| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"G-Ride" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2005 06:39:00 PM |
| Object: |
How Bush Blew It |
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
and
"Breakdowns Marked Path from Hurricane to Anarchy":
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11response.html?p
agewanted=1&ei=5094&en=ce371f0e0587100b&hp&ex=1126497600&partner=homepage
or
http://tinyurl.com/9y9ro
*****
"How Bush Blew It":
Bureaucratic timidity. Bad phone lines. And a failure of imagination. Why
the government was so slow to respond to catastrophe.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It's a standing joke among the president's top aides:
who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be
cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the
displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in
West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug.
30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans,
was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a
couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff,
Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan
Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to
discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task
of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would
do the deed.
The president did not growl this time. He had already decided to return to
Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day,
Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and
their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do in the aftermath of the
storm. President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but
he didn't quite realize how bad.
The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it
might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night.
Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the
president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans.
Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in
their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air
Force One.
How this could be-how the president of the United States could have even
less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average
American about the worst natural disaster in a century-is one of the more
perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of
heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.
President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in
ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the
Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the
papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to
overreact to the noise around them.
But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the
occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be
petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five
years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush
can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents
keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam;
President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly
listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them
what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When
Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush
the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed,
that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job
and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope,
couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other
authority.
The war in Iraq was a failure of intelligence. The government's response to
Katrina-like the failure to anticipate that terrorists would fly into
buildings on 9/11-was a failure of imagination. On Tuesday, within 24 hours
of the storm's arrival, Bush needed to be able to imagine the scenes of
disorder and misery that would, two days later, shock him when he watched
the evening news. He needed to be able to see that New Orleans would spin
into violence and chaos very quickly if the U.S. government did not take
charge-and, in effect, send in the cavalry, which in this case probably
meant sending in a brigade from a combat outfit, like the 82nd Airborne,
based in Fort Bragg, N.C., and prepared to deploy anywhere in the world in
18 hours.
Bush and his advisers in his "war cabinet" have always been action-oriented,
"forward leaning," in the favorite phrase of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. They dislike lawyers and sometimes brush aside legalistic (and
even sound constitutional) arguments. But this time "Rummy" opposed sending
in active-duty troops as cops. ***** Cheney, who was vacationing in Wyoming
when the storm hit, characteristically kept his counsel on videoconferences;
his private advice is not known.
Liberals will say they were indifferent to the plight of poor
African-Americans. It is true that Katrina laid bare society's massive
neglect of its least fortunate. The inner thoughts and motivations of Bush
and his top advisers are impossible to know for certain. Though it seems
abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the
balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play.
It's also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant
crisis, Bush and his team are numb.
The failure of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina worked like a
power blackout. Problems cascaded and compounded; each mistake made the next
mistake worse. The foe in this battle was a monster; Katrina flattened the
Gulf Coast with the strength of a vengeful god. But human beings, beginning
with the elected officials of the City of New Orleans, failed to anticipate
and react in time.
Congressional investigations will take months to sort out who is to blame. A
NEWSWEEK reconstruction of the government's response to the storm shows how
Bush's leadership style and the bureaucratic culture combined to produce a
disaster within a disaster.
Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, didn't want to evacuate. New Orleanians
have a fatalistic streak; their joyful, jazz-blowing street funeral
processions are legendary. After many near misses over the years since
Hurricane Betsy flooded 20 percent of the city in 1965, longtime residents
prefer to stay put. Nagin's eye had long been on commerce, not catastrophe.
A former executive at Cox Communications, he had come to office in 2002 to
clear out the allegedly corrupt old guard and bring new business to the
city, which has not prospered with New South metropolises like Atlanta.
During Nagin's mayoral campaign, the promises were about jobs, not stronger
floodwalls and levees.
But on Saturday night, as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Nagin talked to
Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center. "Max Mayfield has
scared me to death," Nagin told City Councilwoman Cynthia Morrell early
Sunday morning. "If you're scared, I'm scared," responded Morrell, and the
mandatory order went out to evacuate the city-about a day later than for
most other cities and counties along the Gulf Coast.
As Katrina howled outside Monday morning and the windows of the Hyatt Hotel,
where the mayor had set up his command post, began popping out, Nagin and
his staff lay on the floor. Then came eerie silence. Morrell decided to go
look at her district, including nearby Gentilly. Outside, Canal Street was
dry. "Phew," Morrell told her driver, "that was close." But then, from the
elevated highway, she began seeing neighborhoods under eight to 15 feet of
water. "Holy God," she thought to herself. Then she spotted her first dead
body.
At dusk, on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had
their first encounter with the federal government. A man in a blue FEMA
windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city. He
seemed unfamiliar with the city's geography, but he did have a sense of
urgency. "Water as far as the eye can see," he said. It was worse than
Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969. "I need to call Washington,"
he said. "Do you have a conference-call line?" According to an aide to the
mayor, he seemed a little taken aback when the answer was no. Long neglected
in the city budget, communications within the New Orleans city government
were poor, and eventually almost nonexistent when the batteries on the few
old satellite phones died. The FEMA man found a phone, but he had trouble
reaching senior officials in Washington. When he finally got someone on the
line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don't understand, you
don't understand."
Around New Orleans, three levees had overtopped or were broken. The city was
doomed. There was no way the water could be stopped. But, incredibly, the
seriousness of the situation did not really register, not only in
Washington, but at the state emergency command post upriver in Baton Rouge.
In a squat, drab cinder-block building in the state capital, full of TV
monitors and maps, various state and federal officials tried to make sense
of what had happened. "Nobody was saying it wasn't a catastrophe," Louisiana
Sen. Mary Landrieu told news-week. "We were saying, 'Thank you, God,'
because the experts were telling the governor it could have been even
worse."
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a motherly but steely figure known by the
nickname Queen Bee, knew that she needed help. But she wasn't quite sure
what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we
need your help. We need everything you've got."
Bush, the governor later recalled, was reassuring. But the conversation was
all a little vague. Blanco did not specifically ask for a massive
intervention by the active-duty military. "She wouldn't know the 82nd
Airborne from the Harlem Boys' Choir," said an official in the governor's
office, who did not wish to be identified talking about his boss's
conversations with the president. There are a number of steps Bush could
have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the
military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency
communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in
San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went
to bed.
By the predawn hours, most state and federal officials finally realized that
the 17th Street Canal levee had been breached, and that the city was in
serious trouble. Bush was told at 5 a.m. Pacific Coast time and immediately
decided to cut his vacation short. To his senior advisers, living in the
insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of
presidential vacation days counts as a major event. They could see pitfalls
in sending Bush to New Orleans immediately. His presence would create a
security nightmare and get in the way of the relief effort. Bush blithely
proceeded with the rest of his schedule for the day, accepting a gift guitar
at one event and pretending to riff like Tom Cruise in "Risky Business."
Bush might not have appeared so carefree if he had been able to see the
fearful faces on some young police officers-the ones who actually showed up
for roll call at the New Orleans Second District police headquarters that
morning. The radio was reporting water nine feet deep at the corner of
Napoleon and St. Charles streets. The looting and occasional shooting had
begun. At 2 o'clock on the morning of the storm, only 82 of 120 cops had
obeyed a summons to report for duty. Now the numbers were dwindling; within
a day, only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight
the looters, recalled a sad and exhausted Capt. Eddie Hosli, speaking to a
NEWSWEEK reporter last week. "One of my lieutenants told me, 'I was looking
into the eyes of one of the officers and it was like looking into the eyes
of a baby'," Hosli recalled. "It was just terrible." (When the AWOL officers
began trickling back to work last week, attracted in part by the promise of
five expense-paid days in Las Vegas for all New Orleans cops, Hosli told
them, "You've got your own demons to live with. I'm not going to judge
you.")
At emergency headquarters in Baton Rouge, confusion raged. Though more than
100,000 of its residents had no way to get out of the city on their own, New
Orleans had no real evacuation plan, save to tell people to go to the
Superdome and wait for buses. On Tuesday, the state was rounding up buses;
no, FEMA was; no, FEMA's buses would take too long to get there ... and so
on. On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Blanco took her second trip to the
Superdome and was shocked by the rising tide of desperation there. There
didn't seem to be nearly enough buses, boats or helicopters.
Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred
around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran
Townsend, the president's Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure
her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and
insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the
governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, 'whatever you have'." She
asked for 40,000 troops. "I just pulled a number out of the sky," she later
told NEWSWEEK.
The Pentagon was not sitting idly. By Tuesday morning (and even before the
storm) the military was moving supplies, ships, boats, helicopters and
troops toward the Gulf Coast. But, ironically, the scale of the effort
slowed it. TV viewers had difficulty understanding why TV crews seemed to
move in and out of New Orleans while the military was nowhere to be seen.
But a TV crew is five people in an RV. Before the military can send in
convoys of trucks, it has to clear broken and flooded highways. The military
took over the shattered New Orleans airport for emergency airlifts, but
special teams of Air Force operators had to be sent in to make it ready. By
the week after the storm, the military had mobilized some 70,000 troops and
hundreds of helicopters-but it took at least two days and usually four and
five to get them into the disaster area. Looters and well-armed gangs, like
TV crews, moved faster.
In the inner councils of the Bush administration, there was some talk of
gingerly pushing aside the overwhelmed "first responders," the state and
local emergency forces, and sending in active-duty troops. But under an 1868
law, federal troops are not allowed to get involved in local law
enforcement. The president, it's true, could have invoked the Insurrections
Act, the so-called Riot Act. But Rumsfeld's aides say the secretary of
Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people
in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that
National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way.
The one federal agency that is supposed to handle disasters-FEMA-was
dysfunctional. On Wednesday morning, Senator Landrieu was standing outside
the chaotic Superdome and asked to borrow a FEMA official's phone to call
her office in Washington. "It didn't work," she told news-week. "I thought
to myself, 'This isn't going to be pretty'." Once a kind of petty-cash
drawer for congressmen to quickly hand out aid after floods and storms, FEMA
had improved in the 1990s in the Clinton administration. But it became a
victim of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences. After 9/11 raised the
profile of disaster response, FEMA was folded into the sprawling Department
of Homeland Security and effectively weakened. FEMA's boss, Bush's close
friend Joe Allbaugh, quit when he lost his cabinet seat. (Now a consultant,
Allbaugh was down on the Gulf Coast last week looking for contracts for his
private clients.) Allbaugh replaced himself with his college buddy Mike
Brown, whose last private-sector job (omitted from his official resume) had
been supervising horse-show judges for the International Arabian Horse
Association. After praising Brown ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of job"),
Bush last week removed him from honchoing the Katrina relief operation. He
was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen. The Coast Guard was one
agency that performed well, rescuing thousands.
Bad news rarely flows up in bureaucracies. For most of those first few days,
Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing. Bush likes "metrics,"
numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring
statistics. At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them
off: there were 400 trucks transporting 5.4 million meals and 13.4 million
liters of water along with 3.4 million pounds of ice. Yet it was obvious to
anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole.
The denial and the frustration finally collided aboard Air Force One on
Friday. As the president's plane sat on the tarmac at New Orleans airport, a
confrontation occurred that was described by one participant as "as blunt as
you can get without the Secret Service getting involved." Governor Blanco
was there, along with various congressmen and senators and Mayor Nagin (who
took advantage of the opportunity to take a shower aboard the plane). One by
one, the lawmakers listed their grievances as Bush listened. Rep. Bobby
Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had
called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to
e-mail his request, "and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and
with no electricity," Jindal said, incredulously. "How does that make any
sense?" Jindal later told NEWSWEEK that "almost everybody" around the
conference table had a similar story about how the federal response "just
wasn't working." With each tale, "the president just shook his head, as if
he couldn't believe what he was hearing," says Jindal, a conservative
Republican and Bush appointee who lost a close race to Blanco. Repeatedly,
the president turned to his aides and said, "Fix it."
According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush's, the meeting
came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of
"who's in charge?" Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush,
"We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a
more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let's do
it."
A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in
Washington for the previous three days. Normally, the Guard is under the
control of the state governor, but the Feds can take over-if the governor
asks them to. Nagin suggested that Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, the Pentagon's
on-scene commander, be put in charge. According to Senator Vitter, Bush
turned to Governor Blanco and said, "Well, what do you think of that,
Governor?" Blanco told Bush, "I'd rather talk to you about that privately."
To which Nagin responded, "Well, why don't you do that now?"
The meeting broke up. Bush and Blanco disappeared to talk. More than a week
later, there was still no agreement. Blanco didn't want to give up her
authority, and Bush didn't press. Jindal suggested that Bush appoint Colin
Powell as a kind of relief czar, and Bush replied, "I'll take that into
consideration." Bush does not like to fire people. He told Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff to go down to Louisiana and sort out the various
problems. A day later FEMA's Brown was on his way back to Washington.
Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush
aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal
and almost detached." At one meeting described by this insider, officials
were oddly self-congratulatory, perhaps in an effort to buck each other up.
Life inside a bunker can be strange, especially in defeat.
*****
"Breakdowns Marked Path from Hurricane to Anarchy"
By ERIC LIPTON, CHRISTOPHER DREW, SCOTT SHANE and DAVID ROHDE
Published: September 11, 2005
The governor of Louisiana was "blistering mad." It was the third night after
Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and
convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by
federal authorities had arrived.
Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does
anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying
out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000
people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had
failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be
two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.
The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have
already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a
terrorist attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial
examination of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to
which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless
force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff
between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana,
interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to
direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana
and New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that
they were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always
exactly sure what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington
would provide rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing
legalities and logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary
warning from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause "human
suffering incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of
its 28 urban search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and
sent no workers at all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on
Monday, Aug. 29.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by
helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of
destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to
understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me,
this is what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell,
recalled.
State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan
to prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal
with two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and
imposing law and order.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more
than 3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks
flooded. It lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the
watery streets and had to abandon much of its most advanced communications
equipment, guard officials said.
Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New
Orleans convention center, which interviews show was even worse than
previously described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging
into the darkness, guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs' handguns, said
Capt. Jeffrey Winn.
"In 20 years as a cop, doing mostly tactical work, I have never seen
anything like it," said Captain Winn. Three of his officers quit, he said,
and another simply disappeared.
Officials said yesterday that 10 people died at the Superdome, and 24 died
at the convention center site, although the causes were not clear.
Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view
shared by many in city and state government: that a national disaster
requires a national response. "Everybody's trying to look at it like the
City of New Orleans messed up," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "But you
mean to tell me that in the richest nation in the world, people really
expected a little town with less than 500,000 people to handle a disaster
like this? That's ludicrous to even think that."
Andrew Kopplin, Governor Blanco's chief of staff, took a similar position.
"This was a bigger natural disaster than any state could handle by itself,
let alone a small state and a relatively poor one," Mr. Kopplin said.
Federal officials seem to have belatedly come to the same conclusion.
Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said future
"ultra-catastrophes" like Hurricane Katrina would require a more aggressive
federal role. And Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, whom President Bush had publicly praised a week earlier
for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed aside on Friday, replaced by a
take-charge admiral.
Russ Knocke, press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said
that any detailed examination of the response to the storm's assault will
uncover shortcomings by many parties. "I don't believe there is one critical
error," he said. "There are going to be some missteps that were made by
everyone involved."
But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush
White House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the
city and state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false
advertising" about how the government has been transformed four years after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath
said.
Initial Solidarity
At midafternoon on that Monday, a few hours after the hurricane made
landfall, state and federal leaders appeared together at a news conference
in Baton Rouge in a display of solidarity.
Governor Blanco lavished her gratitude on Mr. Brown, the FEMA chief.
"Director Brown," she said, "I hope you will tell President Bush how much we
appreciated - these are the times that really count - to know that our
federal government will step in and give us the kind of assistance that we
need." Senator Mary L. Landrieu pitched in: "We are indeed fortunate to have
an able and experienced director of FEMA who has been with us on the ground
for some time."
Mr. Brown replied in the same spirit: "What I've seen here today is a team
that is very tight-knit, working closely together, being very professional
doing it, and in my humble opinion, making the right calls."
At that point, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the
storm, although some areas were already being flooded through breaches in
levees. But when widespread flooding forced the city into crisis, Monday's
confidence crumbled, exposing serious weaknesses in the machinery of
emergency services.
Questions had been raised about FEMA, since it was swallowed by the
Department of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11. Its critics
complained that it focused too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for
natural disasters, and that it had become politicized. Mr. Brown is a lawyer
who came to the agency with political connections but little emergency
management experience. That's also true of Patrick J. Rhode, the chief of
staff at FEMA, who was deputy director of advance operations for the Bush
campaign and the Bush White House.
Scott R. Morris, who was deputy chief of staff at FEMA and is now director
of its recovery office on Florida, had worked for Maverick Media in Austin,
Tex., as a media strategist for the Bush for President primary campaign and
the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And David I. Maurstad was the Republican
lieutenant governor of Nebraska before he became director of FEMA's regional
office in Denver and then a senior official at the agency's headquarters.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA
employees, wrote to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff
members are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and
contractors."
With the new emphasis on terrorism, three quarters of the $3.35 billion in
federal grants for fire and police departments and other first responders
were intended to address terror threats, instead of an "all-hazards"
approach that could help in any catastrophe.
Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA
priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a
response. In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said:
"Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local
and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a
role. There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that
cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your backyard."
Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the
hurricane response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when
Hurricane Katrina hit. State officials said it did not yet address
transportation or crime control, two issues that proved crucial. Col. Terry
J. Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans since 2003, said he
never spoke with FEMA about the state disaster blueprint. So New Orleans had
its own plan.
At first glance, Annex I of the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency
Management Plan" is reassuring. Forty-one pages of matter-of-fact prose
outline a seemingly exhaustive list of hurricane evacuation procedures,
including a "mobile command center" that could replace a disabled city hall.
New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage
exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency
communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was
to be completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and
water supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last
resort," as part of a new deal with the tenants, the New Orleans Saints.
But the city's plan says that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of
personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they
would be sheltered.
Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and
cities to file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict
standards for evacuation plans.
"There is a very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what
the quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of
Maryland School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland
Security. "There is not a lot of urgency."
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely
followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory
evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans's population left, as many as
100,000 people remained.
Colonel Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter,
assuming the city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48
hours, until the storm passed or the federal government came and rescued
people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of
Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington
discussed the need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there,"
recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at
FEMA and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he
said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the
storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that
major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were
not taken."
Drivers Afraid
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials
pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by
Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local
officials began resisting.
Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to
drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school
buses."
FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, said Natalie Rule, an agency
spokeswoman, only after a request from the state that she said did not come
until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New
Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna
Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of
desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor's frustrated
appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.
She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over
their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the
state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of
the dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation
problem arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.
State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans
and signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies,
according to Louisiana officials.
Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated
before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana
Nursing Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one
nursing home in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.
Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency
preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the
city. An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during
evacuation.
"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come,
people were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home
managers ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep
their frail patients in place and wait out the storm.
Symbols of Despair
The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn
two of the most visible features of the New Orleans skyline - the Superdome
and the mile-long convention center - into deathtraps and symbols of the
city's despair.
At the Superdome, the initial calm turned to fear as a chunk of the white
roof ripped away in the wind, dropping debris on the Saints' fleur-de-lis
logo on the 50-yard-line. The electricity was knocked out, leaving only dim
lights inside the windowless building. The dome quickly became a giant
sauna, with temperatures well over 100 degrees.
Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside were women, children or
elderly, and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police
superintendent overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with
300 troops from the Louisiana National Guard. And it didn't take long for
the stench of human waste to drive many people outside.
Chief Swain said the Guard supplied water and food - two military rations a
day. But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses
expected early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.
Chief Swain and Colonel Ebbert said in interviews that the first buses
arranged by FEMA were diverted elsewhere, and it took several more hours to
begin the evacuation. By Friday, the food and the water had run out.
Violence also broke out. One Guard soldier was wounded by gunfire and the
police confirmed there were attempts to sexually assault at least one woman
and a young child, Chief Swain said.
And even though there were clinics at the stadium, Chief Swain said, "Quite
a few of the people died during the course of their time here."
By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were
so dehydrated that guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died
while walking to the buses. State officials said yesterday that a total of
10 people died in the Superdome.
"I'm very angry that we couldn't get the resources we needed to save lives,"
Chief Swain said. "I was watching people die."
Mayor Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, P. Edwin Compass III, said in
interviews that they believe murders occurred in the Superdome and in the
convention center, where the city also started sending people on Tuesday.
But at the convention center, the violence was even more pervasive.
"The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough security," said Capt.
Winn, the head of the police SWAT team. "The only way I can describe it is
as a completely lawless situation."
While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was
no time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in
a volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital
workers and patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to
storm the place nearly every night.
Capt. Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing
cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a
number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped - and
that murders were occurring.
"We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions," Mr.
Compass said. "And we essentially had to become the lion tamers."
Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the
center's six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.
But the police were at a disadvantage: they could not fire into the crowds
in the dimly lit facility. So after they saw muzzle flashes, they would rush
toward them, searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.
Meanwhile, those nearby "would be running for their lives," Capt. Winn said.
"Or they would lie down on the ground in the fetal position."
And when the SWAT team caught some of the culprits, there was not much it
could do. The jails were also flooded, and no temporary holding cells had
been set up yet. "We'd take them into another hall and hope they didn't make
it back," Capt. Winn said.
One night, Capt. Winn said, the police department even came close to
abandoning the convention halls - and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said
a captain in charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the
regular police officers by helicopter when 100 guardsmen rushed over to help
restore order.
Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were
dumped near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration, emergency
medics have said. State officials said yesterday that 24 people died either
inside or just outside the convention center.
The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of
those deaths may have been murders. Capt. Winn said that when his team made
a final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including
one with multiple stab wounds.
Capt. Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials
said that nearly 10 regular officers stationed at the Superdome and 15 to 20
at the convention center also quit, along with several hundred other police
officers across the city.
But, Capt. Winn said, most of the city's police officers were "busting their
asses" and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I
just didn't expect for it to explode the way it did."
Divided Responsibilities
As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the
response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor
Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin
directed city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point
man for the federal government - meant no one person was in charge.
Americans watching on television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble
mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news
briefings and interviews.
The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it
would prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its
role, offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local
governments. "Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local
and state agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
With Hurricane Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing
with disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather
than led.
FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts -
buses, food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for
specific requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you
don't have time to ask for each round of ammunition that you need,"
complained Colonel Ebbert, the city's emergency operations director.
Telephone and cellphone service died, and throughout the crisis the state's
special emergency communications system was either overloaded or knocked
out. As a result, officials were unable to fully inventory the damage or
clearly identify the assistance they required from the federal government.
"If you do not know what your needs are, I can't request to FEMA what I
need," said Colonel Doran, of the state office of homeland security.
To President Bush, Governor Blanco directed an ill-defined but urgent
appeal.
"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on
Monday. "I am going to need all the help you can send me."
"We went from early morning to late night, day after day, after day, after
day. Trying to make critical decisions," Ms. Blanco said in an interview
last week. "Trying to get product in, resources, where does the food come
from. Learning the supply network."
She said she didn't always know what to request. "Do we stop and think about
it?" she asked. "We just stop and think about help."
FEMA attributed some of the delay to miscommunications in an overwhelming
event. "There was a significant amount of discussions between the parties
and likely some confusion about what was requested and what was needed,"
said Mr. Knocke, the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered
sending active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to
have combat troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's
arranged under our Constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted
at a news briefing last week, "state and local officials are the first
responders."
Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the
president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco.
But they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's
authority, according to the officials involved in the discussions. They
ultimately rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival
of National Guard forces, including many trained as military police.
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security,
explained that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically
moved combat forces into an American city, without the governor's consent,
for purposes of using those forces - untrained at that point in law
enforcement - for law enforcement duties? Yes."
But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"
For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed
remote. Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor
Nagin and Colonel Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words
of assurance federal relief officials had offered. "It was like, 'they are
coming, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming,' " she said in an
interview. "It was all in route. Everything was in motion."
'Stuck in Atlanta'
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of
every possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of
putting bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately
needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the
disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on
community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the
devastated area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were
being lost in New Orleans.
"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?' " said
Joseph Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning
News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
Ms. Rule, the FEMA spokeswoman, said there was no urgency for the
firefighters to arrive because they were primarily going to do community
relations work, not rescue.
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food
and water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer
trucks carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near
Alexandria, La., a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The
drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles
from Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in
the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's
ridiculous."
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of
Mr. Vines, said, "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty
contacting FEMA. Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA."
When the state of Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to
evacuate people displaced by flooding, she said, "they were told they could
not go. I don't really know why."
On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., and
president of the National Sheriffs' Association, sent out an alert urging
members to pitch in.
"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the
paperwork," he said.
Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes
Detroit, Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Mr. Sexton on Sept. 1 The
next day, he led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks and
33 deputies, despite public pleas from Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to wait for
formal requests.
"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn't in good conscience
wait for a coordinated response," he said. He dropped off food, water and
medical supplies in Mobile and Gonzales, La., where a sheriffs' task force
directed him to the French Quarter. By Saturday, Sept. 3, the Michigan team
was conducting search and rescue missions.
"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved," Sheriff Evans said.
Mr. Knocke said the Department of Homeland Security could not yet respond to
complaints that red tape slowed relief.
"It is testament to the generosity of the American people - a lot of people
wanted to contribute," Mr. Knocke said. "But there is not really any way of
knowing at this time if or whether individual offers were plugged into the
response and recovery operation."
Response to Sept. 11
An irony of the much-criticized federal hurricane response is that it is
being overseen by a new cabinet department created because of perceived
shortcomings in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And
it is governed by a new plan the Department of Homeland Security unveiled in
January with considerable fanfare.
The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end
result is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and
tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by
increasing the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."
The evidence of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina raised doubts
about whether the plan had, in fact, improved coordination. Mr. Knocke, the
homeland security spokesman, said the department realizes it must learn from
its mistakes, and the department's inspector general has been given $15
million in the emergency supplemental appropriated by Congress to study the
flawed rescue and recovery operation.
"There is going to be enough blame to go around at all levels," he said. "We
are going to be our toughest critics."
*****
--
Aloha,
G-Ride
"Like a quarrelling group of monkeys on a leaky boat, armed with sticks of
dynamite, we are now embarked on an uncertain journey."
.
|
|
| User: "Jim07D5" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
11 Sep 2005 11:54:39 PM |
|
|
"G-Ride" <gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> said:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
and
"Breakdowns Marked Path from Hurricane to Anarchy":
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11response.html?p
agewanted=1&ei=5094&en=ce371f0e0587100b&hp&ex=1126497600&partner=homepage
This assumes that what happened is a big problem for the Bush agenda:
establishing the American Empire to the benefit of his rich backers.
--- Jim07D5
.
|
|
|
| User: "Fred Stone" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 12:42:04 PM |
|
|
Jim07D5 <Jim07D5@nospam.net> wrote in
news:h6g9i1dplur6sppk2bjm6sl82svjr56utc@4ax.com:
"G-Ride" <gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> said:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
Jeff Goldstein gives Newsweak a thorough trashing.
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19000/
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
I think if we had a three-word message right now it’d be, ‘We can do
better.’ - Howard Dean
.
|
|
|
| User: "Misleart Chuff" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 05:32:21 PM |
|
|
"Fred Stone" <fstone69@earthling.com> wrote in message
news:1126528924.6648ce34f143a521c85b6a32edc7ade3@teranews...
: Jim07D5 <Jim07D5@nospam.net> wrote in
: news:h6g9i1dplur6sppk2bjm6sl82svjr56utc@4ax.com:
:
: > "G-Ride" <gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> said:
: >
: >>A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
: >>
: >>"How Bush Blew It":
: >>
: >>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
: >>
:
: Jeff Goldstein gives Newsweak a thorough trashing.
:
: http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19000/
The crap you've pointed at is giving out 404s.....maybe next time,
you'll consider posting at least an excerpt......
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "Matt Silberstein" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 01:37:45 PM |
|
|
On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:42:04 GMT, in alt.atheism , Fred Stone
<fstone69@earthling.com> in
<1126528924.6648ce34f143a521c85b6a32edc7ade3@teranews> wrote:
Jim07D5 <Jim07D5@nospam.net> wrote in
news:h6g9i1dplur6sppk2bjm6sl82svjr56utc@4ax.com:
"G-Ride" <gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> said:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
Jeff Goldstein gives Newsweak a thorough trashing.
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19000/
Well, if you call objecting to style while not actually contradicting
any points trashing, then it was trashed.
--
Matt Silberstein
Do something today about the Darfur Genocide
Genocide is news | Be A Witness
http://www.beawitness.org
"Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop"
www.darfurgenocide.org
Save Darfur.org :: Violence and Suffering in Sudan's Darfur Region
http://www.savedarfur.org/
.
|
|
|
| User: "Fred Stone" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 02:23:08 PM |
|
|
Matt Silberstein <RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nospam@ix.netcom.com> wrote in
news:741bi1hkukj1lnla5rh9r8dkdtgl7h93p3@4ax.com:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:42:04 GMT, in alt.atheism , Fred Stone
<fstone69@earthling.com> in
<1126528924.6648ce34f143a521c85b6a32edc7ade3@teranews> wrote:
Jim07D5 <Jim07D5@nospam.net> wrote in
news:h6g9i1dplur6sppk2bjm6sl82svjr56utc@4ax.com:
"G-Ride" <gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> said:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
Jeff Goldstein gives Newsweak a thorough trashing.
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19000/
Well, if you call objecting to style while not actually contradicting
any points trashing, then it was trashed.
If you call demolishing negative spin "objecting to style" then it was
indeed trashed.
--
Fred Stone
aa# 1369
I think if we had a three-word message right now it’d be, ‘We can do
better.’ - Howard Dean
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Michael Gray" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
11 Sep 2005 11:56:00 PM |
|
|
On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 08:39:00 -1000, "G-Ride"
<gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> wrote:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
:
Tell me, how did you manage to make the original post exactly 911
bytes long?
You are not Beelzebub, or the FSM are you?
.
|
|
|
| User: "G-Ride" |
|
| Title: Re: How Bush Blew It |
12 Sep 2005 07:31:17 AM |
|
|
"Michael Gray" <fleetg@newsguy.spam.com> wrote in message
news:gug9i1do7ka372aogt0pcddm7f8n2amhlg@4ax.com...
On Sun, 11 Sep 2005 08:39:00 -1000, "G-Ride"
<gride42nospammotherfucker@yahoo.com> wrote:
A couple articles on the government's response to Katrina:
"How Bush Blew It":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
:
Tell me, how did you manage to make the original post exactly 911
bytes long?
You are not Beelzebub, or the FSM are you?
Blue-eyed devil.
--
Aloha,
G-Ride
"Like a quarrelling group of monkeys on a leaky boat, armed with sticks of
dynamite, we are now embarked on an uncertain journey."
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
