"Katrina hit right on target! Now i'll use my mental powers given to me by 5th dimension overlords to bring down the Levy! ZZZZZZZZZz...."
Posted on 02/09/2006 8:34:49 PM PST by blogblogginaway
Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony:
¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.
¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.
¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators that "we put no plans in place to do any of this."
¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.
¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
For a start, there was no way to predict accurately that the hurricane was actually going to make landfall exactly in that place, and the levees had apparently been defective for some time...long before Bush came to the WH. Of course, that is not reasonable to anybody looking to impeach Bush, so they'll go forward with this as if he ordered the levees breached, knew exactly when and where the hurricane was hit...since he ordered it, didn't he?
These people would be all over the right if they even suggested in a back room that any democrat had been negligible.
How could the White House know of a levee failure the night of the storm when the levee apparently didn't fail the night of the storm? My recollection is it failed a day or two AFTER the storm.
I see. And the mayor and governor didn't know. Ah.
My first thought exactly.
"Katrina hit right on target! Now i'll use my mental powers given to me by 5th dimension overlords to bring down the Levy! ZZZZZZZZZz...."
ROFL!
"However everytime a hurricane enters the gulf you cant exactly evacuate the whole LOuisiana coast."
That's exactly what my husband keeps telling me:) That would have had us evacuating at least every other week last hurricane season. LOL! Fortunately we did leave for Katrina.
The morning AFTER the storm, Shep Smith (who spent a great deal of time yelling about the lack of resources...the first time I have lost respect for Shep) was interviewing folks on Bourbon Street who had ridden out the storm and were having breakfast on the Bourbon! I love how everyone wants to feed retrospective knowledge up a long chain of incompetence at the local and state government.
Question: Do we really WANT to rebuild a SLUM? I don't think so....
I had lost power from Katrina by that time. My last tv watching ended shortly after I saw that pastry chef passing out slices of cheesecake and high fiving folks on Bourbon Street.
For the next five days, all I had for infomation was NPR on the radio and cell telephone calls from Howlin and Hildy.
Exactly.
With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
So, basically, people who LIVE news and GET PAID for news and were RIGHT THERE couldn't get to the levees to report, but the Bush Administration is supposed to have god-like powers and be on top of the situation two minutes ago.
I just get this picture of Bush and Cheney floating around on a cloud above New Orleans, directing things with mind ray beams and telekinesis, like some kind of X-Men to the millionth power.
At least, that's what they were SUPPOSED to be doing - BUT NO!
Bush was on his ranch, reading a children's book to a kindergarten class, and Dick Cheney was skulking about in the tunnels under Washington, D.C.
;-)
You forgot about Karl Rove and his Levee Failure Machine!
It's almost like he was taking a normal helicopter ride on a normal day, kind of like traffic monitoring on a sunny summer day, when suddenly he noticed a levee breach.
I've seen a hurricane first-hand, and all hell breaks loose. I imagine it was no picnic being on that chopper, and I also imagine that what they were seeing was obscured and indeterminate.
Yet Lipton, the NYT "reporter", acts like there was a gentle breeze blowing, with 10-mile visibility.
Lying by omission, as usual.
I think I will stop reading news the rest of the weekend, and simply savor this post :))
Tell that to a little old couple living in New Orleans their whole lives, sifting thru their destroyed home. Good decent people looking under feet of mud, sofas and refrigerators turned upside down by flood waters, trying to find maybe one decent picture of their grandchildren that they can save. Are you really that coldhearted? What in the world has happened to Free Republic? When did it become a forum for people to see who can be the cruelest poster? When did it become a place to make jokes and cruel comments at other good peoples expense?
There is plenty of reason to blame local and state politicians but a lot of the comments on here go past that. Have at the mayor and governor. I think they are both in way over their heads and they will be gone at the first opportunity but some of the comments on these forums are just plain hateful to some really good people who lost everything. A lot of them, by the way, who didn't vote for Nagin or Blanco. A lot of them who have worked for many years to elect good Republicans and turn this state around.
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