Posted on 09/08/2005 1:28:36 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
As Lake Ponchatrain's waters began to drown his city, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had the colossal nerve to shout indignantly "Get off your asses, and let's do something" -- and then continued doing nothing himself, but add to the deluge by bursting into tears.
Having been prodded on Saturday into ordering an evacuation by President Bush and the head of the Hurricane Center and then delaying it for seventeen crucial hours until well into Sunday, Mayor Nagin is directly responsible for the AP picture of over 200 unused New Orleans buses marooned in four feet of water that might have evacuated more than 15,000 in one trip alone. Those were the buses that in the Mayor's own plan were to be used to evacuate 100,000 poor the city has long understood had no other means of transportation.
Nagin is also responsible for failing to pre-position generators, food and water, a medical presence and portable toilets for the two sites at the Superdome and Convention Center that he had proclaimed "emergency centers" for tens of thousands of the more than 30% of New Orleanians that lived below the poverty line. And then the Mayor failed to police them.
The rapes, murders, and needless deaths that took place in those "black holes" of New Orleans are his responsibility as well. Eighty armed policemen were too cowardly to enter the Convention Center after reports of the savagery inside as late as Sunday. Troops finally searching the Convention Center on Monday found an elderly man and a young girl, battered to death, among the corpses. New Orleans's would-be reformers thought they had elected a responsible leader in former cable executive Nagin and instead they got a classic "cable guy" with a million excuses and the same lousy service.
Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.
Governor Blanco's ineptitude and indecisiveness was appalling. Her direct orders blocked the Red Cross's heroic effort to pre-position desperately needed supplies at the Superdome before it was cut off by the rising flood waters as well. Attempts by the Mayor, the Governor, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune -- which had extensively reported on the state's and city's similar failures on previous occasions -- to blame the Federal FEMA efforts for failing in its role in the immediate aftermath of Katrina are patently ridiculous.
Under white and black governments alike, New Orleans has always been one of the most corrupt cities in one of the most corrupt states in the United States. Three Louisiana officials were indicted for stealing emergency relief funds prior to Katrina. It should surprise no one that the Sicilian Mafia opened operations in New Orleans before it had a presence in New York. Even the "Louisiana Lottery" put in place by a genuine reformer to raise public funds quickly devolved into scandal.
The great black New Orleans-born blues composer Spencer Williams knew his city well. In his lyrics to "Basin Street Blues" Williams calls it "New Orleans, Land of Dreams." And a "Land of Dreams" it is and has always been. The French dreamt of it as the key to reversing the British conquest of Canada; Jefferson dreamt of it as the key to opening a continent; Aaron Burr was tried for treason for dreaming of using it as the base for his "Empire of the West" that could secede from the fledgling United States; "filibusters" like Samuel Walker dreamt of turning Haiti or Nicaragua into mini-empires for their own enrichment. And most of these dreams were doomed at the outset.
Basin Street itself was an excavation site where water settled after the removal of additional landfill to build up the high land around the French Quarter where the original colonists were smart enough to locate their settlement. And that began the dream that ended with Hurricane Katrina that believed with minimal expense New Orleans could continue to ignore reality and expand below sea level construction indefinitely. And the dream is wider than New Orleans. "Flood insurance" is now being offered that encourages development of the most endangered flood-prone littoral land in the country.
And that is the real problem. E. M. Forster's THE MACHINE STOPS, published almost a century ago, posits a world in the future in which the human race gives up any individual responsibility to an immense computerized system that meets every need -- until it fails.
Those who dream of the perfectibility of human institutions through increasingly, compulsorily collective government will always attack the highest levels of government when it does fail. Republicans and Democrats alike have created huge institutions like the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and now Homeland Security, built on dreams that can never meet the excessive demands placed upon them.
If we are to learn anything from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, we will have to review the more practical expectations of the Framers of our Federal system. Local and state government are the primary responders. To keep their powers and responsibility intact the Federal Government is a resource they must administer wisely and decisively. Focusing on the habitual incoherence of Bush Administration communications is beside the point. There is no excuse for ignoring the key failures of local and state government in facing the challenge of Hurricane Katrina. Doing so will only ensure the next disaster.
Thomas Lipscomb is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future(USC). His family has lived in New Orleans for over 150 years.
Read on . . .
Sep 8th, 2005: 14:29:14
According to Garrett:
The Red Cross was ready. I got off the phone with one of their officials. They had a vanguard, Brit, of trucks with water, food, hygiene equipment, all sorts of things ready to go where? To the Superdome and convention center. Why weren't they there? The Louisiana Department of Homeland Security told them they could not go.
Why not? Garrett again:
The Red Cross tells me that state agency in Louisiana said, look, we do not want to create a magnet for more people to come to the Superdome or convention center, we want to get them out. So at the same time local officials were screaming where is the food, where is the water? The Red Cross was standing by ready, the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security said you can't go.
Garrett was later interviewed by radio talker Hugh Hewitt [transcript, very much worth reading, from Radio Blogger].
Garrett to Hewitt:
I think they are. I mean, and look. Every agency that is in the private sector, Salvation Army, Red Cross, Feed The Children, all the ones we typically see are aggrieved by all the crap that's being thrown around about the response to this hurricane, because they work hand and glove with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When FEMA is tarred and feathered, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are tarred and feathered, because they work on a cooperative basis. They feel they are being sullied by this reaction.
Hewitt later asked:
I also have to conclude from what you're telling me, Major Garrett, is that had they been allowed to deliver when they wanted to deliver, which is at least a little bit prior to the levee, or at least prior to the waters rising, the supplies would have been pre-positioned, and the relief...you know, the people in the Superdome, and possibly at the convention center, I want to come back to that, would have been spared the worst of their misery. Garrett replied:
They would have been spared the lack of food, water and hygiene. I don't think there's any doubt that they would not have been spared the indignity of having nor workable bathrooms in short order.
http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/9/8/142914/9010
Yup, Nagin neglected something very basic.
Result: reports indicate that the anarchy started almost as soon as the lights went out.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
However, we should all forward this piece to our local newspaper and see what they do with the information. My guess is NOTHING!
BFLR
It's hard to anticipate how things will unfold in a national disaster but the state and local government of LA is doing a big CYA (with additional don't-look-at-us voices from their senators and reps on the Hill, and the Congressional Black Caucus).
Is this saying that FEMA was in charge of getting aid to the Superdome and convention center but was stopped by the locals?
So FEMA was there?
its amazing what people in power have the power to do, yet they do not. Alot of lives could have been saved if Blanco/Nagin had followed simply evacuation plans, but then I wonder if the violence would have been any less...probly not....considering
Or, if Blanco had let the supplies in when it looked like Nagin had failed to do so, they could have gotten to the people inside, then forced them to evac.
It's looking like local and state couldn't coordinate between themselves, and Fed had to fill the void. No wonder there was a vacuum in the interim...
I saw President Bush give a speech earlier this afternoon saying they are staffing up the phones and for people to please be patient.
This would almost be funny if I just weren't so sick of hearing the dems complain constantly.
FEMA works with the Red Cross but it sounds like until the Gov gives the O.K., they can't begin.
Who cares...the pajama media will get this plastered everywhere.
The early sci-fi story "The Machine Stops" was actually written by H.G. Wells and was one of my favorites. About a utopian future world where humans spend most of their lives in high-tech little hexagonal cells in sealed-off cities which cater to their every need. All linked together by some kind of supercomputer (it was written in 1914) the "Machine" of the title. The heroine of the story has a rebellious younger brother who makes his way to the world without just long enough to realize there are people living unconnected to this system (shades of "THX 1138") but the robots recapture him before he can get away. He returns to tell her of his discovery but she does not believe him. Then one day the great machine "stops" and everything falls apart.
And when I hear "The Matrix is soooo original" I just laugh. :-)
Nagin has the Red Cross just outside the city with supplies. He could have bussed everybody out to where the Red Cross was, used schools as shelters, and none of this would have happened.
Dems are desperate to conceal the failure of a Dem Mayor and a Den Governor.
I wonder how hard it is to get a line into Jane Harmon's office. Give me a break.
Result: reports indicate that the anarchy started almost as soon as the lights went out.
I spoke to a few people who were in the Superdome. Their stories were about the same.
Everyone was being checked for weapons, etc when they first got there. There was a call(don't know who)to let everyone in since it was begining to rain and familes were getting wet.
It was at this time people were coming in with guns and such.
On Sunday night several speakers got up and spoke about the Dome and told the evacuee's there was plenty of food and water, etc.
Once they ended their speech, they were never to be seen again. This included the security presence.
Rival gangs started fighting with one another, gun shots could be heard all night, etc, etc.
Hell broke out and no one wanted to control it or at least felt powerless to control it.
Yes!
The idea that the government should/can take care of you is nonsense! The big government LIE is being exposed.
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