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 starter's --- they invested in or bought a casino!
Corruption reigns in LA.
Katrina happened during Bush's watch, and with his appointees in place in the government departments with responsibility. That's the reality. That's just the way the political responsibility cookie crumbles. This is as true for the president of the United States as it is for the mayor of Mayberry. Is it always fair? No.
The point is to figure out what went wrong and to fix it. And if the sytem is not fixable, then the government should be honest with Americans and say: Look, if a catastrophic natrual disaster (the scale of a Katrina) or a catastrophic terrorist attack (the scale of a Hiroshima or Nagasaki) destroys your town/region, you are basically on your own. Get your ass in gear and move on. Don't look back.
---Bush should have seized control of the state like his gut was telling him to.---
Under what authority?
I saw a Discovery Channel special on the NOLA levee's back in 2000 and they showed what would happen to the levee's in the event of a CAT 5, and with their computer animation created at Louisiana State University computers, the simulated disaster was spot on to what had actually happened in the wake of Katrina.
It's fun to watch until the Dems win elections anyway, because a big slug of Americans are either too stupid to know better or too crooked to play by the rules.
Sorry man. To me, this stuff is too important to be fun.
Sorry, but the feds had to FIRST obtain permission from LA's governor, which she did not TIMELY grant.
FEMA is used as a last resort, generally when the state and local officials can't handle the crisis.
The Slimes are liars and agents for the democrap party. Sadly, too many Americans still love getting it shoved up their rears for the liberal doles.
They have now admitted that their damn levees wouldn't hold a CAT 3 and they didn't. Billions were funded to them. They spent it on other thangs and lined their own pockets.
Well, that is interesting.
By the way, how much of the plan for evacuating the poorwWhite population had they completed? 100%?
---Plans to reinforce the levees were cancelled in the 70's because of lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club over the Environmental Protection Act.---
And it is a bunch of environmental groups that no one has heard of running most of our Department of the Interior through lawsuits in the very liberal federal court system.
There were FEMA trucks sitting in Alabama for days and weeks because the governor of Louisiana wouldn't allow them into her state.
That's what engineering and scientific experts as well as NOAA officials said on that Discovery Channel program I watched had said.
Evidently this "hearing" isn't going to concentrate on anything that happened before August 29.
And they got hit with the back end of a barely Category 3.
I need to keep reminding myself evil does not win. Reading of the corruption has me down, but not out.
the only way he could have done this was with the military, and there was no plan for that. But you are right: he should have been willing to step on toes.
So, what Bush expected to jump into the nearest phone booth and become superman so he could personally rescue all the people? What on earth do they expect him to do?
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