Posted on 09/14/2005 9:48:57 AM PDT by lowbridge
This article is a disengenuous fraud. According to them, Chertoff didn't sign off until August 30th...which was Tuesday. For almost 24 hours after Katrina passed, the media and city officials were claiming they missed the worst of it and had things under control. In fact, even after Terry Ebbert was informed of the levee breach, he said this: "It's a very slow rise, and it will remain so until we plug that breach. I think we can get it stabilized in a few hours."
Exactly what federal agencies were supposed to act? The Governor was in charge of the guard, which might have provided security, and Louisiana state officials refused to use the Red Cross, which was already on the scene. FEMA has been clumsy in execution, but this does not change the fact that at the critical moments it was state officials who failed to act/or did the wrong thing.
Exactly what federal agencies were supposed to act? The Governor was in charge of the guard, which might have provided security, and Louisiana state officials refused to use the Red Cross, which was already on the scene. FEMA has been clumsy in execution, but this does not change the fact that at the critical moments it was state officials who failed to act/or did the wrong thing.
It's completely ridiculous that an adult, much less a governor, can say they did their part in asking for federal help by saying nothing more than, "help".
What kind of help, where do you need it, supplies, security, rescue, there are a lot of darned details yet the governor thinks she can say the word help and everyone is just supposed to read her mind.
The life and death situationss developed after the levees broke. Local and state authorities then panicked and dithered during a critical 12 hors after that. Besides I am reminded that a certain Illinois lawyer managed to do a pretty fair job in life and death situations.
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You are mistaken. The 17th St levee breach happened before noon on Monday.
The "Newsweek" article that basically exonorated Blanco, admit that she basically didn't know what to ask for. My question is: where was the AG of the Louiaina Guard? Why wasn't he there to give her advise? Or didn't she have the smarts to ask him?
Heck, it took Blanco until Thursday, Sept/1st, to finally deploy "Iraqi hardened" NG troops to use in a law-enforcement capacity. And when she did, she only ordered 300 in to handle the job because she was afraid of the political fallout should deadly confrontations arise.
Blanco deliberately let things get out of control because she didn't want the responsibility for the deaths of poor, black people who might get shot for "looting." Ironically, her own Attorney General hepled perpetuate this crisis (and her reaction) when he went on TV and practically justified the looting. These people failed at so many levels it's disgusting.
It's just crazy. It appears that the only advice she received was "blame Bush" and she went about doing that at the expense of her state's citizens.
I tend to agree with you.
Watching both Brown and Chertoff in the first few days after the hurricane and flood, I didn't get the sense that they had a handle on the vastness of the situation.
They were almost cheery in their assessments. If we face a major terrorist attack some day, let's hope we get somebody in there that can grasp how bad things can get.
That aside, IMHO, it was still Blanco that fouled up the rescue of those at the SuperDome and Convention Center. I don't think FEMA or Homeland Security should take the fall for that.
And somewhere along the line, somebody (and I haven't heard it done much) needs to bring in personal responsibility. True, some of those people were poor and didn't have rides, but many, many did have a way out of town before the storm and chose to ride it out.
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Blanco sent a four page letter to the President via FEMA on 8/28. The letter was a bit more than HELP! written over and over again for all four pages.
I noticed that too. Wasn't the early news out of N.O. that all was well since the storm was a 4 and the eye did not hit N.O. directly? Wasn't the reaction by all the talking heads a sigh of relief of N.O. missing the big one? So what would have been the reason for launching the response at that time and not after flooding started?
The Corps of Engineers knew that levees had broken by noon on Monday, August 29. They also knew that the city would eventually fill with water. Why FEMA and DHS was not informed will come out in the hearings.
Yes, state and local officials did dither. But Chertoff should have been mobilizing on Tuesday, August 30.
I agree with you there is not much point trying to assign blame based on party. I am probably in a small minority in assigning far less blame to Blanco and Nagin than many others on FR. But I also believe that anecdotes about confusion, and conflicting efforts, and difficulties getting help to people are to be expected when the disaster area is 90,000 square miles, roads and communication networks are disrupted and nearly a million people have lost their homes. They are not a reason to assume, de facto, that there was an inadequate response. Of course it was inadequate. The disaster was overwhelming. That does not mean that any particular individuals necessarily failed in their duties.
Having said that, by historical standards, the rescue and relief efforts have been phenomenally fast and effective.
We've all been watching helicopter shots of the 9th ward, underwater. I was amazed, when I saw this the first time, at the hundreds of cars that were sitting underwater in front of these poor people's homes.
The theory I've heard is that poor people didn't want to leave because they knew that their homes would be looted first.
They may have been mobilizing since Bush declared it a disaster area. What I don't know and can't find out is what FEMA did during that time. It may be that they were simply incapable of reacting quickly to the exegency. Like a military unit caught facing the wrong direction.
Not to mention the fact that if Jenna and Barbara had been partying in New Orleans rather than wherever they were, I'm sure the President would have had the 101st freakin' Airborne in there before Katrina made landfall.
Then again, maybe the twins were behind the explosion that took out the levees, as Calypso Louis noted yesterday...!
They were caught flat footed by the power of the elements. Like the manager of that old folks home who decided to ride out the storm because nothing like that had happened to them before. Same thing that happened to people in Mississippi.
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