Bush's Fault?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

This is interesting. And sad. It’s almost as if the locals convinced themselves this could never happen…

Note the date of the story.

New Orleans’s Hurricane Evacuation “Plan”

Jeebus H. Christ!!

[i]In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind; Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult

By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer, New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005:

City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. "You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. "But we don't have the transportation."

Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action. "The primary message is that eachperson is primarilyresponsibleforthemselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said.

In addition to the plea from Nagin, Thomas and Wilkins, video exhortations to make evacuation plans come from representatives of State Police and the National Weather Service, and from local officials such as Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, and State Rep. Arthur Morrell, D-New Orleans, said Allan Katz, whose advertising company is coordinating officials' scripts and doing the recording. The speakers explain what to bring and what to leave behind. They advise viewers to bring personal medicines and critical legal documents, and tell them how to create a family communication plan. Even a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals weighs in with a message on how to make the best arrangements for pets left behind.

Production likely will continue through August. Officials want to get the DVDs into the hands of pastors and community leaders as hurricane season reaches its height in September, Katz said.

Believing that the low-lying city is too dangerous a place to shelter refugees, the Red Cross positioned its storm shelters on higher ground north of Interstate 10 several years ago. It dropped plans to care for storm victims in schools or other institutions in town. Truehill, Wilkins and others said emergency preparedness officials still plan to deploy some Regional Transit Authority buses, school buses and perhaps even Amtrak trains to move some people before a storm.

An RTA emergency plan dedicates 64 buses and 10 lift vans to move people somewhere; whether that means out of town or to local shelters of last resort would depend on emergency planners' decision at that moment, RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Cook said. But even the larger buses hold only about 60 people each, a rescue capacity that is dwarfed by the unmet need. In an interview at the opening of this year's hurricane season, New Orleans Emergency Preparedness Director Joseph Matthews acknowledged that the city is overmatched. "It's important to emphasize that we just don't have the resources to take everybody out," he said in a interview in late May.

In the absence of public transportation resources, Total Community Action and the Red Cross have been developing a private initiative called Operation Brother's Keeper that, fully formed, would enlist churches in a vast, decentralized effort to make space for the poor and the infirm in church members' cars when they evacuate. However, the program is only in the first year of a three-year experiment and involves only four local churches so far. The Red Cross and Total Community Action are trying to invent a program that would show churches how to inventory their members, match those with space in their cars with those needing a ride, and put all the information in a useful framework, Wilkins said. But the complexities so far are daunting, she said.

The inventories go only at the pace of the volunteers doing them. Where churches recruit partner churches out of the storm area to shelter them, volunteers in both places need to be trained in running shelters, she said. People also have to think carefully about what makes good evacuation matches. Wilkins said that when ride arrangements are made, the volunteers must be sure to tell their passengers where their planned destination is if they are evacuated. Moreover, although the Archdiocese of New Orleans has endorsed the project in principle, it doesn't want its 142 parishes to participate until insurance problems have been solved with new legislation that reduces liability risks, Wilkins said. At the end of three years, organizers of Operation Brother's Keeper hope to have trained 90 congregations how to develop evacuation plans for their own members.

Meanwhile, some churches appear to have moved on their own to create evacuation plans that assist members without cars. Since the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004, Mormon churches have begun matching members who have empty seats in cars with those needing seats, said Scott Conlin, president of the church's local stake. Eleven local congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints share a common evacuation plan, and many church members have three-day emergency kits packed and ready to go, he said. Mormon churches in Jackson, Miss., Hattiesburg, Miss., and Alexandria, La., have arranged to receive evacuees. The denomination also maintains a toll-free telephone number that functions as a central information drop, where members on the road can leave information about their whereabouts that church leaders can pick up and relay as necessary, Conlin said.

Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com [/i]

They were going to make a DVD. A DVD saying, “you all are on your own.” They didn’t even care enough to make the DVD before the hurricane season began.

No. New Orleans did not have a functioning government as of the summer of 2005. This is a catastrophic failure of local governance–much worse than FEMA’s failures.

You would think that somebody–somewhere–would have called Washington and said, “You know, New Orleans doesn’t have its act together enough to have a hurricane evacuation plan.” And that somebody, somewhere–in Washington or in Baton Rouge–would have cared.

22

This is very informative as well:

Behind Poor Katrina Response,
A Long Chain of Weak Links
Changing Structure of FEMA,
Emphasis on Terrorism
Contributed to Problems
A Shortage of Helicopters

By ROBERT BLOCK, AMY SCHATZ and GARY FIELDS in Washington and CHRISTOPER COOPER in New Orleans
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 6, 2005; Page A1

Just two weeks ago, five state emergency managers brought a tough message to a meeting in Washington with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his top deputies.

“We told them straight out that they were weakening emergency management with potentially disastrous consequences,” says Dave Liebersbach, the director of Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. The department’s focus on terrorism was undermining its readiness for other catastrophes, said the visiting officials, who included emergency managers from Mississippi and Alabama.

Now that Hurricane Katrina has left the Gulf Coast flooded and New Orleans in ruins, the question ricocheting around the nation and the world is this: How could the world’s biggest superpower fail so badly in protecting and rescuing its residents from a natural disaster so frequently foretold?

The answer is sure to receive intense scrutiny this fall in Congress and around the nation, especially given revived fears that the U.S. is ill-prepared for a terrorist attack. “We are going to take a hard, hard look at our disaster-response procedures,” said Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee this weekend as he assisted patients at the New Orleans airport.

Yesterday, the government moved aggressively to show it has the situation in hand. President Bush paid his second visit to the region in four days, visiting Baton Rouge, La., and Poplarville, Miss. He asserted that federal, state and local governments are “doing the best we can.” The major levee breach in New Orleans, at the 17th Street Canal, was closed, allowing the city to begin pumping out floodwaters, a process expected to take about 30 days.

Meanwhile, thousands of federal troops appeared to be firmly in control of the city, with most residents evacuated and searches for survivors well underway. A Customs and Border Protection aircraft operating as a flying communication link gave first responders in New Orleans the ability to communicate for the first time since Katrina struck more than a week ago. In suburban Jefferson Parish, thousands of residents were allowed to check their homes under tight restrictions to evaluate what was left.

But the weekend’s progress hasn’t erased the troubling questions left by the government’s delayed understanding of the scope of the damage last week and its initial slowness in mounting rescues and bringing food and water to stricken citizens. The problems include:
? The decision to transform the Federal Emergency Management Agency from a cabinet-level agency reporting directly to the president to just one piece of a new, gargantuan Department of Homeland Security, which altered FEMA’s mission and watered down its powers.

? Too few helicopters stationed in the Gulf Coast area ahead of the storm.

? A military stretched by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which left commanders near New Orleans reluctant to commit some active-duty units at nearby Fort Polk, La., because they were in the midst of preparing for an Afghan deployment this winter.

? A total breakdown of communications systems, an echo of the problems that faced New York officials dealing with the 2001 terrorist attacks and a system the government has been trying to fix for four years.

? Poor coordination among federal, state and local officials in the days immediately before and after the hurricane.

? Failure at all levels of government to take seriously many studies and reports over many years warning of the potential disaster.

Indeed, despite many warnings of the dangers, Mr. Chertoff and other administration officials have explained their poor initial response by saying government planners didn’t expect both a serious hurricane and a breach in levees. “This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise,” Mr. Chertoff told reporters on Saturday.

Planners, he said, “were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt.”

Plenty of missteps at the local level contributed to last week’s disaster too, from a failure to take basic steps to protect the telecom infrastructure to inadequate food and water at the Superdome. New Orleans may be able to stage events such as Mardi Gras and Jazzfest and provide parking, crowd control and adequate toilets for millions of visitors, but its hurricane plan was more rudimentary. “Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them – that was the plan, man,” Mayor Ray Nagin said in an interview yesterday.

But so far, the federal government is bearing the brunt of criticism, given its vast resources and unique role in responding to major disasters. Critics say the response shows that the nation’s disaster-response system, rebuilt in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, is woefully inadequate. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken on Friday, the public said by a 67% to 31% margin that the federal government wasn’t adequately prepared for Katrina.

“What the events of the last week have shown is that over the last few years since 9/11 we have slowly disassembled our national emergency response system and put in its place something far inferior,” says Bill Waugh, an academic expert on emergency management at Georgia State University. “We reinvented the wheel when we didn’t need to and now have something that doesn’t roll very well at all.”

Many of last week’s problems are rooted in January 2003, when the Bush administration, urged on by some members of Congress, created the Homeland Security Department. It amalgamated 22 agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Secret Service, creating the largest government bureaucracy since the Pentagon was formed in 1947.

From the start, emergency experts and even the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned that a special effort was needed to be sure FEMA’s traditional mission of providing disaster relief wasn’t lost in the shuffle.

But it was. FEMA’s clout had long depended on its ability to help states plan for natural disasters by providing emergency preparedness grants and other resources. Under Homeland Security, grant-making decisions were transferred to a new, department-wide office in an attempt to consolidate funding. As a result, FEMA lost control of more than $800 million in preparedness grants since 2003, congressional figures show.

Focus on Terrorism

State emergency managers and congressional investigators say the overwhelming focus for grants is now on fighting terrorism. More money goes to local police and fire departments for that mission than responding to and recover from disasters.

Officials from Shelby County, Ala., for instance, last year said they could get federal money for chemical suits. But they were unable to get money for an emergency operations center that could link computers, phones and televisions to respond to tornadoes. Between 1957 and 2003, the county had 20 tornadoes that it said killed 11 people and caused more than $32 million in damages.

Meanwhile, morale at FEMA has dropped since it was subsumed by Homeland Security. Several key jobs are unfilled and its executives are overtaxed. Its acting chief operating officer in Washington, for instance, is also the director of FEMA’s Atlanta region; his seat there is being held by another acting director. That area includes much of the hurricane-prone Southeast.

In July, Mr. Chertoff unveiled a departmental restructuring that would cement FEMA’s reduced role. Among other moves, the plan restricted FEMA’s purview to disaster response, stripping away longstanding functions such as helping communities build houses outside flood zones.

The plan, he told Congress, was “to take out of FEMA a couple of elements that were really not related to its core missions, that were generally focused on the issue of preparedness in a way that I think was frankly more of a distraction to FEMA than an enhancement to FEMA.”

‘Extremely Negative Impact’

On July 27, Alaska’s Mr. Liebersbach, in his role as the head of the National Emergency Management Association, an association of state emergency management directors, warned in a letter to Congress that Mr. Chertoff’s plan was nothing short of disastrous. It would have “an extremely negative impact on the people of this nation,” he wrote.

“The proposed reorganization increases the separation between preparedness, response and recovery functions,” the letter said. “Any unnecessary separation of these functions will result in disjointed response and adversely impact the effectiveness of departmental operations.” It was the letter that prompted the meetings with Homeland Security officials in late August.

Last week’s response certainly revealed cracks in the current system. Though President Bush declared a state of emergency before Katrina made landfall on Monday, officials appear to have underestimated the severity of the damage caused by the storm. By Tuesday it became clear that the response was not meeting needs and that FEMA and Louisiana emergency teams were overwhelmed. Then the flood waters hit in New Orleans. It still took several more hours for Mr. Chertoff to declare the disaster an “incident of national significance.”

Even then, some requirements hampered speed. Because of worries that terrorists could take advantage of such chaos, FEMA now must abide by post-9/11 security procedures, such as putting air marshals on flights. That meant stranded residents couldn’t be evacuated from the New Orleans airport until FEMA had rounded up dozens of Transportation Security Administration screeners and more than 50 federal air marshals. Inadequate power prevented officials from firing up X-ray machines and metal detectors until the government decided evacuees could be searched manually.

Slow Off the Mark

In the hours before and after Katrina struck, there weren’t firm procedures in place for directing people and materials. Dan Wessel, owner of Cool Express Inc., a Blue River, Wis., transportation company that contracts with FEMA to move supplies, said he didn’t get a green light to send trucks to a staging area in Dallas until about 4 p.m. Monday, hours after Katrina made landfall. That was too late to meet a deadline of getting trucks to Dallas by noon Tuesday, he said.

Once the trucks arrived, drivers often found no National Guard troops, FEMA workers or other personnel on hand to help unload the water and ice, Mr. Wessel said. “I almost told the guys to leave, but people are wanting the water,” he said. “The drivers distributed it.”

Inside New Orleans, said Dr. Joseph Guarisco, chief of the emergency department of Ochsner Clinic Foundation, a 580-bed hospital in New Orleans above the water line, said there was confusion about where to direct evacuees seeking shelter.

‘There’s No One There’

For a couple of days, Dr. Guarisco said, he directed a stream of patients to what he understood was a FEMA mass-casualty tent at the intersection of Interstate 10 and Causeway Boulevard. "A number came back and said, ‘there’s no one there.’ " Dr. Guarisco said.

Some critics have blamed the war in Iraq, and the deployment of thousands of troops, including National Guard members, to that effort. President Bush has vehemently denied that charge. The administration has said problems on the ground were due to an unexpectedly severe storm and unanticipated flooding.

Four weeks before the hurricane, Lt. Colonel Pete Schneider, of the Louisiana National Guard, told WGNO, a local ABC affiliate, that when guard members left for Iraq last October, they took a lot of needed equipment with them, including dozens of high-water vehicles, Humvees, refueling tankers and generators that would be needed in the event a major natural disaster hit the state.

“You’ve got combatant commanders over there who need it, they say they need it, they don’t want to lose what they have and we certainly understand that,” he said. “It’s a matter of us educating that combatant commander [that] we need it back here as well.”

Col. Schneider also said the state had enough equipment to get by, and that if Louisiana were to get hit by a major hurricane, the neighboring states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida had all agreed to help. In the end, those states were hit by Katrina as well.

The U.S. Army has a large facility, Fort Polk, in Leesville, La., about 270 miles northwest of New Orleans. Officials at Fort Polk, which has nearly 8,000 active-duty soldiers, said their contribution so far has consisted of a few dozen soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division manning purification equipment and driving half-ton trucks filled with supplies and equipment. The first contingent of soldiers didn’t receive orders until Saturday afternoon.

A spokeswoman at Fort Polk said she did not know why the base received its deployment orders so late in the game. “You’d have to ask the Pentagon,” she said. A senior Army official said the service was reluctant to commit the 4th brigade of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Polk, because the unit, which numbers several thousand soldiers, is in the midst of preparing for an Afghanistan deployment in January.

Instead, the Pentagon chose to send upwards of 7,500 soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas and the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., along with Marines from California and North Carolina. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division are able to deploy anywhere in the world in 18 hours. It took several days for them to arrive on the ground in Louisiana.

Helicopters Proved Crucial

There, no piece of equipment was more necessary than helicopters. But in the first 48 hours after the levees were breached, the shortage of helicopters became acute. FEMA wanted choppers to save stranded residents, while the Army Corps of Engineers needed the aircraft, known as “rotary wing” in military jargon, to repair the breaches. The Coast Guard, the primary agency responding to the disaster in New Orleans, had a total of 20 aircraft in the area, mostly helicopters, which focused solely on rescue operations.

“We have very limited aviation assets and rotary wing is what we need to put materials into those breaches, and that’s the very asset we need to do search and rescue and save victims, so our efforts became something of a second priority and our initial plan was delayed a bit because of that,” says Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers.

A FEMA spokesman said the Coast Guard and National Guard had adequate numbers of helicopters on hand, but that rescue and supply operations were hampered by other factors, including limited airspace around New Orleans, which is geographically small. “You put in 30 helicopters in that area and you create a dangerous situation,” said the spokesman, Marty Bahamonde.

On the supply front, helicopters flew food to the Superdome, he said, but the helipad there could only accommodate small aircraft, which couldn’t hold many supplies.

Communications systems also broke down, as they did at the World Trade Center in 2001, preventing emergency officials from communicating with each other and the military. That led to the odd juxtaposition of top federal officials praising the rescue effort and denying problems at New Orleans’ overcrowded convention center while TV cameras showed people there crying for help.

Radio Systems Lacking

Flooding and power shortages appear to be behind most of the serious communications problems, but incompatible radio systems didn’t help.

Emergency responders in New Orleans and three nearby parishes all use different radio systems. New Orleans and nearby Jefferson Parish both use radios that operate on the 800 Mhz band, according to a Louisiana State Police interoperability report, but they were manufactured by different vendors. That means officials there had up to five channels on which to talk to one another.

“Communication is always difficult in emergency situations because of increased traffic,” says William Vincent of the Lafayette Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, about 135 miles from New Orleans. Emergency 911 dispatchers in Lafayette fielded calls from New Orleans residents who still had working cellphones but couldn’t reach local police.

New Orleans officials had equipment at the fire department’s communication center that could link otherwise incompatible local and federal systems. It was reportedly knocked out by flooding.

Another problem: Even after 9/11, local officials and federal emergency responders don’t typically use the same radio frequencies, which can make communication difficult until agreements are reached on sharing channels.

As handheld radios began losing power in New Orleans, police officers and other emergency responders had no way of recharging them. Unlike radios used by firefighters combating wild fires, which can be powered by disposable batteries found in any grocery store, a typical handheld police emergency radio uses rechargeable batteries similar to those powering cell phones, according to Ron Haraseth, director of automated frequency coordination at the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officers.

Bad Information

FEMA itself seemed to frequently have bad information. At a Tuesday press conference Bill Lokey, federal coordinating officer for FEMA and the agency representative on site, downplayed the severity of the flooding caused by the breaches in New Orleans, saying the water wasn’t rising in most areas. “I don’t want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl,” he said. “That’s just not happening.”

Within hours, much of the city was under water, and Mr. Lokey was calling Katrina “the most significant natural disaster to hit the United States.”

The possible problems had long been trumpeted. In June 2004, FEMA spent more than half a million dollars to commission a “catastrophic hurricane disaster plan” from IEM Inc., a Baton Rouge-based emergency-management and homeland-security consulting firm. A report analyzing results of a mock hurricane hitting New Orleans, dubbed “Hurricane Pam,” was envisioned and a response and recovery plan was to be drawn up.

During a five-day mock exercise in July 2004, emergency-management responders huddled in Baton Rouge to plan a response to “Hurricane Pam,” a Category 3 storm which featured 120 miles per hour winds and a storm surge that topped New Orleans’s levees. For reasons that aren’t clear, the mock exercise never anticipated the levees giving way, despite such warnings. Even so, the mock hurricane destroyed 500,000 buildings in New Orleans and displaced one million residents.

The group developed a plan to get stranded residents out of the way and construction of a “command structure” with enough space for upwards of 800 rescue workers. A report, dated Jan. 5 of this year, detailed recommendations from the exercise and was provided to FEMA, an IEM spokeswoman said. FEMA has not released the report.

–Greg Jaffe, Yochi J. Dreazen, Dionne Searcey and Marilyn Chase contributed to this article.

Write to Robert Block at bobby.block@wsj.com, Amy Schatz at Amy.Schatz@wsj.com and Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com

23

http://images.t-nation.com/forum_images/./1/.1126019620066.truman.jpg

Leadership anywhere?

24

[quote]deanosumo wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
I think Bush has visited twice, plus his flyover.

How many times did Clinton visit St Louis when the Mississippi flooded in the mid 1990s? When did he time his visits? Who cares. Clintons response was similar to Bushs.

!

You’re talking about a two disasters of completely different magnitudes Zap. This is possibly the largest natural disaster in America’s history. Where is the strong and decisive leadership needed from Bush?

[/quote]

No matter what bush does or does not do, it doesn’t effect the actual response to something like this. Many governmental agencies fucked up big time, all seeming to think someone else was going to pick up the ball that they dropped. Bush is a fucking headfigure, basically the only thing he can do is cheer or boo the actions of his government underneath him. When something like this happens, the response is supposed to be automatic, it’s not like people were waiting on bush’s orders to do something to help these people. And if they were, thats their fault for being retarded.

Also, you can say bush is evil for diverting funds from reinforcing the levi’s to the war in iraq and the WOT but guess who else diverted money away from the levis, the local governments, and did they use the money to save soldiers lives overseas in a war? Nope, They built a new town hall and funded some casinos or some complete bullshit.

So you guys don’t like the fact that bush didn’t go in a wade through the sewage and personally pull people off rooftops? Did we forget that there were people with guns shooting people down there? Keeping the president safe in that environment would be next to impossible for the secret service to accomplish. It’s assnine to even question why he wasn’t there. He’s the fucking president. Some of you politicize so much stuff it actually makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t love bush, actually I think his speeches about this dissaster are downright idiotic. No emotion and a third grader could have come up with more inspirational stuff, but I really don’t think he has anything to do with the recovery mission.

V

25

[quote]rubberbubba wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Of course it is Bush’s fault. He diverted the hurricane to stop all those refineries, and boost oil prices even further.

Now seriously, why do we skip over mayors, governors, and all the people who are actually in charge of this stuff, and go straight for the president?

Why use a tragedy to make political attacks?

You know, I seem to recall during my Army days, that if we needed the weather to change - specifically, to make it MORE miserable - we always asked our Sergeant Major to do it. Seems he always managed to get it done, too. Do you s’pose it might have been one of those?

RB
[/quote]

My SMaj would have called this whole situation a clusterfuck and kicked someone’s ass. But I remember that he too had power over the weather. Where is a Sgt Major when you need one?

I really don’t see how you can put this one on Bush. Seems more like God’s fault. Or the hurricane’s. New Orleans’ municipal govt and PD is one of the most corrupt in the nation and Louisiana is one of our most backward and impoverished states. Not to mention something like this was inevitable given the city is built below sea level. Maybe pure human stupidity is to blame.

WMD

26

JTF,

I don’t know how much training you’ve had in National Incedent Management System (NIMS), but responsibility for the coordination of disaster relief and rescue efforts start at the LOCAL level. The feds should be used in support of the incident commander on scene and local to the incident.

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/index.jsp

Planning & Prevention

National Response Plan: Local/Federal Response Strategies & Coordination Structures

Emphasis on Local Response

All incidents are handled at the lowest possible organizational and jurisdictional level. Police, fire, public health and medical, emergency management, and other personnel are responsible for incident management at the local level. For those events that rise to the level of an Incident of National Significance, the Department of Homeland Security provides operational and/or resource coordination for Federal support to on-scene incident command structures.

Please place special emphasis on the part that states that the federal government SUPPORTS on scene incident command structures.

27

Ok, so now we just got fucked up by a national dissaster. When the smoke clears from this do you guys think we might actually do something about the impending worst natural dissaster in the history of the world, save the asteroid that hit and killed all the dinosaurs. I’m talking about the tsunami that is going to hit and obliterate the entire east coast of both North and south America. When half of a Volcanic mountain in the Canary Islands (over by africa) falls into the ocean it will send a wall of water that some estimate to be 100 ft high or higher and miles in length. In contrast the last tsunami in the indian ocean was 20ft high or so. The 100FT tsunami will also be moving at close to 100 miles per hour VS. A mere 30-40 miles per hour of the last tsunami.

Also this wall of water is going to hit Miami, Daytona, Jacksonville, Myrtle Beach, New York, The florida keys will be gone, so will most of the carribean. When the mountain erupts and falls into the ocean, it will take 8 hours for the wave to reach the coast of the US. Millions of people will die, there is really no way around it. The kicker is it could happen tommorow or in 100,000 years. There were two other volcaninc peaks on the same land mass and based on thier past eruptions scientists have estimated that we are within the window of the next eruption.

So, how do we plan for this. What possible steps could be taken to reduce the damage and loss of life? Is it even worth making a plan for? Will it turn the US into a third world country overnight to have the entire east coast vanish? Again, this will happen, it’s just a question of when.

V

28

[quote]WMD wrote:
…something like this was inevitable given the city is built below sea level. Maybe pure human stupidity is to blame.
[/quote]

I shudder to think of the fallout that this will cause, but - I agree 100% with you on this, WMD.

No one seems willing to discuss the fact that the city’s elevation is anywhere from -8 feet to -22 feet. Or the fact that some of the levies in place are attempting to restrain the the mouth of the largest river in North America. Or the fact that the rest of the levies are attempting to hem in the second largest saltwater lake in the the country.

I don’t think that the President can be blamed for the level of human ignorance displayed in NOLA.

29

Veg, all I know is when it happens it will be Bush’s fault.

30

Regardless of who is at fault, the response sucked.

I mean, sure, afterwards the roads were nearly impassible, but it sure wouldn’t have been impossible to realize that they would be.

When everyone was evacuating, the roads into affected regions should have had trucks bring in supplies while they could.

The dome, the convention center, other likely high ground hotspots should have had pre-dropped supplies IN CASE they become needed.

Of course, you can say this is 20/20 hindsight, but there were reports about the situation… predictions. There weren’t any surprises here. Watching CNN before the storm hit, the flooding and it’s expected effect were well known, the fact that previous studies had been done was well known.

Supplies and the means to distribute them should have been secured and preprared at the same time the emergency declaration occured.

Who may be at fault isn’t important yet, there is still way too much work to be done.

However, I do predict the heads will roll at FEMA.

I don’t see it rising to the president, I don’t see homeland security taking any lumps.

I can imagine FEMA will be the scapegoat, with local politicians point back to the federal government when they get blamed for anything.

Hopefully the blame game will hold off as long as there are survivors that need rescuing.

31

Bush, Congress to Investigate Response

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON -
President Bush and Congress pledged separate investigations into the widely panned federal response to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday as Senate Democrats said the government’s share of relief and recovery may top $150 billion.

“Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people,” Bush said after meeting at the White House with his Cabinet on storm recovery efforts.

“Governments at all levels failed,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said at the Capitol. She announced that the
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee would hold hearings, adding, “It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days.”

Stung by criticism, Bush called congressional leaders to the White House for a meeting, their first since the hurricane spread death and destruction on a fearsome scope along the Gulf Coast and left much of New Orleans under several feet of floodwaters.

Congress formally returned from a five-week summer break during the day, signaling that the hurricane would take top billing on the agenda in the coming weeks.

The response “needs to be first and foremost,” said Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., although he, like Bush, also stressed the GOP goal of confirming John Roberts as the next chief justice by the time the Supreme Court convenes on Oct. 3.

Congress approved $10.5 billion as an initial downpayment for hurricane relief last week, and Senate Democrats were consulting among themselves in advance of the White House meeting.

One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was possible Democrats would request as much as $50 billion as a next installment.

“I believe that the recovery and relief operations will cost up to and could exceed $150 billion. FEMA alone will likely require $100 billion in additional funding,” Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a statement issued after he talked with relief officials and Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), D-La. An aide to Reid, Rebecca Kirszner, added, “Our priorities right now are targeted assistance for health care, housing and education.”

Apart from the investigation announced by Collins and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the Senate Energy Committee arranged hearings on gasoline prices. The hurricane disrupted oil production and distribution in the Gulf of Mexico, and gasoline prices that had already been rising spiked sharply last week in some areas of the country.

For his part, Bush told reporters he was sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help determine whether the government is doing all that it can.

The president has traveled to the storm-affected region twice since late last week.

“What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong,” Bush said. “We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack or another major storm.”

But Bush said now is not the time to point fingers and he did not respond to calls for a commission to investigate the response.

“One of the things people want us to do here is play the blame game,” he said. “We got to solve problems. There will be ample time to figure out what went right and what went wrong.”

Bush was devoting most of his day to the recovery effort. After the Cabinet meeting, he was gathering with the congressional leaders, representatives of charitable organizations and with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to talk about assistance for displaced students and closed schools.

McClellan said the president also was increasing what he described as a sizable personal contribution to the Red Cross and also was sending money to the Salvation Army.

Meanwhile, Bush objected to references to displaced Americans as “refugees.”

“The people we’re talking about are not refugees,” he said. “They are Americans and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens.” The president raised the subject during a meeting with service organizations that are helping with the relief effort.

In another development, the commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division said that its paratroopers plan to use small boats, including inflatable Zodiac craft, to launch a new search-and-rescue effort in flooded areas of central New Orleans.

In a telephone interview from his operations center at New Orleans International Airport, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said his soldiers’ top priority is finding, recovering and evacuating people who want to get out of the flooded city.

There has been heavy criticism of the government’s response to the hurricane, and city and state officials. Bush did not respond directly when asked if anyone on his disaster response team should be replaced.

The president said that he and his Cabinet members were focused on planning in several areas of immediate need ? restoring basic services to affected areas, draining the water from New Orleans, removing debris, assessing public health and safety threats and housing for those displaced by the storm. He said it was important to get people’s Social Security checks delivered to them.

Earlier, McClellan rejected suggestions that the poor, and particularly blacks, had been abandoned when New Orleans was evacuated.

“I think most Americans dismiss that and know that there’s just no basis for making such suggestions,” McClellan said.

32

[quote]WMD wrote:
rubberbubba wrote:
The Mage wrote:
Of course it is Bush’s fault. He diverted the hurricane to stop all those refineries, and boost oil prices even further.

Now seriously, why do we skip over mayors, governors, and all the people who are actually in charge of this stuff, and go straight for the president?

Why use a tragedy to make political attacks?

You know, I seem to recall during my Army days, that if we needed the weather to change - specifically, to make it MORE miserable - we always asked our Sergeant Major to do it. Seems he always managed to get it done, too. Do you s’pose it might have been one of those?

RB

My SMaj would have called this whole situation a clusterfuck and kicked someone’s ass. But I remember that he too had power over the weather. Where is a Sgt Major when you need one?

I really don’t see how you can put this one on Bush. Seems more like God’s fault. Or the hurricane’s. New Orleans’ municipal govt and PD is one of the most corrupt in the nation and Louisiana is one of our most backward and impoverished states. Not to mention something like this was inevitable given the city is built below sea level. Maybe pure human stupidity is to blame.

WMD[/quote]

They made that Sgt. major a three star.

He is running the show now.

33

Don’t blame lazy, apathetic people living their entire lives on welfare, waiting around for someone to say “here ya go.”
Don’t blame the countless criminals preying on their own people as well as the people attempting to rescue them.
Disregard the fact that natural disasters happen all over the world and that particular government’s response does NOT require armored personell carriers to protect bus drivers and doctors from the refugees.
Yup, it’s that SOB Bush. He should be crucified because of a bad storm.

Anyone here who has blasted Bush because of an unexpectedly messy disaster… you have lost my respect. And you’re off my Christmas List!:slight_smile:

-daMOJO-

34

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
This is a fascinating read – it’s the weblog account of a blogger who was following the progress of Katrina and wondering why New Orleans wasn’t being evacuated. This makes it look even more like the fault of the local government:

http://brendanloy.com/page2.html#112511310874584823

scroll up and down to read the progression.
[/quote]
The magnitude of the evacuation necessary to toally remove all persons from the predicted path would have been impossible to acheive. There was a wide angle of trajectory still 2 days before the storm was about to come ashore.

No, I don’t think this is Bush’s fault that nothing was done. But I do question the local and state gov’t. Did they have the resources necessary or were thay just incompetant? In retrospect I still feel the Fed didn’t react quickly enough. We can blame LA and NO for the events up until katrina but after the fact the Gov’t should have reacted and not waited for Bush to survey the damage. This is the real tragedy–the gov’t has failed it’s citizens.

35

[quote]bigflamer wrote:
JTF,

I don’t know how much training you’ve had in National Incedent Management System (NIMS), but responsibility for the coordination of disaster relief and rescue efforts start at the LOCAL level. The feds should be used in support of the incident commander on scene and local to the incident.

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/index.jsp

Planning & Prevention

National Response Plan: Local/Federal Response Strategies & Coordination Structures

Emphasis on Local Response

All incidents are handled at the lowest possible organizational and jurisdictional level. Police, fire, public health and medical, emergency management, and other personnel are responsible for incident management at the local level. For those events that rise to the level of an Incident of National Significance, the Department of Homeland Security provides operational and/or resource coordination for Federal support to on-scene incident command structures.

Please place special emphasis on the part that states that the federal government SUPPORTS on scene incident command structures.
[/quote]

Continuing…

Proactive Federal Response to Catastrophic Events

The National Response Plan provides mechanisms for expedited and proactive Federal support to ensure critical life-saving assistance and incident containment capabilities are in place to respond quickly and efficiently to catastrophic incidents. These are high-impact, low-probability incidents, including natural disasters and terrorist attacks that result in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions.

Multi-Agency Coordination Structures

The National Response Plan establishes multi-agency coordinating structures at the field, regional and headquarters levels. These structures:

Enable the execution of the responsibilities of the President through the appropriate Federal department and agencies;

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0569.xml

proactive - controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after it happens

Official says feds warned of storm’s potential
BATON ROUGE, La. - Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said yesterday that officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security - including FEMA Director Mike Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff - listened in on electronic briefings given by his staff before Hurricane Katrina slammed Louisiana and Mississippi and were advised of the storm’s potential deadly effects.

“We were briefing them way before landfall,” Mayfield said. “It’s not like this was a surprise. … I keep looking back to see if there was anything else we could have done, and I just don’t know what it would be,” he said.

Chertoff said Saturday that government officials had not expected the damaging combination of a powerful hurricane and levee breaches that flooded New Orleans.

Brown, Mayfield said, is a dedicated public servant. “The question is why he couldn’t shake loose the resources that were needed,” he said.

Brown and Chertoff could not be reached for comment yesterday.

In the days before Katrina hit, Mayfield said, his staff also briefed FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, at FEMA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., its Region 6 office in Dallas and the Region 4 office in Atlanta about the storm’s potential.

He said all of those briefings were logged in the Hurricane Center’s records.

Mayfield said his staff also participated in the five-day “Hurricane Pam” exercise sponsored by FEMA and the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in July 2004 that assumed a similar storm would hit the city.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002472774_mayfield05.html

36

An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

“If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.”

Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves
Engineer Corps

(I have no fear of publicly using my name for this. Pass it on. These are my words, and I stand behind them with my name, rank, and convictions. And if it ends up on CNN, with my name, and Bush reads it, even better.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10154.htm

37

[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

“If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.”

Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves
Engineer Corps

(I have no fear of publicly using my name for this. Pass it on. These are my words, and I stand behind them with my name, rank, and convictions. And if it ends up on CNN, with my name, and Bush reads it, even better.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10154.htm

[/quote]My turn to be a bitch… and hell hath no fury, muthafucka!

This stuff is garbage of the highest caliber. It is completely biased, completely irrational, and the author has a clear and concise anti-Bush agenda… all cloaked in the sweet sheep skin of, “this is scientific fact, not just my opinion” (my summation of the article).
The writer shoots himself in the foot right off the bat when he exclaims that “…Bush will go down as the President who destroyed America.”

Get the f*ck outta Dodge! Open your panzy-ass eyes and look around you. Is the country really falling apart? Apparently not, considering that your punkass is sitting in a nice cushy home, typing on your little computer with your DSL connection. As you stuff your butterface with Ben&Jerry’s and enjoy freedoms no other country on the planet will EVER have, you are also free to spin hate-infused rhetoric about our leaders who, Jimmeny-jumpin Jerubeem, are far from perfect.
These occasional “I was there” or “I’m a soldier” firsthand accounts/opinions are NOT being made by average or unbiased people. They’re being made by people who’s ignorance is beyond measure. (What? There are ignorant soldiers out there?)
Trying to demonize the Pres. Hmmm. Let’s see. If Bush really destroys America, I owe everyone a fucking Coke.
Honestly, grow a brain!

-daMOJO-

38

[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

“If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.”

Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves
Engineer Corps

[/quote]

Oh, and a 2ndLT in the f*cking Army Reserve. Lemme tell you something missy… I pick 2ndLTs out of my shit every day.
All ya are is a mindless, wet-behind-the-ears, post cadet who should’ve joined Green Peace instead of the military.
That is all.

-daMOJO-

39

[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

“If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.”

Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves
Engineer Corps

(I have no fear of publicly using my name for this. Pass it on. These are my words, and I stand behind them with my name, rank, and convictions. And if it ends up on CNN, with my name, and Bush reads it, even better.)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10154.htm[/quote]

I forget lowly reserve officers that don’t even work for a living know how to run a country. Put her ass in the office and see where this country goes. Everyone should blame everything on Bush. We all know he is the one that makes things happen and has the final say on all matters (BULLSHIT). How about the Senate, the House, The supreme court and every other governing body in this country. If Bush’s ideas were so crappy, some government body (congress) would stomp those ideas to the ground. People forget that it takes a lot more than Bush to put all of this into action.

40

Probably a good read for everybody contributing to this thread.

http://www.fema.gov/emanagers/2005/nat082605.shtm

Situation Update: Friday, August 26, 2005

National Situation Update: Friday, August 26, 2005
Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED).

State and Federal Preparation for Hurricane Katrina
FEMA Headquarters: The FEMA National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) Red Team was activated at a modified Level II on Thursday, August 25 at 0700 EDT with ESFs 1 (with an Air Ops Element), 3, 4, 5, 7, 15, and a Military Liaison.

FEMA Headquarters is conducting daily video-teleconferences with FEMA Region IV, the National Hurricane Center, Florida, and other potentially affected States.

The Logistics Readiness Center (LRC) has adequate initial resources on hand in Florida to meet emergency commodity requests. State resources are staged at the Palm Beach Fairgrounds. Florida plans to deploy a combination of PODS and comfort stations for victim relief. Homestead, Palm Beach and Lakeland Florida are FEMA emergency commodity staging areas capable of initially delivering 100 truck loads of water, 75 truck loads of ice and 24 reefers within a 24 hour window. A 50-pack of generators is in route. The LRC has also executed contracts for additional water, ice, reefers and carriers.

FEMA Region IV: At 1200 EDT on August 25, operations transitioned from the FEMA Region IV Regional Response Coordination Center (RRCC) activated at Level III in Thomasville, GA, to the RRCC in Atlanta activated at Level II. Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) activated at the RRCC are: ESF 1, 3, 4, 7, 14, 15 and Department of Defense (DOD).

Region IV is anticipating back up support from Region X for Individual Assistance (IA) and Logistics for a full Emergency Response Team (ERT) at a Joint Field Office (JFO) in the event of a declaration. In the event of the need for a second ERT-A team, Region IX will field the team.

Alabama: Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is at Level 4 (Normal) Operations.

Florida: Florida’s (EOC) is at Level 1 (full activation). The Governor issued a State of Emergency on August 24, 2005.

Mississippi: EOC is at Level 1 (Normal) Operation.

Georgia: EOC currently operating at Level I (Monitoring).

South Carolina: EOC currently operating at Level 5 (Normal). (FEMA Region IV)

Home ? Emergency Managers ? National Situation Update: Saturday, August 27, 2005

National Situation Update: Saturday, August 27, 2005
Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED).

Katrina Becomes a Category Three Hurricane, Aims Towards Northern Gulf Coast
At 5 a.m. EDT, the eye of Hurricane Katrina was located by radar near latitude 24.4 north and longitude 84.4 west, about 435 miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River and about 165 miles west of Key West, Florida.

Katrina is moving toward the west-northwest near 7mph and a gradual turn to the west and west-northwest is expected during the next 24 hours.

Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 115 mph with higher gusts. Hurricane force winds extend outward up to 40 miles from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 150 miles. Estimated minimum central pressure is 963 mb or 28.44 inches.

Katrina is now a Category Three hurricane and some strengthening is forecast during the next 24 hours. Reconnaissance aircraft data indicates that the Katrina has also become a larger hurricane.

Storm surge flooding of 2 to 4 feet above normal levels can be expected along the southeast coast of Florida in areas of onshore flow east of Cape Sable and in Florida Bay. Storm surge will gradually subside today.

Rainfall from Katrina is expected to slowly diminish across the lower Florida Keys though an additional 1 to 2 inches of rain is possible in some of the heavier rain bands. Isolated tornadoes are also possible this morning over the Florida Keys. (National Hurricane Center, media sources)

State of Emergency Declared in Mississippi, Louisiana DueIn anticipation of a possible landfall, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco declared States of Emergency Friday. In Louisiana, New Orleans is of particular concern because much of that city lies below sea level.
According to Gov. Blanco, Lake Pontchartrain is a very large lake that sits next to the city of New Orleans and if the hurricane winds blow from a certain direction, there are dire predictions of what may happen in the city.

Robert Latham, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said evacuations of tourists along the coast could begin late Saturday afternoon, followed by mandatory evacuations of coastal residents on Sunday. The National Guard had been activated to help with storm preparations, he said.

The last time Mississippi or Louisiana saw landfall from a storm classified as Category 4 or stronger was in August 1969, when Hurricane Camille roared ashore with winds in excess of 155 mph, killing 143 people.

In the Gulf of Mexico, six oil companies operating offshore facilities evacuated at least 150 people as a precaution. However, most of those employees were described as “non-essential” to production, and rigs and platforms continued to operate.

At least 12 platforms and nine oil rigs in the Gulf have been evacuated – a small portion of the 953 manned rigs and platforms operating there, according to the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service.

Friday afternoon, the Air Force began evacuating aircraft from at least two bases in the Florida Panhandle to minimize any possible damage. (Various media sources)

State and Federal Preparedness for Hurricane Katrina
FEMA Headquarters:

The FEMA National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) remains at modified Level II operations with Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) 1 (with an Air Operations Element), 3, 4, 5, 7, 15, and a Military Liaison.

On Saturday, the NRCC will transition to a 24-hour Level I on Saturday, August 27 at 07:00 a.m. EDT. ESFs 2, 6, 8, 9, 10-15 and the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) are being activated.

FEMA Headquarters is conducting daily video-teleconferences with FEMA Region IV, the National Hurricane Center, Florida, and other potentially affected States.

FEMA Region IV:

The Regional Response Coordination Center (RRCC) remains at Level II operations. In addition to ESFs 1, 3, 4, 7, 14, 15 and the Department of Defense (DOD), ESF 6 has been activated. ESFs 2, 8, 9, 11, 12 and Rapid Needs Assessment are being activated.

RRCC Level I will be established on Saturday, August 27 at 12 p.m. EDT. Beginning Sunday, August 28 the RRCC will go to 24-hour operations.

An Emergency Response Team-Advance Element (ERT-A) from Region IX has been activated and will arrive to pre-stage in the RRCC on Saturday.

A request for a disaster declaration has been received from the Governor of Florida and acknowledged. Preliminary disaster assessments (PDAs) are being scheduled.

Alabama: Emergency Operations Center (EOC) will move to Level 1 (full activation) on Saturday. A FEMA Liaison and a full ERT-A has been requested and is scheduled to arrive on Saturday.

Florida: Florida?s EOC is at Level 1 (full activation). An ERT-A from the Long Term Recovery Center in Orlando has been sent to the EOC in Tallahassee.

Mississippi: EOC is at Level 1 (normal) Operation.

Georgia: EOC continues operating at Level I (monitoring).

South Carolina: EOC currently operating at Level 5 (normal). (FEMA Region VII)