OT New Orleans

Matt Macchiarolo did pass the time by typing:

Your right, what was I thinking.. (shakes head)

:P

What? And then lower prices so it's harder for Exxon-Mobil to reap single-quarter profits of over 7 billion dollars?

Never said building the levees were a federal responsibility, please re-read my post.

According to a DHS spokesman, I suppose the people there who were there dying of thirst were lying?

Your post could be reasonably read to imply that fed was responsible. I did not (and still do not) understand the intent of your post given that the only named government was the federal government.

I don't understand the meaning of this either. Normally I would take this as sarcasm, but perhaps you meant something else. You really should state what you mean to avoid misunderstandings.

The 'refugees' fled their homes for the Superdome on Monday morning. I pointed out that the Feds delivered seven trailers of food and water on that very same Monday. If anybody said they were dying of thirst on Monday, then yes, I would say they're were lying or else they had a hell of head start.

Of course, running seven trailers of food and water into the face of a cat 4 hurricane may not seem like much to some, but I was sure impressed. It certainly was much more than the locals managed to accomplish.

-- msosborn at msosborn dot com

Then I clarify: Failures of every level of government. Local to recognize the what needed to be done to protect the citizens living there, local and state for competent evacuation planning, and lacking motivation for federal response when it was clear a strong federal response was needed but not delivered.

You are still basing this assertion on a statement from a spokesman for the Dept of Homeland Security. I would be interested to see a confirmation of the assertion, can you cite one? If it is true, the supplies did seem to run out rather quickly and slow to be replenished.

Of course not, if I had the means to leave....

Detroit in many ways is similar to N.O., a lot of corruption and poor leadership, less so now than in the Coleman Young days. I live about 45 minutes from there. Surprisingly, during the '03 blackout, we expected mass lootings and breakdown of order, but it never happened.

Anyway, in case I will move to my cabin in the northeastern lower peninsula. I have all my personal records in an emergency file in case I need to take my family in a hurry.

In that case, will you give your Social Security benefits back?

I'll admit that the mainstream press has been more interested in smearing the Feds than reporting the facts. This New York Times article contains the snippet of interest:

"While the situation in the Superdome was nightmarish and not satisfactory to anyone involved," Mr. Knocke said, "it was not a life-and-death situation, and we had to focus our priorities where we could."

Even so, he said relief crews delivered seven trailers filled with water and ready-to-eat meals to the Superdome before the storm hit on Aug. 29, along with another seven trailers on Aug. 30."

(you'll probably have to paste the link together>

-- msosborn at msosborn dot com

I t seems fairly obvious now that between Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco, local leadership completely dropped the ball.

Their efforts to evacuate last year before Ivan hit the Gulf Coast were roundly criticised for the exact same reasons as what just happened. They had no plan to evacuate the immobile folks that ended up trapped in the Dome, etc. Last year they just got lucky, and looks like they didn't do anything at all in the interveneing time period. While they have a well documented evacuation plan for New Orleans, they never actually deployed it. Thats why the busses were flooded in a lot right next to the Dome, etc. Worse, the NO cops bailed, the NO Fire Dept evacuated THEMSELVES, rather than staying to help, etc. That the Feds were slow to respond I think there's no question, but the locals trully screwed the dog.

Local efforst are expected to carry the first few days of natural disaters like this, while Federal assets are organized & deployed. That's what happened last year when 4 hurricanes in succession hit Florida. That State has a much better plan than Louisiana, and it showed. Funny that the same Michael Brown who just got made the scape-goat of Katrinma was hailed for his efforts last year in Florida.

And then the CoonAss authorities refused the Red Cross permission to supply more food/water to the Superdome/Convention Centers on the logical assumption that if there were supplies then more people would come. The logic of that is plain for any fool to see!

Of course, those ignorant folks in MS took the attitude that if you got help to supply, then take it where ever you're brave/foolish enough to go. One segment of some news program showed the SBC trucks in the middle of the MS mess on Wednesday - they had to clear some of the roads themselves to get through or they would have been in further sooner.

It takes a finite amount of time for each level of a bureaucracy to respond even if you follow all their piss-ant rules and procedures - you ever get a 4-day response to an issue that has to be cleared by a cabinet level authorization? I doubt it. The rules for survival in a bureaucracy require that no one at any level take action until the request for authorization has been passed up to whatever higher level has defined authority to issue such and then comes back down through the same channel. It is impossible for a bureaucracy to react quickly; that's the nature of the beast. That lower levels made bad decisions and did not initiate requests in a timely manner through established channels just exacerbated the problems. With the failure of the communications systems that all bureaucracies depend on, I'm amazed that things happened as fast as they did in NOLA!

I have some experience with rural emergency response agencies. I assume that what is happening in New Orleans is similar, but on a bigger scale. The whole thing is based on personality. You can be fully competent for your position, but be sacked because you "hurt someone's feelings". On the other hand, a total idiot, who knows who to suck up to, will have lifetime job security. Another thing to consider is the socio-economic status of firemen, police, emergency medical workers. Although the people at the top may have education and get paid a lot, such as your police commissioner, fire chief, or a surgeon, the people at the bottom, who drive the fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances, are barely high school or at best technical school graduates. They may have the will, but they won't have the brains or the insight to react properly in an emergency like this.

There are web sites that describe the response, or lack of it, to recent tragedies like the World Trade Center and the Columbine tragedy. There were and are serious problems. Most of them are related to lack of leadership and failure to understand its importance. Where leaders exist, they are political functionaries, without real understanding of the types of emergency they are likely to deal with in their positions. Consider the well-known American distrust of authority, which is, to be fair, based in experience. How many of our presidents or governors have stabbed us in the back, or been proven to have feet of clay?

In a situation like what is happening in New Orleans, you need people with a strong sense of personal responsibility, who can lead and follow both, as necessary. In our society (not just the United States) maybe one in twenty is capable of this degree of personal responsibility, or you might even call it honor or talent. The rest just get in the way.

In our little valley in the Colorado mountains, the Sheriff's Office did a study of the need for Homeland Security preparedness. There are a lot of grants that they could get, if they had need. The former under-sheriff concluded that the chance of a disaster was so remote, that it would not be worth the resources required to adequately prepare for one. I hope he is right. This is a gamble. If we win, great. If we lose, and the train runs off the tracks into the Animas river, it is really going to be "El rio de las almas perdidas", just like the Spanish named it.

Other communities and agencies gladly take the federal money freely offered, and do silly things with it, just because it is there for the taking. What is our county nurse going to do with a basement full of gas masks and Tyvek suits, for example? She takes the money, and pays for equipment and training, that will never be used, just to get the administrative overhead, so she can hire another employee. The county commissioners know all about it, but they let her get away with it, because of the personality thing. I remember the civil defense equipment of the fifties and sixties, that finally went for pennies on the dollar, none of it ever used. The people running the supply lines and warehouses made a bundle.

What would it take, to prepare this country adequately for every possible emergency that might occur?

There is a lot of waste in this part of the public sector, some of it unavoidable. You have to prepare, for a disaster that may never come. What do you do while you are waiting? The answer should be, "train, think of disaster scenarios, try to keep up morale", but in many cases it is "nothing". Take a look at alt.med.ems. Most of these guys can't even figure out how to post to Usenet.

Earle

Saw that, are there any other sources?