

Gandalf, you should know better than that. First of all, where is the historical precedent for that? I don't believe it has ever been done. That might be because it is not a practical idea. Hurricane's are not predictable, and deploying significant military assets pre-emptively every time a hurricane threatens this country would be completely impractical. Second, naval assets are not just tied up in port configured for rescue missions. It wouldn't do a lot of good to anchor a bunch of ships offshore that had little more than presence to offer to the fight.

[marblehead17]

ping

[blackie]

If she declared a state of emergency ~ why wasn't No evacuated?

[lastchance]

I was involved in Emergency Management in just a small way. It was my responsibility to attend the Governor's Hurricane COnference in Tampa each year and collect the latest information on FEMA standards for applying for aid.
It was also my responsibility to be aware of any new regulations concerning disaster response and to inform my higher ups of them. If our City realized the importance of this, why the heck was N.O. so out of the loop. During the conference you get to meet a lot of Disaster response planners and you learn things from them that no text can teach you. That in itself made it a very valuable conference to attend.

[gandalftb]

Hey! Good to hear from you! The military assets I described and many more are there now, 4 Marine hovercraft just landed on the MI coast loaded with MREs and water. They could have been there days ago. The governor of any state has the discretion to federalize the response. Hurricanes Ivan, Andrew, and Camille all had active duty military (my brother was an MP in the 82nd Airborne at Camille) present for months doing relief work.

The 3 cruise ships were rented by FEMA on thursday, why the delay? They have a capacity of 6,000 passengers, full care, feeding, and shuffleboard.

Our response was disgraceful, the first three days are critical for life support and there wass virtually none.

[gandalftb]

All states must have capability for the first 72 hours and LA first response completely collapsed. FEMA can watch TV just like us and knew there was no first response. They had a duty to act and did not. This is a national tragedy and disgrace.

[krunkygirl]

Thank you so much for posting that quote.
Hope that is picked up and spread far and wide.
The citizens of America need to know.

[gandalftb]

Agreed, command structure broke down. Clearly the Governor's office broke down and FEMA was slow taking over for them.

[WHBates]

So you figure they were watching tv?

[gandalftb]

Had they been, they could have watched thousands of poor people at the convention center for five days with no food and water. They could have also watched heavy lift helicopters dropping sandbags on the levees and maybe one of them could have wondered whether they could spare one sortie to drop a pallet load of MREs and water off in those five days.>Priorities are all screwed up here, they should have at least one person assigned to monitor the media and report directly to Chertoff with such obvious mistakes.

Of course FEMA is busy but if you can't relieve the largest gathering of survivors for days, they are not doing the right jobs at the right time.