It has been one year after the largely ineffectual response to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Despite the failures on all levels of government, it seems that history shows that Bush bears the full brunt of the blame for the failures. While Bush and FEMA do bear some blame for the aftermath, there are many failures that must be noticed if they are to be rectified. It may be politically helpful to pick a favorite scapegoat for political gain, however, lives are lost if all the lessons aren't learned. After action reports have been discarded for political talking points.
First, the United States is a grouping of 50 sovereign states. The president has no authority, absolutely none, to tell a governor what to do with their own resources. Governors cannot be selected by the President, they are not accountable to the President, and most importantly, they cannot be removed by the President. It may be simple to say "The buck stops at the top" but it reflects a sad lack of understanding of the US governmental system. Bush is responsible for some aspects of the aftermath, but Louisiana Governor Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin bear a good chunk of the blame themselves. They were elected to be sole stewards of their governmental assets and they utterly failed their constituents.
Second, it is important to note that the disaster plan was written by the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans alone. It was their plan. They are responsible for what their governments do leading up to a disaster, it was their responsibility to be prepared to deal with a disaster as much as possible, and it was their responsibility alone to deal with evacuation. FEMA responds after a disaster strikes; it is the local and state governments which must take action to mitigate the potential damage.
Third, the failure to call for an evacuation until virtually the last effective moment only maximized the number of people in harms way. Mississippi managed to handle the disaster effectively with minimal loss of life. Florida did as well. All the tales of horror came from Louisiana, and in particular, New Orleans. This was largely because those officials did not call for an evacuation. In fact, the President got on the phone to ask them to evacuate when it was clear they weren't doing so. An extra 24 to 48 hours would have been more than enough to evacuate every man, woman, and child from the New Orleans area.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Apollo
Hi john pls do not let some few uncomfortable facts interfere with the "nice" story as told by the leftist media.
First declare "Bush is Evil" and then fit everything into place. If some facts get in the way blame it on the Joooish lobby, the wingnuts and the leprachauns.
2 - RedTard
Another dimension is the people of New Orleans. The poor unproductive wards of the state before the storm are exactly the same afterwards. They live in their free trailer with free food and stipend and in one year have managed to do absulutely nothing to help rebuild their city.
Nagin was right about NO becoming a 'chocolate' city, it will be brown becuase of all the Mexicans they will have to bring in to do the work becuase the people that formerly lived are simply too lazy.
3 - Nancy
Most interesting would be a good, hard, honest audit of where exactly all the money has gone. As noted by the author, NO has a long, loooooong history of corruption & greed that dwarfs even that of Washington. I'm betting nothing short of moving in a battalion & systematically wiping out all the current inhabitants right up to the governor would cleanse the place, and that of course is unlikely to happen; therefore I do not look to NO to be rebuilt either now or in the future. But the money will disappear into the black hole....
4 - From The N.O.
Nobody talks about the 1.2 million people that were evacuated before Katrina made landfall on One highway. If you haven't seen the devastation first hand you shouldn't speak. Imagine whatever city you live is gone, everything, not just a few block like the WTC site but the whole city, every house, every school, every church, every hospital, every store under 6 - 20 feet of water. Everything you know and love gone. And to top it off, if you couldn't afford to evacuate for more than a couple days, you have to hope someone cares enough to pluck you off a rooftop. Its amazing that people that are sitting in their homes on there personal computers can be so critical of those with nothing. You gotta love this selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed country.
5 - Nancy
The question arises, why, after one year and billions of donated funds, are they still with nothing? In a year, no one has managed to find a new home, a new job? Have they even tried? Or is it like it was before the hurricane: they're all sitting around with their hands folded, waiting for someone from The Government to hand them something on a platter?
6 - Lady Dragonfyre
Red Tard:
Another dimension is the people of New Orleans. The poor unproductive wards of the state before the storm are exactly the same afterwards. They live in their free trailer with free food and stipend and in one year have managed to do absulutely nothing to help rebuild their city.
Agreed. Also, the refugees have spent at least a billion dollars of the FEMA money given to them on vacations, hookers, and drugs, to name a few. I've read one account of a family that spent relief aid on a trip to the Dominican Republic.
Then we have the increased crime rates. Violent crime spiked in Houston when refugees were sent there.
The refugees are starting to burden the city of Houston financially. 59% of them are STILL without jobs, and the crime rate among them continues to rise.
At a recent job fair, the mayor pointed out to refugees that there are 5,000 open jobs. Many of them elect not to work, and the city is struggling financially to support them via welfare and other services.
50% of the refugees sent here to Rhode Island had violent criminal records.
My heart goes out to the refugees who are being proactive in rebuilding their lives. Those who wait for government handouts while not even lifting an ass cheek off their couches garner no sympathy from me, and the FEMA fraudsters among their ranks belong behind bars, not living off my tax dollars.
7 - The Fifth Dentist
Bambie you're doing a heck of a job.
8 - ILoz Zoc
It was one hell of a mess, and is still one hell of a mess. It was also a profound failure of leadership at all levels, but especially at the local. How that idiot got re-elected I will never understand.
9 - Dave Nalle
Iloc, if there was ever a rigged election it was the last New Orleans mayoral election. They were letting evacuees vote without checking whether they were ever planning to come back to the city, and basically making the rules up as they went along.
Dave
10 - Clavos
JB, excellent article. It was about time someone pointed out that the blame for the mishandling should be spread everywhere up and down the governmental line.
First responsibility is the individual's. PRPARE. These days, NOAA's NHC gives us plenty of warning--there is no excuse for people not even having water stored up when a storm approaches.
But in NO's case, the lion's share of the blame unquestionably lies with the NO municipal government and the LA state government.
Somebody mentioned that NO hasn't been rebuilt yet.
It shouldn't be.
There probably couldn't be a worse place in the world for a good-sized city. If NO is rebuilt in the same place, inevitably, we will all be paying for it to be rebuilt again in the future. Find a better location, and get the Federal government to pay for the relocation--we taxpayers will pay less that way.
11 - Bliffle
Nagin failed, Blanco failed. Is it too much to ask that someone finally do something? this was a chance for Bush to rescue his reputation as a bumbler and he failed.
12 - John Bambenek
In order for Bush to circumvent the authority of a governor he would have to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Exactly what would you be saying if Bush used the Insurrection Act to take over a state from a governor of the opposing party?
Would you be singing his praises then? Or would you be claiming a power grab by an out of control Presidency?
13 - Alec
The nine points listed here are largely as wrong as much of the Katrina coverage. It is pointless to talk about first responsders, sovereign states, and who should have done what. The plain fact is that local, state and federal agencies were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem and failed to respond. However, some of the most effective response was by the Coast Guard and later the Army, not state or local agencies. This point is important to keep in mind for future disasters or, God forbid, terrorist attacks. It is possible that local agencies will be overwhelmed no matter who has written their disaster manuals.
The best news coverage came from the local paper, the Times Picayune, and some of the best subsequent reporting has come from local reporters, citizens and scientists. When media made mistakes, those mistakes were later corrected even though right wing nut jobs kept harping on the initial errors, not the later corrections.
I watched a streaming video from a New Orleans TV station in which a disaster victim noted that some residents desperately fired at helicopters overhead in a foolish and desperate attempt to attract attention to people who needed to be rescued, not as an example of wanton lawlessness. This video was available to anyone with a computer and was linked in many blogs. And yet despite this the myth of lawlessness and the equally false countermyth of media distortion continues.
I also think a special slap is deserved to all the pundits and talkradio blowhards who could easily have got up off their fat butts and gone to New Orleans and to Mississippi. Instead, these morons, both on the right and the left, sat on their comfortable rumps where they could conveniently ignore any facts that did not suit their ideology.
The worst damage in New Orleans came from the flooding, not from the hurricaine. It is pointless to compare the damage and the problems in New Orleans to the damage caused in Mississippi or to other hurricaines.
While it is wrong to bash Bush too much personally, the cold hard fact remains that FEMA was headed by a totally unqualified political crony, and that FEMA's already shaky ability to respond to disasters has been fatally compromised by an increase of staffers who do not know what they are doing. You can even make a case that FEMA should be disbanded altogether, and that local and regional agencies, perhaps under the control of governors, would be superior to a federal agency. But the admitted failures of the New Orleans mayor and the Louisiana governor do not in any way excuse the abysmal failure of FEMA or of the Bush Administration's general ineptitude.
14 - Clavos
the cold hard fact remains that FEMA was headed by a totally unqualified political crony,
FEMA is still headed by a totally unqualified political crony. Chertoff is all hat and no cattle, as GWB would say.
At least they now have Paulison, who does have a good reputation. We'll see how does when he's tested.
15 - Nicholas Stix
Excellent article. Unfortunately, both major parties are dominated by people for whom "federalism" is a foreign term.
However, one of your points appears to me to be mistaken; the other is simply wrong.
Seventh, patients were summarily executed by medical professionals. This was called "euthanasia" by the press and the medical community, however, they were not killed for being terminal, they were killed because the conditions of the storm made them "too difficult" to care for or move easily. They were killed because they were too high maintenance.
While I am aware of some nursing home patients dying after being being deserted b their nurse aides and nurses, I am not aware of any being murdered.
Eighth, everyone remembers the stories of carnage and rioting in New Orleans that permeated the media. When those stories turned out to be, at best, exaggerations, the organ most responsible for spreading the deceptions, the media, was not taken to account. It is unknown how many lives were lost simply because the media's stories of Armageddon had scared off people from helping. The media needs to thoroughly examine how it gets news and how it presents news. The media is known for sensationalizing stories to produce fear or anger in their audiences. This needs to be addressed.
The stories of carnage and rioting were not exaggerations. It was the later stories, claiming that the carnage had been exaggerated, that were fraudulent. I've written on the New Orleans media fraud previously, and will have more to say about it presently.
16 - Clavos
While I am aware of some nursing home patients dying after being being deserted b their nurse aides and nurses, I am not aware of any being murdered.
Murder is being alleged, and charges have been filed.
CNN has an article here
17 - Nicholas Stix
Thanks for the link, Clavos.
18 - John Bambenek
Alec-
Sometimes the best way to deal with disasters is planning to mitigate the damage BEFORE they strike... that point, which I made repeatedly is ENTIRELY valid.
And for the record, I volunteered to go... I was told no.
19 - Alec
John - Clausewitz used the term "friction" to describe the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. The same applies to disasters.
FEMA had a playbook, Nagin had a plan, Blanco supposedly had a plan, but the events overwhelmed them all. I watched Blanco say that she asked the president for FEMA help, “everything they’ve got,” but also clearly saw that she was in over her head and didn’t even appear to have a staff capable of co-coordinating anything. Nagin supposedly had a plan, but clearly the impact of the unexpected flooding quickly neutralized the mayor and the police department’s ability to move throughout the city (they couldn’t drive cars and didn’t have boats). The Coast Guard was successful in quickly delivering help because they were able to hang back before the storm hit and then move in with the right equipment when it was safer for them to move.
There are very important issues about logistics and the need to improvise communications, command and control and other points that go far beyond simplistic ideological blather about sovereign states and first responders. You saw similar issues with the attack on the World Trade Center, where some rescuers could not communicate with each other because their communication equipment either wouldn’t work inside the building or was incompatible with the equipment used by other agencies.
Again, I don’t want to waste space blaming Bush personally, but the agency he was responsible for, FEMA, failed spectacularly on this point. They had a plan, but it was insufficient, and they lacked any institutional expertise to be able to be flexible in responding to a rapidly changing situation. Nobody seemed to ask, “What will happen if the levee breaks,” and they failed to recognize Nagin and Blanco’s inability to respond to the crisis.
Also, by the way, much has been made about the buses that were supposedly available. But no one has shown that either the mayor or the governor had drivers ready or any clear route out of the city, or even keys to the vehicles. Also, I have to continue to emphasize that the flooding was a second, almost independent disaster that quickly followed on the heels of the hurricane. Apparently no one really thought that a near complete evacuation of the city was necessary, in part based on past history. And also, as we have seen later, in Houston, it is not as easy as it seems to get a full evacuation of areas of a city taken care of even under relatively good weather conditions.
Lastly, it is clearly documented that volunteers were stupidly turned away, and also that rescue teams and medical personnel arrived on scene with nothing to do and no one to direct them. One group of firefighters ended up taking surveys and passing out literature.
20 - John Bambenek
Alec-
Nagin had a plan? To let buses sit in parking lots? To not order an evaucation until the last possible minute? These are NOT federal decisions, they are local decision. It wasn't Bush that made the Superdome the refuge of last resort. The events overwhelmed it because they waited to take action. That's what happens when you get caught in a collosal fuck up... you get overwhelmed.
Blanco is a governor of a sovereign state in this country... if she's in over her head doing the one thing we EXPECT people to do, there is something wrong in Louisiana. Their fuck ups were primarily BEFORE the disaster struck... they made it worse afterward.
Guiliana had a bodycount 10x that of Katrina, including mass casualities among his police and fire, and he got the job done anyway.
FEMA has been and always has been a SECONDARY agency in disasters. They give resources to locals to handle the situation. FEMA didn't respond to 9/11, NYC did and FEMA lent resources.
Sure FEMA screwed up... but if we are going to fix all the problems with Katrina... fix ALL of them.
Exonerating Nagin and Blanco because they have a D after their name reaks of partisanship and if the left wants to keep it up, then they, as an entire class are not only unworthy of office, their are unworthy of citizenship.
Those buses take people to school, yes? Exactly who drives them during normal circumstances? Hell... an 18 year old stole a bus, loaded it up, and drove out of NO. In an emergency, you could have gotten people off the streets to drive them. They had a clear route... the same route everyone else took. The city is underwater, they new those levees would only sustain a Cat 3 BY DESIGN (aka intentional choice). Once they got word that a Cat 5 was coming, they had no excuse not to order a complete evacuation. Instead they waited 24-48 hours. Evacuations are hard, yes. But that doesn't exonerate not ordering one. That also is why you order them EARLY.
Yes, volunteers were stupidly turned away... I gave thought to organizing my own team and just respond unilaterally but it was a little late to get that together (you need people ready in advance to work together, coordinating that remotely just won't work).
My point is, and remains, yes FEMA screwed up, but let's deal with ALL the screw-ups. Let's figure out what FEMA's role is supposed to be, because it seemed everyone had a different opinion. Let's deal with disappearing homeland security funds in La. Let's deal with stupid ass disaster plans that simply maximize impact and human suffering. But let's not simply deal with it to make partisan points. At least Bush acknowledged responsibility... all the Left wants to do is keep blaming the Right.
21 - Clavos
The city is underwater, they new those levees would only sustain a Cat 3 BY DESIGN (aka intentional choice).
A good point made all the stronger by the fact that they were wrong--the levees didn't survive even a CAT 3, which is what Katrina was when she went ashore.
22 - John Bambenek
Strictly speaking it was only a subset of Cat 3.
But gee... you mean the lowest-bidder problem meant we got shitty levees? You don't say?
What do you suggest? We give a no-bid to Halliburton to do it right?
23 - Clavos
JB,
What do you mean by "subset of Cat 3"?
I couldn't find any reference to subsets in the Saffir-Simpson scale anywhere on the National Hurricane Center website.
24 - pleasexcusetheinterruption12
Clavos, I dont know what he means by a subest of Cat 3 either. But it was unlike any other cat 3 in known tropical history.
I seem to remember having this argument with you before Clavos in another thread. You were saying the cat. at land fall is the only thing of importance, while I was arguing the fact that it was cat. 5 for a day before landfall is very significant.
At the time I had no good facts to back me up, only speculation. But recently I was reading the post-season analyses of several '05 hurricanes including Katrina. The text of the 40 or so page summary made three important points. First, the fact that it was a cat. 5 and 4 for right up until several hours before landfall is important when calculating storm surge. The large surf and wall of water churned up and pushed ahead of the storm did not subside as soon as the winds did. There was a "lag time" as I put it in the last thread.
The second point was that Katrina has the LOWEST central minimum pressure of any hurricane with 110kt winds IN HISTORY. The pressure was 920mb. Lower than the 922mb?? I remember for Andrew, cat. 5 at landfall. 920mb is much more normal a pressure for a strong cat. 4 or weak cat. 5. This was somewhat unheard of and surprising to the NHC. The NHC often uses normal pressure-wind ratios to calculate windspeed when only the pressure is known, and wind data is absent. However, as Katrina proved this ratio is not constant. In fact, the low pressure was so surprising that they reported the winds at 110kt, when the highest measurement by aircraft corresponded to 98kt ground speed winds! In effect, they were so baffled they added 12kts arbitrarily because they couldnt believe the winds were so low!!!
And third, because the hurricane was old, and decaying (eye wall replacement cycles), the wind field had expanded beyond any normal hurricane. SO because it was cat. 4 + 5 prior to landfall, but weakening, it had a large windfield. In fact one reason it weakened was precisely because it was expanding.
Not to rub it in your face or anything ;), but Im sure you appreciate the bizzarre meteorological phenomenon of such a record breaking storm.
25 - Clavos
You're right, we (or you, rather) have discussed all of this before, and there's no doubt in my or anyone else's mind that, because of a confluence of circumstances at the time (including the crappy job by the Army in constructing the levees), Katrina was a devastating hurricane.
However, the Saffir-Simpson Scale categories of hurricanes are determined (according to the NHC) by "present" wind velocity, which in the case of Katrina's landfall in Louisiana, fell in Category 3. There are no subsets. Here's the relevant quote from the NHC website:
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is a 1-5 rating based on the hurricane's present intensity.
This is my one and only point. All of what you say is true, but not relevant to what category Katrina was, only to how much damage she caused.
Except for the point about Katrina's pressure, which does have an additional relevancy in that it was hitherto unheard of, and that it revealed that the pressure-wind ratio is not constant after all.