HURRICANE KATRINA 32

I am not sanguine about us being any more prepared for the next disaster than we were for Hurricane Katrina. There simply has been and is increasingly now too much bureaucracy and too many centers of power and authority in the various levels of government trying to respond to disasters.

Who is to blame for the catastrophe that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Where to start? The then and still, mayor of N.O., Ray Nagin, can be faulted for not responding fast enough (the order of response should local, state, then the federals) and not following his own disaster plan by supplying transportation (school and city buses) for the people who could not get out of their neighborhoods. And once people were in the Superdome, according to the plan, they were supposed to be given water, RTE meals, and security. None of these was provided.

We are a nation of laws and the law states that the governor has to request help from the federal government in the form of disaster aid and the military before the federal government can legally act. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco bears a great deal of blame for not ordering the state national guard into N.O. sooner and not allowing Bush to send in federal and other state guard units to help. The Red Cross was standing by to go to the Superdome with supplies, but was not allowed in by the Governor’s homeland security dept. because the governor felt that people would then go to the Superdome in greater numbers and she and the mayor did not want that. Where the hell were people supposed to go? Bush actually called Blanco and urged her to act, but she still dithered another 24 hours. Incidentally there was bad blood between Blanco and Nagin even before the hurricane because Nagin supported Blanco’s moderate Republican opponent, current Louisiana congressman, Bobby Jindal, for governor in the last race (I don’t know why). Blanco’s performance as governor is in contrast to Haley Barbour in Mississippi who acted quickly and decisively even allowing that his problems were not of the same magnitude as Blanco’s.

When Bush saw that the mayor and the governor were not up to the monumental task they faced he should have acted and the law and precedent be damned – lives and the suffering of many people were at stake. Bush was 24 hrs. late in acting. He did not come through with the same stellar performance he did after 9/11. Even though FEMA was not set up as a first responder in a disaster it is a hopelessly inept bureaucracy and Michael Brown was an archetypical bureaucrat. He deserved to be canned and Bush showed bad judgment in appointing him in the first place. The type of person who is needed in a job like that is Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. The wife of one of the firefighters from McKinney (a city just north of Plano) said on the radio here that when her husband’s unit volunteered and went to New Orleans a FEMA official there gave them the job of passing out FEMA flyers and told them there would not be doing any firefighting and rescue work because he knew they were just there for the glory! That SOB should have been fired on the spot, but of course was not.

The politicians are not covering themselves in glory with their carping and unseemly criticizing even as the rescue effort was ongoing. For the egregious Howard Dean to say that the slow federal response was racially motivated is just plain nuts and divisive. The tendentious remarks of the insane Nancy Pelosi were inane. Hillary Clinton while more restrained in her criticizing came out with the same old canard of calling for a bipartisan commission. Good lord, doesn’t that woman have any imagination or originality? Who remembers what even the recent 9/11 commission said or accomplished? Name just one thing. I can not. Among others, two Louisiana politicians, Mary Landreau and Bobby Jindal have bitterly complained about the response of the federal government. It is as if they have been complete outsiders and not influential politicians in Louisiana. Landreau is a United States senator, her brother was the Lt. governor, and her father was a long time powerful politico in Louisiana. To paraphrase what Dr. Samuel Johnson said about the American colonialists, Landreau and Jindal should be thankful for any punishment for their culpability for this catastrophe - short of hanging.

What does come through is the generosity and just plain goodness of so many ordinary Americans. There are always the scam artists (according to the FBI there were 2300 phony Hurricane Katrina disaster relief web sites – some came from overseas) and as we all saw there were looters in New Orleans and Mississippi. When the massive amount of government and private relief monies came flooding in, so to speak, there were the inevitable stealing and ‘misappropriation’ of some of the funds.