A Simple Plan
Julian Sanchez | September 7, 2005, 1:09pm
Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them -- that was the plan, man.
—New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
Oy. Was anyone, at any level of this operation, not inept? I still think what I said a few days ago is right: We ought to expect that when a major catastrophe renders a locality incapable of providing the basic civil order that is supposed to be government's primary task, it may be necessary for the feds to temporarily step into the vacuum. But I hope there's some way to do that without increasing (quite so much) the likelihood of a vacuum in the first place.
Mark | September 7, 2005, 5:02pm | #
Okay, alternate history time....
When you're done fantasizing, get back to the real world. This was a fuckup at every level, and despite the administration's interest in SwiftBoating responsibility to the locals it's the feds who are ultimately responsible.
These facts are irrefutable:
1) On Saturday Aug. 26, two days before the storm made landfall, the governor of Louisiana asked the federal government to declare a state of emergency in Louisiana.
2) On Sunday the 27th, President Bush signed that declaration, in which Gov. Blanco
specifically stated that local and state officials were not equipped to handle the situation without federal assistance:
"Pursuant to 44 CFR § 206.35, I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster."
3) On Sunday, Aug. 27, President Bush signed the disaster declaration, directing FEMA "to coordinate all disaster relief efforts" and "provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe."
Text above is taken directly from the Press Release issued by the White House on Sunday.
4) Days later, as people who weren't killed by the storm were dying from exposure and lack of critical medical and food supplies, FEMA was still turning away would-be rescuers with provisions and a desire to help.
Yes, the locals were poorly prepared and poorly equipped to handle the disaster. Yes, there's plenty of blame to go around.
But the fact is, they asked for help on SATURDAY, placed themselves under federal control on SUNDAY and then waited helplessly for FIVE DAYS while FEMA sat around with its thumb up its ass, and the President did a low flyover in Air Force One on his way home from vacation, then went over to Trent Lott's to reassure the senator that his mansion would be rebuilt.
I have no political dog in this hunt. I loathe Nancy Pelosi and the jackasses on the left as much as I do Rick Santorum and the jackasses on the right.
So I'm not making a political statement when I say Bush and his team fucked up. Or that he'd be a much better leader -- and seem much more human -- if he owned up to the mistakes and set about correcting them rather than unleashing the dogs to blame the locals...
Mike from Mississippi | September 7, 2005, 5:53pm | #
I think Bush is responsible for the federal government's deplorable response to the crisis. I agree with what Kayne West said 5 days ago on NBC that Bush does not care about black people, and I think that influenced the miserable failure that is Bush's response to this disaster.
Bush has never agreed to meet with the NAACP, and is the only President since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s that has been so insensitive to this organization for black people. He has nominated some extremely ideological conservative judges to federal district courts who have been hostile to civil rights and civil liberties such as:
a.) Terrence Boyle, 4th circuit court judge who ruled for whites and against blacks in two voting rights cases-reversed both times.
b.) Janice Rogers Brown, DC circuit court judge who voted to protect racist speech in the work place.
c.) D. Michael Fisher, 3rd circuit
court judge who voted to protect racist speech in the work place.
d.) William Pryor, 11th circuit court judge who voted to promote states? rights over the rights of blacks who have been discriminated against.
Bush has also repeatedly passed tax cuts that mostly help his rich 1% upper class friends while at the same time he has cut social services to help the very poor. Bush?s much-touted No Child Left Behind Act is inadequately funded and does not address the soaring number of poor, under funded, racially segregated public schools nationally. The Bush administration also backed white students in their effort to torpedo the University of Michigan?s affirmative action program. Bush backed so called ?race neutral alternatives? that cripple the fight for workplace diversity.
In short, Kanye West is 100% right when he says that Bush doesn?t care about black people. Maybe if Bush did care about minorities he would have responded more appropriately to this disaster rather than commenting on how much he hopes that Senator Lott's mansion would be rebuilt so that he could BBQ on the porch.
stubby | September 7, 2005, 7:13pm | #
Joe: It seems to me like you're the one trying to change the story - anything to take the focus off Nagin and put it solely on FEMA (which, for the record, is fucked up. And Brown is useless. So stipulated).
Nagin - and every mayor before him - has known that there are (were) approximately 100,000 people in NOLA who did not own cars or otherwise have access to private transportation. Plans may or may not have been made to move these people - I've seen both claims made - but if there was a plan, it was not followed and if there was not, that's criminally negligent.
Further. Nagin told the people without cars that if they couldn't get out otherwise, the city would transport them to the Superdome. Now, surely, the 100,000 people without cars did not occur to Nagin only when he declared the mandatory evac, did they? Did he make up the idea of Superdome-as-refuge-of-last-resort on the spot? No, he didn't. Then why was no effort made - no effort at all - to stock up on supplies, portable toilets, etc.? Because this is NOLA, a city so singularly fucked up as to make FEMA look efficient and, even though Nagin is much less corrupt than all the former mayors (hey, I'm much taller than most fifth graders) he still did nothing to prepare for a scenario in which a) a lot of poor people are stuck in the city and b) there's a hellacious flood. Neither of which were unlikely scenarios. So he told all the poor folks to get together with their neighbors and bring food. That's not really disaster prep, is it?
I live in Houston. The Astrodome was made ready in under 48 hours.
I haven't even addressed the question of why he waited till Sunday to declare a mandatory evacuation.
And please don't claim that you can't make any claims about Nagin and Blanco's performance because you don't know. You do know. You are very well informed, you stay current on events, you've read the same newspapers and watched the same newscasts I have, you know about Nagin and Blanco's performances.
To say that those performances were abysmally inadequate is not to absolve FEMA of any responsibility.
