< ... Snip > Mr. Broussard recalled he told her “somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night,” sobbed the parish president, breaking down. “She drowned on Friday night.”
Choking back tears, he pressed on, ignoring the interjections of moderator Tim Russert. “Nobody’s coming to get her, nobody’s coming to get her: The secretary’s promise, everybody’s promise. They’ve had press conferences — I’m sick of the press conferences. For God’s sakes, shut up and send somebody.” His raw frustration with the plodding, inept response of the federal government to the cataclysmic nightmare on the Gulf Coast was palpable.
President Bush, who waited two days after Katrina landed and a day after levee breaks drowned New Orleans to leave his Texas ranch and follow the federal response from Washington, proclaimed that “in America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.” But those who were abandoned believe otherwise.
Families of the very young and very old who succumbed to the abandonment know better. A quarter of New Orleans’ 480,000 residents who live below the poverty line and had to fend for themselves when all hell broke loose know better.
Four years ago the government got a wake-up call about how unprepared it was to handle the worst. A huge bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security was formed and tens of billions of taxpayer dollars were spent to beef up the nation’s disaster response system. Never again would the federal government bungle its way through the worst wrought by man or nature.
Then Katrina hit and destroyed that myth. Unlike 9/11, the government knew a powerful hurricane had its eye on New Orleans in time to prepare for a worst-case scenario. For years it knew how vulnerable the city’s levee system was to unpredictable hurricane forces.
Yet when Katrina’s floodwaters breached New Orleans levees and drowned the city, federal disaster officials were watching from afar like the rest of us. Only after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff noted that it looked “as if an atomic bomb had been dropped” on the Big Easy did a sweeping relief effort swing into action. But everything was a day (or days) late and a dollar (or dollars) short.
Bureaucratic red tape tangled rescue and relief operations from Alabama to Mississippi and down to Louisiana. By the time logistics could be figured out and emergency operations enacted, people were dead or dying who might have survived if the threat of impending disaster had been taken seriously.
The anarchy and chaos that rocked places where people had nothing to lose after days of no food, water, shelter, or communication might have been mitigated if the government hadn’t waited until after the levees broke to organize resources, search and rescue missions, and massive evacuations.
Instead, the world watched in stunned disbelief as the last remaining superpower appeared powerless to help untold thousands, now called refugees, who were stuck in hot, stinking, dark arenas with nowhere to go and no way to get there.
Out of the prolonged suffering of those waiting desperately to be saved from the worst came a harsh realization. After all the talk about improving national security through heightened awareness and coordination of responsible agencies, the government can’t bail anyone out.
It has no more — and maybe less — capability to protect the public than it did on Sept. 11, 2001. Four years after violent disaster hobbled the homeland with numbing ferocity, the United States appears as impotent as it was then to effectively safeguard its citizens from utter devastation.
It’s a sobering discovery to make when it matters that expected help is not on the way. To paraphrase the emotional parish president, no Desperately seeking survivors
Source: Katrina’s victims feel a sense of abandonment
A couple more references to Broussard's crocodile tears:
Louisiana Nursing Homes Now Vacated, Many Elderly Feared Dead
After the hurricane hit, everyone was pretty sure that NO had dodged a bullet. However, it was patently obvious to all that Mississippi and Alabama had not. By far the greater devistation was in Mississippi. They were assured by the locals that the levees were holding and turned to the rescue operations and to getting aid to the people in MS and AL. The locals should have been more than able to get the people out of NO.
By Tuesday, when the levees broke ( a day AFTER the hurricane) assets that were pointed toward the greater hit areas had to be turned back to NO. Because of the ineptness of the LA authorities, the people of MS were denied the relief they had a right to expect because all assets were turning to LA.
The MSM is going to have a lot to answer for in the coming days. They have outright lied, ignored their fellow Americans, and have failed to dig into the real cause of the confusion. Like WHY was the plan filed with FEMA not followed?