What went wrong in Katrina's wake?

[Amelia]

What went wrong in Katrina's wake?

Many questions but few answers about the slow response on all levels

By Lisa Myers

the NBC Investigative Unit

Sept. 6, 2005

WASHINGTON - Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why weren’t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?

A draft emergency plan, prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and obtained by NBC News, calls for "400 buses to... evacuate victims." Yet those 200 buses were left in Katrina's path.

"That's a real tragedy that these resources weren't employed," said Greg Shaw, a disaster management expert at George Washington University," because it would have been good to get those people out of the city."

Tuesday, the mayor of New Orleans would not comment.

On the federal level, clearly the arrival of the military has helped. But why did it take so long?

Last Wednesday, an Army officer said the nation's elite rapid deployment group, the 82nd Airborne, had 3,500 soldiers and 30 helicopters ready to be in New Orleans within hours. Yet they arrived only on Labor Day.

Tuesday, the Pentagon was defensive.

"Not only was there no delay," said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, "I think we anticipated in most cases — not in all cases, but in most cases — the support that was required. And we were pushing support before we were formally asked for it."

A persistent unanswered question is, why didn’t the military just drop pallets of water to those stranded in various locations?

"This was an inexcusable failure of the government," said Gunnar J. Kuepper with the International Association of Emergency Managers.

One huge bottleneck in the evacuation — the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines weren’t working. Finally, someone at Homeland Security signed an order to allow evacuees to be screened by hand.

So far, there are many more questions than official answers about the delays and failures on the state, local and federal levels that, critics say, made this catastrophe even worse.

[Dr. Shane]

If the evacuation had started earlier the buses could have made several trips and evacuated over 100,000. Not only that, if the citizens with cars that stayed had seen the thousands being evacuated by bus, they would have been more likely to leave themselves.

[Amelia]

The mayor of NO is refusing to address these points and keeps saying FEMA is at fault.

[Dr. Shane]

Micheal Brown has made the point that he doesn't have a police department, a fire department or a means to evacuate people. However he also says if people want to blame him they can do so. He says he is focused on doing what can be done.

[Barbara]

I am sorry it is not all FEMAs fault. All part of the goverment are at fault. As Mayor he should have started geting the poor out of the city using the city buses, school bus and any transportation before it hit. I don't blame alot of there folks being mad and upset. Katrina caught everyone with their pant down. I hope that the goverment can use the mistakes made after Katrina and improve their resposes and the next time get people help sooner and be better perpared.

[aldona]

[]http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2005/09/07/cartoon_0809_gallery__550x389.jpg[/]

[aka]

....read it HERE

[Dr. Shane]

The looters that most bothered me were the ones shooting at rescue workers and breaking into people's private homes. There were many of both. In the past, WHITE looters have been shot on site after hurricanes and earthquakes. Color has nothing to do with it.

[aldona]

From today's newspaper (The Australian):

</font><blockquote><font class="small">Quote:</font><hr />

YOU compliment the media on stepping in where the US authorities have feared to tread in New Orleans (Media, 8/9). But I have waited in vain to see our media reveal the television coverage of President Bush's visit to the disaster area on September 3 for the sham that it was.

CNN showed Mr Bush visiting an open-air food distribution point at the 17th Street levee, with grateful people being helped. German network ZDF News reported that as soon as Mr Bush and the media had departed, the stand was taken down, and others that were being prepared were abandoned.

Dr Alison Broinowski

Paddington, NSW

<hr /></blockquote><font class="post">

[Ron Lambert]

The real problem was right on the eve of the storm.

Fox News has reported that the Red Cross and FEMA had trucks already loaded with food, water, and supplies and in position to move into the Superdome and the Community Center ON MONDAY, before the storm hit, to preposition all the food and supplies so they would be ready when the storm hit and refugees began entering these evacuation centers. But Governor Blanco of Louisiana ordered the trucks to stay where they were and not move in. Her reason she gave was that if food and supplies were pre-positioned in such centers, then more people might be encouraged to disregard the order to evacuate. Thus her concern was more to uphold her own authority than to make prudent preparations. After the storm hit and the streets were flooded, the trucks could not move in.

The fact that a large percentage of the population would not or could not heed the call to evacuaute was predicatable, since it has always been that way everywhere else where mandatory evacuations were declared. Governor Blanco should have realized this, and deferred to the sound judgment of the Red Cross and FEMA, who have experience with disasters. Thus she is the one who most got in the way, and made everything worse. It is ironic now that FEMA is coming in for so much criticism.

[LifeHiscost]

Quote:

---

Ron Lambert said:

It is ironic now that FEMA is coming in for so much criticism.

---

It is true that not all is as it seems to be. Especially during periods of great stress and chaos.

[:"red"] "Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening]. " [/]

1 Corinthians 13:7 AMP

Most appropriate at this time of a microcosm of a future yet to be experienced.

[there buster]

The reason pallets of water were not dropped at the Superdome is because the state and local officials vetoed it.

They didn't want the Superdome to become a magnet for more people, so, although the Red Cross and others had supplies available, the state people said "No."

[Fran]

FEMA took all the blame and everyone was crying to get rid of Brown!

Now that more truth comes out, will they cry to impeach the governor? What about the mayor? I'm just waiting to hear the rest of the rest of the story.

[Ron Lambert]

The mayor of New Orleans was the one who complained about Governor Blanco's order prohibiting the trucks with emergency supplies from entering in advance of the storm, in an interview with Brit Hume on Fox News.

Of course, the mayor could share blame for not responding to the many warnings over the past several months that the levee system needed repair and upgrading before a major storm hit. City officials were told by experts, including the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, that a major category four or five storm would overwhelm the levees, and the city would be flooded up to 20 feet in some places, exactly as happened. They didn't want to spend the money. Sure saved a lot of money, didn't they? Talk about an ounce of prevention....

[lazarus]

The city of New Orleans does NOT fund Army Corps projects. The federal governement funds these projects.

"....the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million..."

Chicago Tribune Sept 1 2005

If you really want to know a little bit about finding issues for the army corps of engineers see this link form 2002.

http://orig.clarionledger.com/news/0203/07/m05.html

Lets not just blindly accept the Democrat or Republican talking points!

[there buster]

Quote:

---

In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state,

about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

Much of that Louisiana money was spent to try to keep low-lying New Orleans dry. But hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to unrelated water projects demanded by the state's congressional delegation and approved by the Corps, often after economic analyses that turned out to be inaccurate. Despite a series of independent investigations criticizing Army Corps construction projects as wasteful pork-barrel spending, Louisiana's representatives have kept bringing home the bacon.

For example,

after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations.

The Corps also spends tens of millions of dollars a year dredging little-used waterways such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Atchafalaya River and the Red River -- now known as the

J. Bennett Johnston Waterway,[former Democrat Senator]

in honor of the project's congressional godfather -- for barge traffic that is less than forecast.. .

But overall,

the Bush administration's funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton administration's for its past five years.

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the chief of the Corps, has said that

in any event, more money would not have prevented the drowning of the city, since its levees were designed to protect against a Category 3 storm, and the levees that failed were already completed projects.

Strock has also said that the marsh-restoration project would not have done much to diminish Katrina's storm surge, which passed east of the coastal wetlands. (emphasis supllied)

---

find the entire article here: Washington Post Sept. 8 2005

[Dr. Shane]

I have been saying from the beginning that if the levees were underfunded that the Congressional delegation from LA had a lot to do with that. For anyone that has been involved with politics, that is a no brainer.