Multi-Layered Failures
 

I think you will find this article might clear up some of the minor misconceptions held by people on this forum who do not fully understand how emergency management functions in the United States. The author is a conservative citizen of the United States whose ancestors came from Africa.


http://www.nationalreview.com/murdoc...0509130839.asp
Multi-Layered Failures
The government responses to Katrina left something to be desired.
By Deroy Murdock

"Why can't they drop water on these people?"

I repeatedly shouted that question to my TV as I watched the heart-wrenching news coverage of Hurricane Katrina's attack on New Orleans. Washed from their homes as Lake Pontchartrain poured into the Crescent City through the 17th Street Canal, thousands of evacuees at the Superdome and nearby Convention Center soon ached for as little as a Dixie cup of water. High humidity, searing sunshine, and 90-plus-degree temperatures intensified their thirst. And yet there was not a drop to drink.

Answers to this mystery are gradually surfacing.

"We were ready from literally the time the storm blew through," American Red Cross president Marty Evans told Fox News Channel's Major Garrett last Thursday. "We were ready to go. We just were not given permission to go in."

"The state Homeland Security Department had requested — and continues to request — that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane," a statement on the Red Cross' website explains. "Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city."

"Acess [sic] to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders," the statement also notes.

Salvation Army Major George Hood told FNC's Garrett that his group was ready to help, too. "We were prepared," Hood said. "The intent and the will was definitely there."

The Red Cross's Evans added: "We understood that the thinking was that, if we were to come in, that, one, it would impede the evacuation. They were trying to get everybody out. And, secondly, that it could possibly suggest that it was going to be OK to stay."

So, while the Red Cross and Salvation Army were able and eager to deliver water, food, medicine, and other relief supplies to those suffering at the Superdome and convention center, Louisiana officials rebuffed them, for fear that hydrating and feeding these individuals would chill an already glacial evacuation while encouraging others to get cozy and settle in for the long haul. In short, Louisiana officials starved their citizens out of town.

Amid ample federal fumbling as the Katrina crisis unfolded, this was just one of numerous instances where authorities in Baton Rouge and New Orleans City Hall appear to have neglected their constituents, amplified their pain, and surely cost some their lives.

Early on, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco should have requested federal troops to quell or at least deter the chaos in New Orleans as flood damage took its toll, looters stole electronic gear and luxury items as well as groceries, and rifle-wielding sociopaths fired on rescue boats and medical helicopters. Not until Thursday, September 1 did Blanco say, "I've actually asked for uniformed troops of any sort," either National Guard or active-duty GIs. The White House apparently hesitated, as federal troops are prohibited from conducting domestic policing under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

"At a meeting on Air Force One outside Baton Rouge," the next day, "Mr. Bush offered her [Blanco] the full force of every federal relief agency including the military, he claims," the Times of London reports. "Fearful of losing control of the relief effort and of being blamed later for doing so, she asked for another 24 hours to think about it."

Blanco "needed 24 hours to decide," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told reporters, as he said President Bush outlined the situation to him after Blanco resisted Bush's offer to federalize the state National Guard. Blanco rejected Bush's offer the next day.

Blanco's leisurely decision making exacerbated much that shocked the eyes of the world for the last two weeks.


You Need Leadership, Man
While state-level intransigence kept New Orleans' evacuees parched, famished, and menaced for days, City Hall's incompetence left them marooned. New Orleans Port Police director Cynthia Swain "ordered all harbor officers to abandon their posts and flee to higher ground" as the city flooded on Tuesday August 30, NBC's Lisa Myers reported September 8.

"I sent them to high ground because I did not want them to become victims of rising floodwater," Swain explained. Of course, the citizens of New Orleans were not crazy about becoming victims of rising floodwater, either. That is why their taxes financed these boats in the first place. "There were no harbor police rescue boats in the water for rescues for four days," Myers concluded.

"I need 500 buses, man," Mayor Nagin bellowed the evening of September 1 on local radio station WWL-AM. "We ain't talking about — you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here. I'm like, 'You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.'"

While Nagin awaited the relative comfort of Greyhound motor coaches, he could have filled at least 80 percent of his expressed transit needs simply by employing buses already in his control.

At least 146 municipal mass-transit buses, plus 255 school buses, could have been deployed to whisk car-less evacuees to Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Houston, or any number of places more appealing than the Superdome. Assuming a fairly comfortable 50 people each, these buses alone could have evacuated 20,050 New Orleanians per trip.

But rather than speed toward safety, these buses languished in parking lots where they now are waterlogged. Fuel and oil seep out of their submerged engines, deepening the city's monumental clean-up challenge.

"Sure, there was [sic] lots of buses out there," Nagin explained Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "But guess what? You can't find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren't available."

Nagin and company should have planned for this Category 4 (not 5) contingency. School and mass-transit drivers could have been assigned to start their buses, bring their own families, collect evacuees, and then leave town. Or, the city could have improvised. Among local citizens and tourists eager to escape, volunteers could have been recruited to drive buses. Almost any idea would have trumped drowning 401 buses in a lake. Wags have nicknamed this the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool.

None of this should have surprised Nagin, assuming he happened to read the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan." Among its instructions:

Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. ...The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. ...Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. ...Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.

Page 13 of the January 2000 "Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan" also chose buses as latter-day arks for the poor and immobile of New Orleans.


The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.

So, even as undertakers gather those who Katrina extinguished, why spend time documenting where state and local officials failed the embattled people of New Orleans?


Federal Mismanagement
This is no whitewash of the federal contribution to this catastrophe. President Bush can blame no one but himself for appointing Michael Brown to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The former equestrian-competition executive was a college roommate of Bush pal Joe Allbaugh, his predecessor at FEMA, who he served as deputy for two years. That seems his most obvious qualification for this critical job, from which he resigned on Monday.

FEMA's tragicomic highlight reel includes flying evacuees to Charleston, West Virginia rather than Charleston, South Carolina. Between August 28 and September 8, FEMA shuttled an experienced medical assessment team from Alabama to Biloxi, then Dallas, and Galveston. "We joined the team to help people who need it, and we're not helping anybody," Tim Ward complained to NBC News before FEMA jetted him and his colleagues to Houston. Far less itinerant is a mobile communications unit that a German concern is prepared to fly into the disaster zone. FEMA, they complain, has yet to return any of the hundreds of calls they have left.

Publicly detached at first — despite declaring an emergency the Saturday before Katrina hit and pressuring Governor Blanco for a mandatory evacuation that Sunday morning — Bush seems increasingly hands-on and should stay so. He also should ditch his boundless loyalty to loyal but hapless underlings. Having fired essentially no one after September 11 (i.e. former CIA Director George Tenet) Bush should dismiss those who fell on their fannies when this calamity hit. FEMA's Brown is thought to have jumped; as for others, Bush should not be afraid to push.


Racial Repulsiveness
That said, it is vital for Americans to understand that many fannies hit the floor — from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Washington — both Republicans and Democrats. This fact unravels the corrosive narrative that the American Left has woven furiously since the moment Katrina exited Orleans Parish for points north. From their perspective, this whole mess is Bush's fault, and his misdeeds were fueled by anti-black bigotry.

Consider just a few of vicious statements:

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," rapper Kanye West declared September 2 on an NBC concert and telethon for hurricane relief.

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean told the National Baptist Convention in Miami on September 7, "We have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age, and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not." He added, "The question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America?" Dean spoke as if New Orleans succumbed to Hurricane Jim Crow.

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights alluded to Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case that established the "separate-but-equal" rationale for Southern segregation. Said Ratner, "The legacy of that thought is what we saw at the Superdome."

"There's a historical indifference to the pain of poor people and black people," the Rev. Jesse Jackson fumed as the Big Easy sank beneath the waves. He visited the New Orleans Convention Center and announced: "This looks like the hull of a slave ship." One wonders, had Katrina smashed into Boston, forcing thousands of white evacuees into Faneuil Hall, would Jackson have sauntered in and said: "This looks like the Irish Potato Famine?"

Thousands of Americans have toiled and even died to heal this country's racial wounds. Turning Katrina from an epic story of widespread government ineptness into an indictment of anti-black genocide perpetrated by the president of the United States is beyond pernicious.

The wild-eyed theory that Bush hates blacks so deeply that he would engineer their wholesale starvation, dehydration, and asphyxiation pries the scabs off these still-healing wounds and grinds fresh pepper into them. Either such explosive nonsense is a warm pile of lies, or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FEMA's departed Michael Brown, Democratic Governor Blanco, and Democratic Mayor Nagin (who is black) share Bush's anti-black animus and helped him harm and kill black Americans on live, international television.

This is best-described scatalogically. But to keep it polite, the race hustlers who are exploiting this tragedy are beyond contempt. They are polluting the public square with nitroglycerine. Their twisted view of a bigoted America is belied by the 18,000 mainly black New Orleanians rescued by the Coast Guard, the $762 million in Katrina-related donations Americans of all colors have offered so far to our disadvantaged countrymen, along with free housing, schooling, and more. Thousands of volunteers, many with white faces, raced to comfort the tempest-tossed, many with blacks faces.

"When those Coast Guard choppers, many of who were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin," President Bush told reporters Monday after surveying flood-damaged neighborhoods in New Orleans. "They wanted to save lives." Bush added: "The storm didn't discriminate, and neither did the recovery effort...The rescue efforts were comprehensive, and the recovery will be comprehensive." Some 71,000 federal personnel are now on the ground returning the Gulf Coast to normal.

Let us concur that many public officials from New Orleans City Hall to the Oval Office, overwhelmed by America's biggest natural disaster ever, performed far below expectations, but without malice. Let us marginalize the wretched racial arsonists before they burn anything else to the ground. And let us magnify the heroism and generosity that already are helping Hurricane Katrina's survivors reassemble their shattered lives.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Its a widely acknowledged fact that those who press for "Racial Equality" in the US are frequently far more famous, wealthy, and unlikely to be in need of Medicare or government assistance than most.

Racial Equality exists. Whats being pushed for is an inequality towards those who arent Black.

Anyone here capable of naming a prominent spokesman on the rights of Hispanics within the US? Bearing in mind that Hispanics make up a far greater proportion of the underpaid immigrant workforce within the US' southern states than any other racial group?



Didnt think so.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I concur.

which is hardly surprising given i've been saying it for weeks.

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Scarface?

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Alberto Gonzales?

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

tl,dr

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I seem to recall you posting something else. I seem to recall you blaming Bush. Has the catastrophe in New Orleans so unsettled me that I remember things that did not happen?

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Racial equality does not exist in the US. Institutional racism pervails. Blacks and hispanics are overrepresented in America's prisons, the population living beneath the poverty line, the unemployed, have lower lifespans, are more likely to die from violent crimes are more likely to be the victim of crimes, are less likely to have health insurance, make less money for the same job than whites, are more likely to receive the death penalty, are more likely to receive longer and harsher punishments than whites for the same crime, less likely to go to college, are often associated with stereoptypes in the media... I mean the list goes on, are you going to deny the Holocaust too?

And as for hispanics in America, they are not a cohesive group that can easily be put into one broad, general category like Blacks. Black people share a common history of slavery and post-slavery segregation, among other things. Hispanics are diverse comming from various backgrounds including Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Central America, South America and have diverse view points and ideas and even speak different languages and dialects and do not share a common history. So don't hold your breath waiting for a hispanic version of Martin Luther King Jr.

Despite this, there is a prominent civil rights icon for Hispanic immigrants, Cesar Chavez.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

forgive my ignorance. I had thought the oval office was Mr Bush's personal office. obviously i was wrong ...

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

What he posted.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

No, you are not mistaken. But, Kathleen Blanco and Ray Nagin do not share the Oval Office with the president. Are you denying that in the past two weeks you have blamed Bush for the aftermath of the hurricane?

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

widely acknowledged by whom?

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Nagin was somewhat to blame. Blanco was somewhat to blame. Dubya and his administration are somewhat more to blame.

Can you follow this through to the part where more than one person can be at fault?

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Kanye West.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Hasn't Bush himself taken the blame?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4243678.stm

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

apparently not

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

please excuse my ignorance in this matter,

but does this Texan fellow actually like that nob of an american president?

m
x

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

from his posts defending bush / flaming those who dont like bush , i would think he'd go as far as monica lewinsky did for clinton :P

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I don't think he cares that much for Bush, i think it just gets to him people pissing on his country's good name (so to speak) seemingly all the time.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I think you have it backwards. Bush was somewhat to blame. Blanco was more to blame and Nagin was most to blame.

I think I can follow, since the title of the post is multi-layered failures.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I believe that Texan did not vote for Bush.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Bush took the blame for the actions of the Federal government. Blanco took the blame for the actions of the state government and Nagin took no responsibility for his inaction.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I think you do not follow that anyone besides Bush might have some responsibility.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

I never voted for him. I don't agree with much of what he has done. I do agree with some things he has done though.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

You cannot give Reputation to the same post twice.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

i dunno. the argument that dems are abusing the catastrophe to grab the black vote falls a little flat with me. i guess maybe we are shooting for 150% of the black vote in 2008.

and the "bush doesn't hate black people" argument is actually a little scary. even kanye west only said 'doesn't care'; i also heard 'indifferent.' I remember when Ashcroft was nominated and there was an outcry "Ashcroft hates homosexuals!" and the response from the administration and a lot of their supporters was "He has a very good record on race issues!"

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Yup i thought that grey blob was you :P

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

With 1k posts, I doubt that Texan is giving anyone grey blobs.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

He has negative reputation, which means he can't affect anybody else's rep.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Oh, I didn't know that, and I can't see his blobs. :/

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

let me put this in words that you can understand.

s|k intimated that you had been in the army.

when the legions commanded by Quintillius Varus were attacked and massacred in the Tuetoberg forest by a german ambush there were many people to blame. there were scouts sent out (these scouts were killed and thus they failed in their job as scouts.) there were the individual soldiers who broke and ran in the confusion (thus allowing themselfs to be easily killed by germans) and there was Quintillius Varus commander of Upper Germany.

This is a concept we call 'command'.

Who did the divine Augustus vent his rage at the disaster upon?

Quintillius Varus.

Why?

Because he was in charge. he had the power to change the situation and he did nothing.

Who should america blame?

well an awful lot of american citizens (certainly the political class so far) already know who is to blame

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Nagin was in charge in New Orleans. Nagin had the greatest capability to change the situation in New Orleans. Nagin had an emergency plan for evacuating New Orleans. Nagin did not follow the emergency plan to evacuate New Orleans. If Nagin had followed the emergency plan in New Orleans, there would have been a lot less casualties in New Orleans.

Bush did not have 400 buses in New Orleans. Nagin had 400 buses in New Orleans. Nagin did not use the 400 buses in New Orleans.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

bush had 20 million buses outside new orleans which had wheels

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

Reading your historical analogy yahwe surely the appropriate response extrapolating from the current situation to that of the roman period would be that of the roman people blaming augustus rather than augustus blaming varrus? Merely in terms of scale and all that rather than the slightly more important question of who actually was to blame.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

http://pirate.planetarion.com/announ...uncementid=152
Default reputation : 10
Every 365 Days you get +1 reputation altering power
Every 100 posts you get +1 reputation altering power
For Every 100 reputation points you get +1 reputation altering power

This would seem to indicate that I have:

10 -- Default
+4 -- Every 365 days
+11 -- 1100 posts
And either no bonus because I have neg rep or a -1 malus because of my neg rep.

That puts me at an altering power of +25 or +24 when I rep someone.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

the divine augustus was not a democratic leader

he was an absolute leader

with democracies i tend to believe that in my analogy 'the voters' are the divine augustus

EDIT: so in my analogy all americans should be demanding "quintilius varus where are my eagles?!?" as the divine augustus famously did

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

The federal government has two buses here in Hanau, Germany. Should we have driven those buses to New Orleans and taken 80 people out of New Orleans?

I think it is clear that you understand the situation, but now cannot admit that you might possibly could have been wrong. So, you maintain that buses in Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta and Baltimore are more useful for evacuating people from New Orleans than buses that are actually in New Orleans. I don't think you will convince many people with that argument.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

well it wouldn't have hurt would it?

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That's fair enough. I suppose I could be all argumentative and pedantically point out how augustus wasn't exactly as much of an absolute leader as the later roman emperors but that would be rather beside the point. "I mean like holy shit do you mean analogies don't work 100% I never would have guessed thank you for pointing that out!" And so on and so forth. Also when you call him the divine augustus it makes it sound like it's a rock 'n' roll band.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

well i am a god you see. i can't very well ignore other gods now can i?

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If Nagin had done the job he was elected to do, federal buses would not have been necessary.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

What Caused the Flood?
The problem of too much government funding.
By Rich Lowry
Hurricane Katrina makes for a straightforward narrative for liberals: Big government could have prevented the catastrophe, but President Bush so distrusts government, he didn't spend enough on levees and other projects to save New Orleans. Leaving aside that the free-spending Bush is hardly a miser, this narrative has no connection to the grimy facts on the ground. Indeed, if this is "a big government moment," one wonders why government continues to look so bad.

The "more funding for levees" argument perpetuates a common misperception. The long-standing earthen levees surrounding the city did not fail. It was the floodwalls around the drainage canals that protrude into New Orleans that were overwhelmed. One breach seems to have been caused by a barge breaking loose from its moorings and battering down one of the walls. Will Nancy Pelosi now accuse Bush of underfunding barge moorings?

It is still a matter of debate what caused the other breaches. One expert at the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center told the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune that he suspects a "catastrophic structural failure." Another expert suggested that "the flaw may not be in the design but in the construction or materials."

So the flooding didn't result from old levees desperately needing more funding. In fact, the section of 17th Street canal where a major breach occurred had just been upgraded, and the New York Times writes "received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region." Even if Bush had larded more money on New Orleans — according to a broad-brush comparison in The Washington Post, he spent more in his first five years in office than Bill Clinton did in his last five — it wouldn't have stop such a breach.

In a key respect, too much government funding was the problem. A hurricane researcher at Louisiana State University has long warned that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet — built in 1965 as a shortcut from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans — would serve as a "hurricane highway," magnifying storm surges and delivering them into the city. It appears that this is what happened.

The Washington Post reports that only 3 percent of the port's cargo comes through the canal, at a price to taxpayers of an estimated $12,000 per vessel. Still, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent $13 million dredging the canal last year. Even though there were warnings about the dangers of MRGO, even though it was commercially marginal, the Corps wanted to spend up to $38 million on keeping it going. A former employee with the Corps' New Orleans district told the Post: "The general feeling was: 'There's no way we're closing that.' They wanted all the business they could get."

Here is the recipe for government, not as liberals imagine it, but as it actually exists: Take the Corps, for whom every project, no matter how unnecessary, is a "pressing need"; combine it with Congress, where Louisiana representatives eagerly diverted Corps money to their pet projects; and throw on top the corrupt officialdom of New Orleans. Then shake well — and get out of the way.

The Orleans Levee Board, the state agency charged with protecting the levees, is so notorious that it makes Bush's FEMA look like a paragon of professionalism. Former president of the board Billy Nungesser, who was ousted after trying to reform it, says: "Every time I turned over a rock, there was something rotten. I used to tell people, 'If your children ever die in a hurricane, come shoot us, because we're responsible.' We threw away all sorts of money."

The board operates an airport, two marinas, and has a private police force that Nungesser says "wears more gold braid than Gen. MacArthur when he went to the Philippines." The board just spent $2.4 million on a Mardi Gras Fountain near Lake Pontchartrain. NBC News reports that the board spent $15 million on building overpasses to a riverboat casino, and paid $45,000 to a private investigator to find dirt on a board critic — followed by another $45,000 to settle the resulting lawsuit. Feeling dry yet?

— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

natural disasters happen

we watched one happen.

i mourn america's dead. i ...


... well i no longer know who you care about

do you want to protect the bush presidency? is that what you want to do??

i wanted to stop having to watch people die.

that is all i ever wanted,

i'm glad for every man woman or child rescued by the bbc.

i don't really care where the dying come from. this time they were from american.

I care. I want to care for the poor,

this natural event? yes?

well it was ****ed up. are you in disbelief? well i am too. we are not so different you and i.

you can't even pretend to blame the mayor, you can't even blame the senator (though god knows she is awful)


i'm so sorry to you darling. i have no idea what it is to suffer as america has. but look at me, am i your enemy? i hope not. i am and ever will be america's friend.

bush really did **** up. i mourn every death i saw. if is seem bitter. i am bitter for you.

Re: Multi-Layered Failures
 

when your own reputation is negative however, as far as i understand it the rep altering power becomes 0 and all rep given is grey.
The above only holds true when your rep is positive ( and btw rep and rep altering power are seperate things )