In a parking lot, in New Orleans.
Via Drudge who seems to be the first one asking how many of the poor, the very young and disabled, could have been moved out of New Orleans with that fleet, while the highways were still open and the streets dry and unobstructed?
I’ve been listening to Charles Adler and others today while I work, and I have to say, the lack of attention on cases of negligence of those civic officials charged with the first line of defense, is predictable. In their world, the only politician alive in America is George W. Bush.
But, by all means – you know-it-all media pundits, whine about how America is the wealthiest country in the world, whine about the delay in federal assets getting to the storm victims, raise the opportunistic hot button of racism, but while you’re at it – please share with the rest of us watching which fingers you’d snap.
And before you answer, here’s another question for you, if you believe the only factor lacking is will and organization.
Where are the lawyers?
Heard of any class-action suits?
Me either. That – more than any shortage of personnel carriers or rescue helicopters – should tell us everything we need to know about how difficult it is to access New Orleans.
Update Debris Trail delves into the logistics that the majority of the finger-snapping media experts seem incapable of comprehending.
Don’t hold you’re breath waiting Kate.
As for the anarchy running rampant in New Orleans now, New Orleans was always a violent city. It’s run by corrupt Democratic politicians and the streets are run by drug dealers and gangs, same as parts of many other cities in North America. Chicago comes to mind.
Last year university researchers conducted an experiment in which police fired 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire.
Ten years ago New Orleans was the murder capital of the United States. Today it is about ten times the national average.
This violence could have been largely averted if they had put these creeps behind bars, preferably below the water line.
I read today where they are now offering assistance for drug dealers in Vancouver. For those too sick to shoot themselves up they can now call for help. Does anyone think that these people would be conducting themselves any differently if this disaster had happened in the Lower Mainland?
A whole fleet of school buses – UNUSED and UNDERWATER!
New Orleans’ local elected officials made many tragic mistakes – if we are seeing roughly 100 school buses which could be jammed tight with 60 persons, potentially 6,000 people could have been evacuated.
Something which horrifies me about this tragedy is that foreign enemies like Al Qaida are studying the situation closely. The tragic mishandling of the hurricane evacuation is surely being studied by those who seek to inflict an attack on my U.S. homeland. I think local authorities fell seriously short of their best efforts.
Who they going to sue … the wind?
Interesting how there is no governance anymore. No one does their jobs anymore. It’s all fluff and pensions. Maybe a few more phoney baloney jobs for family and friends.
We pay taxes for very little nowadays. I am one individual who is sick of it.
Lies, failures, disappointments and more lies for your taxes. That’s it.
It will get better when we stop supporting what we have now.
Think?
The facts that seems to escape these morons are:
The victims of Katrina would not be dying, starving and missing creature comforts if they would have got the hell out of Dodge before it was too late, as they were told before the Hurricane.
The population of N.O. is compromised of a lot of “I am entitled” welfare recepients, and a whole lot of low life pieces of @#$%, which includes a lot of the N.O. Police Dept. as demonstrated by the looting and free for all grabing of goods, instead of using that same energy roaming the streets and helping the ones who needed help!
The mayor forgot, that it was his responsability to plan evacuations and emergency procedures, way in advance of the storm. It is his city not Bush’s. The police Dept is under his direct control and it his primary responsability to take care of the city.
The Governor forgets that it is her State and she has the National Guard and State police directly under her control, she has the primary responsibility to provide immidiate aid to a city that requires it. There should have been contingency plans made way in advance!
But than again, we all know that whatever happens in the U.S./world/galaxy is all Bush’s fault.
Arrive too early on the scene and it’s a photo-op. Too late he’s an un-caring whore to big oil, or whatever the anti-Bush swill du jour is being served up by the pussies in the MSM.
I lost a tremendous amount of respect for Charles Adler today. Just another ‘centrist’ Canadian broadcaster pretending to be ‘small c conservative’. But then again, he has to be a fence sitting centrist, to get airplay east of Winnipeg. Call yourself small c and the Corus network will give you western Canada and a sliver of the east ‘syndication’. Throw in just enough anti-American pap (like his little staged tirade today) to get the odd listener in Ontario. What a sellout. Bucking for a Senate seat Chuck?
Mr. Adler should know better, being a so-called “seasoned journalist”. It never ceases to amaze me how people will lash out on an issue without doing the research. This little exercise in “chain of command” is a prime example. “Prime Chuck?” Prime B.S.
6,000 people? That’s only one trip per bus. Think of how many could have been moved to safety 150 miles inland, the buses returning to pick up more, for the two days in which a national emergency was declared before the hurricane hit?
You know, Adler has a contact form. When you hear these guys go off the deep end, let them know.
Hey Kate:
When a blowhard sounds off in Canada does anyone hear it?
(down here in the south, ashamed of my federal government)
John A
Yes, I’m trolling but I need the exposure…
Trained / Experienced in the following:
– Industrial Medic
– Surface Mine Rescue
– High-Speed Trauma
– Search and Rescue
– High-angle Rescue
– First Aid Instructor
– Triage
– Wilderness Extrication
– Industrial Firefighting
– Medi-Vac LZ Set-Up and Control
Have all of my own equipment (SCBA excluded)
Haven’t been able to figure out how to get down south (lousiana or mississippi) to help… My own contacts are comming up empty…
This is an open request: If anyone has any information on who to contact please let me know. It would also be helpful if you could put a link to this post on your own sites as well. The more eyeballs that see it, the better the chances of it being seen by the right people.
I’m more than willing to go, and stay, as long as I’m needed. (contact me here: http://nomoresocialism.blogspot.com/2005/09/put-me-in-coach.html )
Sorry Kate but I’m at my wits end… Have to get mobolized… Can’t sit here any longer… Almost ready to drive down on my own…
Watching this tragedy unfold in the Big Easy, one can only ponder on what would happen if it occurred in THIS country! Scary thought!
I just had CNN on and the race-baiting continues. They did a segment where they mentioned how “quick” Bush was to show up at the World Trade Center (where the firefighters were white) but how it took him five days to show up at the hurricane site. He was at the WTC site on Friday, Sept. 15, the fourth day after 9/11. Today is the fourth day after the levee breaks and his second visit to the area counting the flyover two days ago. CNN has no shame.
“This is an open request: If anyone has any information on who to contact please let me know….
FEMA�s Hurricane Katrina information page, including disaster and emergency declarations, news releases, information for businesses, and other resources.
http://www.fema.gov/press/2005/resources_katrina.shtm
Resources for finding loved ones and information about emergency response.
http://www.firstgov.gov/Citizen/Topics/PublicSafety/Hurricane_Katrina_Recovery.shtml#vgn-disaster-cleanup-and-agency-resources-vgn
For an “act of God” the left would sue God himself.
Sorry Kate, I don’t listen to Adler. I just don’t trust anybody with a beard. Kind of like all the bald dippers.
Thanks JM but I’ve checked those… Haven’t found anywhere that they’re asking for SAR / Medic assistance…
Wait a second, it’s the fifth biggest port and you’re surprised that it’s corrupt?
Get a grip, sailor boy. Have you ever been blown ashore? Big ports are always corrupt.
The point is, we need that port. For October’s harvest, if not before; not in 2006.
I counted 223 buses in the picture. A typical bus has a capacity of 66-72.
http://www.cbe.ab.ca/transportation/Safety.asp
In an emergency another 20 people could sit in the middle isle. I have done it a couple of times as a kid. During the evacuation traffic is usually moving at a snails pace so the safety risk of people in the isle is not very big. ~90 X ~220 = 19,800 people that could have been transported out just from what I can see in the picture.
9000 people stayed at the Superdome during the storm. Does the city you live in have an evacuation plan? I will have to send this article to my local councilor.
Having been to NO many times in my Semi to make deliveries, and seeing that I10 to the east was decimated as well as the causeways to the north(both across lake ponchartrain and I55)I can also imagine that I10 west is impassible. Trucks have to use the interstates in that area because the surface roads and bridges cannot take the weight of a loaded truck ,so this explains the length of time it took for supplies to reach the affected.
But it is much easier to blame President Bush than to take responsibility for your own poor choices. This was the Mayor’s city but he did not take the storm seriously enough to evacuate as many people as possible. Seeing all those busses there sure does seem to deflate the arguement that the poor were neglected by the Feds when the Mayor himself could have mobilized the fleet.
The breach in the 17th street canal was also joke
in that the Mayor and the Governor as well countless local officials all knew that the levees could only be counted on to hold in a cat3 hurricane and they knew it was at least a cat4 well before it came ashore.This same levee was just upgraded and was the last place they thought it would breach. As for the funding cutbacks this spring that is also blamed on Bush , these things take years to build ,I heard in a interview today by someone in the army corps of engineers that upwards of twenty years would be needed to upgrade all of the levees to withstand a cat5 storm.
I think that all this handwringing from the left is just disgusting and tasteless these people need help and all those pointing fingers can just stick them up their ass.
I have read your post and have been profoundly disturbed by it.
First of all, let me indicate my background: I am no bleeding heart liberal. From a very early age, I have been on the right side of the political spectrum and do not in general favor government action. While I was born in Saskatchewan during WWII and both sides of my family are from that province, I have lived most my life–all but one year–in Ontario. Ayn Rand, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell were the authors of my youth who most impressed me and they still strongly influence my thinking. However, for all that I think your post is wrongly conceived: to illustrate this let me mention three classes of people in New Orleans who your post either ignores or deals with inadequately.
The Aged: my mother is alive, still lives independently, can drive and has a car, yet if she lived in New Orleans and were faced with a choice of staying or leaving I think she would have elected to stay and I think this would have been the rational choice for her at the time and at her age, even though ultimately it may have led to her death. Do you really think that given the choice between the uncertain risks of staying where she was and the uncertain and the difficult to cope with risks of hitting the road as an octogenarian vagabond without roots to an unknown destination, it can be said that her decision to stay was wrong at the time it was made and should so held against her as to disentitle her to government assistance? Hindsight is a wonderful, but useless measure, of the correctness of a decision at the time it is made.
The Poor: by poor, I mean those without access to motor vehicles capable of getting out of the hurricane�s area of destruction. Your post dismisses the poor with the comment they could have walked. Well, I am a golfer and I know I can walk at least 8 miles a day. Although getting on in years, I figure I could make at least 15 miles a day even carrying enough water and food to survive 3 or 4 days, but I could not walk much more. For the average non-golfer, though, I think 15 miles a day carrying such supplies would be a stretch and for those with small children impossible. However, let�s assume 15 miles a day as a standard, for the sake of the argument.
Now if you study the storm track:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at200512.asp
you will see that the earliest one might have predicted that Katrina might be heading in the New Orleans direction, as opposed to anywhere else in the Gulf and was likely to be more than a Category 2 is about 6:00PM EST on the Friday before the storm hit, so the poor of New Orleans could only have got about 30 miles outside of the city. (If the moral obligation to start walking is asserted to have arisen any earlier, then all of the poor on any coast anywhere in the Gulf should have taken to their heels as soon as the storm passed through Florida.) Even accepting that getting 30 miles to the west of New Orleans would have improved the poor�s survival chances, how could you have expected the poor to know to go west�knowledge of hurricane dynamics is not an innate human characteristic. Being 30 miles north or east of New Orleans without cover when the hurricane struck would probably have been more likely to result in death than staying put�look at the NOAA satellite pictures. I did not hear of any authority recommending that those who had no transportation start walking east at any time, let alone two days before the storm hit.
Now as far as I can see the bulk of the people who stayed in New Orleans are comprised of the two categories referred to above, but I am willing to admit that there is a third category: the Stupid. I mean by that those who had the means to leave and the capacity to cope with the problems of the trip, but did not leave the city. I do not know how many of these there are, but I will accept that there are a large number of them. Nevertheless does the fact that the Stupid exist, justify society in letting them perish, even if one could somehow separate them from the first two categories? I think not and only a social Darwinian would dare to contradict that view. The 20th century has I think sufficiently discredited that philosophy.
(I have stated the foregoing without adverting to the racial aspects of the situation in order not to be too inflammatory. Please do not assume that I think that the race of the bulk of the people that were likely to remain and did remain in New Orleans is not an element in the inadequacy of the response.)
You show a picture of a large number of buses (well more than 60) sitting in a parking lot in New Orleans and ask why the city did not use them to get people out of the city before the storm. Where, pray tell, on Sunday last before the storm reached the city were those buses supposed to go?
Fact of the matter is that if government has any major purpose beyond protecting the governed from foreign aggressors, it is to provide an organized and efficient response to disasters of this nature. The US federal and the Mississippi state governments have woefully failed to provide an adequate response. The nature and extent of what has happened were subject to uncontested and accurate forecasts well in advance of the event, a computer simulation that in fact mirrored reality was run at least 6 months ago. To take 5 days (at least 6 days actually from the date that the disaster was known to be a reasonable certainty) to effect or start to effect a minimally adequate response in the circumstances constitutes a total failure of those governments in fulfilling their functions.
In fact, the federal and state governmental response to the event has been so slow and so bad that, in my view, if I as an individual had failed in an analogous way to protect another person to whom I owed an analogous duty and that person died, I would be guilty of criminal negligence. Politicians and bureaucrats, however, get to write and administer laws in a way that protect their own asses at the expense of the governed.
Of course, jldill, the governemnt’s response will always be at best marginal. Otherwise, the non-beneficiaries would de-elect them.
That’s why you can never trust them.
“You show a picture of a large number of buses (well more than 60) sitting in a parking lot in New Orleans and ask why the city did not use them to get people out of the city before the storm. Where, pray tell, on Sunday last before the storm reached the city were those buses supposed to go?”
Your own discussion notes that they were aware of the problem on Friday… They had a full two days to get their shit together…
I was listening to a talk radio show out of NO on that friday and they were even talking about not being able to broadcast on monday…
Two days warning and better than 60 busses left to drown…
jldill
How pray tell were they supposed to speed it up ?
Is it your assertion that they were deliberately slow?
You seem as stupid as that asshat Jack Cafferty on CNN the other day saying they should just drop sandwiches down into the Superdome.
Even if you could do such a thing and the weight of all those sandwiches didn’t crush a few people the stampede without the order that the national guard seems to bring would have probabally got even more people killed.
“You show a picture of a large number of buses (well more than 60) sitting in a parking lot in New Orleans and ask why the city did not use them to get people out of the city before the storm. Where, pray tell, on Sunday last before the storm reached the city were those buses supposed to go?”
The same place they are going now , anywhere but where they were.
Hi Richard
I, like you have a great desire to get my butt down there to help ASAP. I have trolled the net to find and e-mail as many short CV’s to any group and public agency I can in Canada and the states the day after this disaster started to unfold.
My background is shipboard marine engineering and stationary engineering. With lots of experience with water making, sewage disposal systems and thus far it has been too no avail.
I realize you have a skill set that could be used NOW, not tomorrow and in my opinion your ass should be on a plane NOW. Unfortunately the enormity of the situation has everyone in line lock while trying to find their assholes.
What I have also discovered is the first responder structures have a bureaucratic necessity of having everyone they deploy trained to a standard that requires all people to do a course before they can deploy. (tell that to the poor sods down there)
Tell you what, send me an e-mail and if I hear anything that you should know about I will get in contact with you ASAP.
Glen Braid e-mail: shippedout@hotmail.com
Amazing we have all these pictures of no help from news teams that could have maybe took supplies of some type in or people out you know the lady with 7week old baby and nothing else or some of the people in wheelchairs but if they did that there would not have been as much suffering to film and to blame Bush and the people in power for
(it way not have been much but better then the blame game)
For the kind person who above was advertising his willingness to come down here and provide some help – contact Mississippi Emergency Management. Here in the Magnolia State, we actually have a planning framework in place and are taking common-sense steps to coordinate and deal with this disaster, unlike Louisiana, which is setting a world record for criminal incompetence.
The buses:
“…they were aware of the problem on Friday…” In fact that’s Friday afternoon. Surely making such arrangements, mobilizing the bus drivers and collecting the 18,000 people would take at least a day hence my ignoring Saturday.
Actually, the municipal, state and federal authorities were aware of the problem months and years before Katrina, but does anyone really think that in the absense of a real emergency the mayor of New Orleans could have found a place (and given the uncertainties of a hurricane’s path there probably would have needed to be several places) willing to accept 18,000 of the city’s poor, aged or infirm, mostly black without a real hurricane to concentrate the mind. Once there was an actual emegency impending perhaps that might have been possible, but any place then selected is going to raise the problems of sheltering and supplying, for an indefinite period, the people thus moved. Maybe stopgap arrangements for supply and accomodation could have been made, but does anyone really believe two days would have been enough to organize all that.
How are you going to collect a hundred let alone 18,000 persons without being able to tell them with some specificity where they’re going and what’s going to happen to them when they get there?
Another poster noted that the buses could have made more than one trip. However, based on the traffic I saw on the roads out of New Orleans before the storm that would have been impossible.
“…they were aware of the problem on Friday…”
As Katrina approached, HR shifted into action mode
By Kathy Gurchiek
http://www.shrm.org/hrnews_published/CMS_013938.asp#P-11_0
…What appeared to be a �small nuisance� on Friday turned over the weekend into a category 5 hurricane that found the vice president of human resources for Southern Farm Bureau�s Jackson, Miss., office searching the building�s grounds on Sunday for objects that might become airborne missiles and arranging for a backup generator.
Hurricane Katrina was generally perceived as only a moderate threat late last week as it crossed south Florida, so few HR professionals in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama thought it necessary to brief their employees in detail about their disaster plans before everyone went home for the weekend. By Sunday night, however, Southern Farm Bureau�s Billy Sims, SPHR, and HR professionals like him across the Gulf Coast region were taking steps to limit damage to their businesses and, in particular, to encourage workers to stay away from danger.
Katrina kept about one-third of the Farm Bureau office�s 650 employees home on Monday as the storm gathered force, causing schools and day care centers there to close as it bore toward Alabama and Mississippi after hitting parts of Louisiana.
�This was such a small nuisance on Friday,� when Katrina was ranked a category 1 storm, said Sims. But over the weekend he and other support staff, including the building engineer and security personnel, were preparing for the likelihood Katrina would barrel into their area…
“Thanks JM but I’ve checked those…
Try here:
http://www.shrm.org/hurricanekatrina.asp
Thank You RS… I’ll chase it down this am
Hi Richard
Here is some information I picked up from the Mississippi Emergency Management’s web site.
MISSISSIPPI EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY
HURRICANE KATRINA NEWS RELEASE
CONTACT: (601) 352-9100
�Disaster Preparedness Saves Lives and Property�
Visit us online at http://www.msema.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 9 a.m. Aug. 31, 2005
HURRICANE KATRINA VOLUNTEER INFORMATION
Jackson, Miss. � Mississippians and people across the world are asking about how to volunteer
to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Thank you.
PROFESSIONAL SEARCH AND RESCUE VOLUNTEERS
Professional search and rescue volunteers must contact MEMA Search and Rescue Support at
601-360-0937 to receive credentials allowing them to pass roadblocks.
PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL VOLUNTEERS
Please contact the following:
Nurses:
Miss. State Board of Nursing
Delia Owens
601-497-8022
Physicians and EMT�s
Miss. State Board of Health
601-576-8085
NON-PROFESSIONAL VOLUNTEERS
At this time we are working to improve access into affected areas, and establish food, water,
shelter and sanitation. Once that is completed, we will be able to deploy volunteers.
Please contact volunteer organizations such as your local Red Cross, Salvation Army and local
churches. The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) group will work
with these organizations to coordinate volunteer manpower. You may also contact NVOAD at
http://www.nvoad.org.
Once it is safe, hopefully in the next few days, we will have a reserve of volunteers that we can
put to best use.
###
Good Luck and be safe
Glen
sarge her. while of course we (lots of republicans ) are apropriatly blaming bush, we really have it out for this incompitent bastard running FEMA, and the govenor of LA. rumour has it bush’s popularity numbers are now in the 20’s
I would get ahold of the american red cross for volunteer info
btw…americna conservatives are not quite the same as american neocons. try not to forget that, my little kanukistani
“Michael Brown is a lawyer and GOP party activist. Before he came to FEMA in 2001, he had a full-time job overseeing horse-shows as the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. He started with them in 1991. But he was eventually fired because of what the Herald describes as “after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.”
But the stars were shining on Brown because President Bush had just been elected. And he appointed his chief political fixer Joe Allbaugh to replace James Lee Witt as head of FEMA.
That was a good break for the recently-canned Brown, because, as we learn from the Herald, he and Allbaugh were college roommates. He hired Brown as his General Counsel at FEMA in February. And then, by the end of the year, he promoted him to Deputy Director.
Then, little more than a year later, Allbaugh left FEMA to set up New Bridge Strategies, a consultancy to cash in on the Iraqi contracts bonanza. On Allbaugh’s departure from FEMA, Brown became Director, in charge of federal domestic emergency management in the United States.
So, just to recap, Brown had no experience whatsoever in emergency management. He was fired from his last job for incompetence. He was hired because he was the new director’s college roommate. And after the director — who himself got the job because he was a political fixer for the president — left, he became top dog. And President Bush said yesterday that he thinks Brown is “doing a helluva job”.
More buses under water pictures:
http://junkyardblog.net/archives/week_2005_08_28.html#004752
Google maps picture of buses and rest of the city
http://tinyurl.com/bdkwe
Unbelieveable.
“…rumour has it bush’s popularity numbers are now in the 20’s’….”
That’s got to be keeping his campaign team up at night.
Quidnunc “Savant”
After reading your comments directed at jldill I couldn’t help wondering if “Savant” was an alias.
Pennington, that was a graceful jab, had me laughing out loud. I’m not laughing at your expense Savant, you have to admit to the humour. eh? ‘3s TG
The buses could clearly move very few people, assuming there were bus drivers for them.
The roads were clogged.
There was nowhere for the people to go anyway. Witness where they are going now: outside the state.
Those whom can leave, leave, the rest hunker down at the dome. Rescue anyone else using local, state and federal resources.
A state of emergency was declared Aug 26.
Officially, the levees weren’t supposed to breach, they were supposed to overflow.
They breached after the storm passed, which is why we went from relief to emergency, and I think caused considerable confusion at all levels of government.
Walking out? This hurricane hit hard 100 miles inland. The walkers would be dead.