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Thread: Katrina blog and thoughts

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    Katrina blog and thoughts

    I haven't looked through every post on every thread about Katrina, but I wanted to pass along this blog from a weather "nerd" (New York Times terminology) who posted continuously on Katrina as it approached and was sharply critcal of the mayor for delaying the evacuation order.

    http://brendanloy.com/page2.html

    Here's my analysis having seen more information and finding this blog:

    1. Local officials were aware that the levees were designed only to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. Anything above a Cat 3 hurricane = flooding and destruction.

    2. The city's studies determined that it would take up to 72 hours to clear all traffic of evacuees.

    3. The city's hurricane evacuation plan included the use of buses to evacuate those without means of transportation.

    Failures at the local level:

    1. Hurricane Katrina was forecasted to be a Cat 4 hurricane nearly 48 hours prior to landfall in this NOAA forecast: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005...lic.017.shtml?
    This was already within the 72 hour window to achieve 100% evacuation. Yet, the NO mayor failed to issue a mandatory evacuation and instead waited nearly 24 hours.

    2. When the mandatory evacuation was ordered, instead of evacuating persons out of NO, which by design should have flooded at landfall or just after, people were evacuated to the Superdome, inside the fish bowl. Does this make sense to anybody?

    3. Instead of using all available school buses and city buses (I assume there is a city bus system - the website is down - www.norta.com) to evacuate citizens inland (this requires city to state coordination, as there are places in LA to evacuate to to ride out the hurricane - I don't know if any contingency plans had been made to this degree), a farm of school buses sat unutilized and by the time plans were made to evacuate out of the city, they were under water and only contributing to toxins polluting flooded NO.

    There is certainly some improvements to be made at the federal level, but what is upsetting to me is the nearly free pass being given to NO and LA. To me, there is zero reason why the mandatory evacuation order shouldn't haven't been issued 48 hours prior to landfall and then this would be only an Army Corps of Engineer task to pump out flood waters instead of a national effort to rescue tens of thousands of lives. Hopefully, whatever commisssion/hearings that take place will not neglect a solid review of the responsibilities of local and state officials so that the risk of future storms will be minimized on the front end instead of trying to bail out a failed evacuation plan after the fact.

    One final note - why do New Orleans emergency personnel need 5 day passes after just over a week of operations? I'm all for a brief respite of 24 hours to check on family, but when you choose a career of public service, you need to be available to the public in their time of need and ensure that you have a solid contingency plan for your family in the event that you need to operate 24/7 at the job. For a comparison, if soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen in Iraq had the same schedule, they would spend over 4 months on R&R leave during their 12 month tour, not 2 weeks. This is a good idea overdosed on steroids for a political effect, IMO.

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    I found this timeline of events:

    http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archive...onse-timeline/

    While the blog site begs the question, this post only links to MSM articles, most of them from local papers. There is no commentary except one instance of comparing what has been reported in the papers vs. the mayor's comments.

    If you do want some analysis, here's a blog by a reservist from Florida who served one year in command of an infantry company in Ramadi, Iraq, serves on Missouri's Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and routinely is activated by the Florida Governor to respond to hurricanes in that state. He's well qualified IMO to speak authoritatively on the subject since he's in a unique position with unique experience.

    www.iraqnow.blogspot.com

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    An interesting editorial.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/natio...2931-2126r.htm

    Not much traction with the abuse
    September 6, 2005


    George W. finally gets it -- in more ways than one. The tardy president was back on the Gulf Coast yesterday, bucking up the spirits of the damned and stiffening the resolve of the slackers.
    He's getting it as well from his critics, many of whom can't believe their great good luck, that a hurricane, of all things, finally gives them the opening they've been waiting for to heap calumny and scorn on him for something that might get a little traction. Cindy Sheehan is yesterday's news; she couldn't attract a camera crew this morning if she stripped down to her step-ins for a march on Prairie Chapel Ranch.
    The vultures of the venomous left are attacking on two fronts, first that the president didn't do what the incompetent mayor of New Orleans and the pouty governor of Louisiana should have done, and didn't, in the early hours after Katrina loosed the deluge on the city that care and good judgment forgot. Ray Nagin, the mayor, ordered a "mandatory" evacuation a day late, but kept the city's 2,000 school buses parked and locked in neat rows when there was still time to take the refugees to higher ground. The bright-yellow buses sit ruined now in four feet of dirty water. Then the governor, Kathleen Blanco, resisted early pleas to declare martial law, and her dithering opened the way for looters, rapists and killers to make New Orleans an unholy hell. Gov. Haley Barbour did not hesitate in neighboring Mississippi, and looters, rapists and killers have not turned the streets of Gulfport and Biloxi into killing fields.
    The drumbeat of partisan ingratitude continues even after the president flooded the city with National Guardsmen from a dozen states, paratroopers from Fort Bragg and Marines from the Atlantic and the Pacific. The flutter and chatter of the helicopters above the ghostly abandoned city, some of them from as far away as Singapore and averaging 240 missions a day, is eerily reminiscent of the last days of Saigon. Nevertheless, Sen. Mary Landrieu, who seems to think she's cute when she's mad, even threatened on national television to punch out the president -- a felony, by the way, even as a threat. Mayor Nagin, who you might think would be looking for a place to hide, and Gov. Blanco, nursing a bigtime snit, can't find the right word of thanks to a nation pouring out its heart and emptying its pockets. Maybe the senator should consider punching out the governor, only a misdemeanor. The race hustlers waited for three days to inflame a tense situation, but then set to work with their usual dedication. The Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, our self-appointed twin ambassadors of ill will, made the scene as soon as they could, taking up the coded cry that Katrina was the work of white folks, that a shortage of white looters and snipers made looting and sniping look like black crime, that calling the refugees "refugees" was an act of linguistic racism. A "civil rights activist" on Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog even floated the rumor that the starving folks abandoned in New Orleans had been forced to eat their dead -- after only four days. New Orleans has a reputation for its unusual cuisine, but this tale was so tall that nobody paid it much attention. Neither did anyone tell the tale-bearer to put a dirty sock in it.
    Condi Rice went to the scene to say what everyone can see for himself, that no one but the race hustlers imagine Americans of any hue attaching strings to the humanitarian aid pouring into the broken and bruised cities of the Gulf. Most of the suffering faces in the flickering television images are black, true enough, and most of the helping hands are white.
    Black and white churches of all denominations across a wide swath of the South stretching from Texas across Arkansas and Louisiana into Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia turned their Sunday schools into kitchens and dormitories. In Memphis, Junior Leaguers turned out for baby-sitting duty at the city's largest, most fashionable and nearly all white Baptist church, cradling tiny black infants in compassionate arms so their mothers could finally sleep. The owner of a honky-tonk showed up to ask whether the church would "accept money from a bar." A pastor took $1,400, some of it in quarters, dimes and nickels, with grateful thanks and a promise to see that it is spent wisely on the deserving -- most of whom are black.
    The first polls, no surprise, show the libels are not working. A Washington Post-ABC survey found that the president is not seen as the villain the nutcake left is trying to make him out to be. Americans, skeptical as ever, are believing their own eyes.

    Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.

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    Magic Marker Strategy

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/op...06tierney.html

    Op-Ed Columnist

    Magic Marker Strategy

    By JOHN TIERNEY
    Published: September 6, 2005
    It was the climax of George W. Bush's video introduction at the Republican convention: the moment at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series when he threw a pitch all the way to home plate. The video ended, and the conventioneers cheered as Mr. Bush strode onto a stage shaped like a pitcher's mound.

    Well, live by the pitch, die by the pitch. When you campaign as the man on the mound, the great leader whose arm rescues Americans in their moment of need, they expect you to deal with a hurricane, too.

    Mr. Bush made a lot of mistakes last week, but most of his critics are making an even bigger one now by obsessing about what he said and did. We can learn more by listening to men like Jim Judkins, particularly when he explains the Magic Marker method of disaster preparedness.

    Mr. Judkins is one of the officials in charge of evacuating the Hampton Roads region around Newport News, Va. These coastal communities, unlike New Orleans, are not below sea level, but they're much better prepared for a hurricane. Officials have plans to run school buses and borrow other buses to evacuate those without cars, and they keep registries of the people who need special help.

    Instead of relying on a "Good Samaritan" policy - the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors - the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave, Mr. Judkins told The Daily Press in Newport News, rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.

    "It's cold, but it's effective," Mr. Judkins explained.


    That simple strategy could have persuaded hundreds of people to save their own lives in New Orleans. What the city needed most was coldly effective local leaders, not a president in Washington who could feel their pain. It's the same lesson we should have learned from Sept. 11 and other disasters, yet both liberals and conservatives keep ignoring it.

    The liberals bewailing the insensitivity and racism of Republicans in Washington sound like a bad rerun of the 1960's, when urban riots were blamed on everyone but the rioters and the police. Yes, the White House did a terrible job of responding to Katrina, but Democratic leaders in New Orleans and Louisiana didn't even fulfill their basic duties.

    In coastal Virginia - which, by the way, has a large black population and plenty of Republican politicians - Mr. Judkins and his colleagues assume that it's their job to evacuate people, maintain order and stockpile supplies to last for 72 hours, until federal help arrives. In New Orleans, the mayor seemed to assume all that was beyond his control, just like the mayors in the 1960's who let the riots occur.

    They said their cities couldn't survive without help from Washington, which proceeded to shower inner cities with money and programs that did more damage than the riots. Cities didn't recover until some mayors, especially Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, tried self-reliance.

    Mr. Giuliani was called heartless and racist for cutting the welfare rolls and focusing on crime reduction, but black neighborhoods were the greatest beneficiaries of his policies. He was criticized for ignoring social services as he concentrated on reorganizing the Police and Fire Departments, but his cold effectiveness made the city a more livable place and kept it calm after Sept. 11.

    Yet Mr. Bush, with approval from conservatives who should have known better, reacted to Sept. 11 by centralizing disaster planning in Washington. He created the byzantine Homeland Security Department, with predictable results last week.

    The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for ineptitude, became even less efficient after it was swallowed by a bureaucracy consumed with terrorism. The department has spent billions on new federal airport screeners - with no discernible public benefit - while giving short shrift to natural disasters.

    The federal officials who had been laboring on a one-size-fits-all strategy were unprepared for the peculiarities of New Orleans, like the high percentage of people without cars. The local officials who knew about that problem didn't do anything about it - and then were furious when Mr. Bush didn't solve it for them. Why didn't the man on the mound come through for them?

    It's a fair question as they go door to door looking for bodies. But so is this: Why didn't they go door to door last week with Magic Markers?

    Email: tierney@nytimes.com

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    Good bunch of info, laid out in one place. Thanks shek...
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

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