Tag: Hurricane Katrina
Anne Rice: ‘Why Did America Ask a City to Fight for Its Own Life for So Long?’
“Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That’s my question. [Those who stayed behind] didn’t have any place to go.
“They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do — they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.”
— Anne Rice
Ball Keeps Getting Dropped and New Orleans People Keep Suffering
Jacksonville, Florida was ready for New Orleans’ sick and injured but, once again, somebody up the food chain appears to have dropped the ball.
The ill and injured from New Orleans emerged from the back of a C-130 Sunday morning to a flight line packed with Jacksonville rescue vehicles. Patients on stretchers were rolled directly into idling ambulances, where doctors waited for them…
The cancellation of a second flight wasn’t publicized until about 2 p.m., leaving about 100 workers and volunteers with a day of uncertainty inside a hangar.Scores of sailors, Jacksonville Fire Rescue Department workers, Red Cross volunteers and doctors contributed to a federal relief effort as the Air National Guard transported patients from New Orleans to Jacksonville in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
About 100 more patients were expected to arrive in the afternoon, but plans changed at the last minute. The cancellation of a second flight wasn’t publicized until about 2 p.m., leaving about 100 workers and volunteers with a day of uncertainty inside a hangar.
“We’ve been on stand-by for the last few days,” Commanding Officer Chip Dobson said.
Patients who arrived in the morning were taken to nine different hospitals in the Jacksonville area…
At Baptist Medical Center, the staff was ready for a crush that never came.
A nursing supervisor said she offered 47 beds for adults and 13 for children. As of Sunday morning, the hospital served three elderly patients from the New Orleans flight…
Preparations for the event began Tuesday, Dobson said. On that day, workers began setting up supplies in the hangar, he said. The plan followed by all the groups was created in case there was a need for cross-country transport of large numbers of people in need of hospitalization, he said.
“This was an existing plan that has never been activated before,” Dobson said.
It wasn’t immediately clear if more patients would arrive today or in the near future.
Jeez. At what point does the impeachment process begin?
What Happened to FEMA?
The first barrage in the White House campaign to revise reality about the administration’s failure to respond to last week’s hurricane disaster is to float the idea that there is a “blame game” going on between federal and local officials, or rather, between Republicans in Washington and Democrats in Louisiana. They’re going to have trouble blaming the hobbling of FEMA on the Democrats however, in light of these facts:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency once speedily delivered food, water, shelter and medical care to disaster areas, and paid to quickly rebuild damaged roads and schools and get businesses and people back on their feet. Like a commercial insurance firm setting safety standards to prevent future problems, it also underwrote efforts to get cities and states to reduce risks ahead of time and plan for what they would do if calamity struck.
But in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, FEMA lost its Cabinet-level status as it was folded into the giant new Department of Homeland Security. And in recent years it has suffered budget cuts, the elimination or reduction of key programs and an exodus of experienced staffers.
The agency’s core budget, which includes disaster preparedness and mitigation, has been cut each year since it was absorbed by the Homeland Security Department in 2003. Depending on what the final numbers end up being for next fiscal year, the cuts will have been between about 2% and 18%.
The agency’s staff has been reduced by 500 positions to 4,735. Among the results, FEMA has had to cut one of its three emergency management teams, which are charged with overseeing relief efforts in a disaster. Where it once had “red,” “white” and “blue” teams, it now has only red and white.
Three out of every four dollars the agency provides in local preparedness and first-responder grants go to terrorism-related activities, even though a recent Government Accountability Office report quotes local officials as saying what they really need is money to prepare for natural disasters and accidents.
This Week Rove Must Revise Reality about Last Week’s Worst Performance Yet by Nation’s Worst President Ever
FEMA screwed up. The aid was demonstrably not forthcoming when it was needed. The buck stops at the top. Period. Game and match.
Predictably, the Bush message-meisters are launching a trademark hardball, all-politics-all-the-time campaign to rewrite the events of last week to so that the administration’s worst week becomes someone else’s fault, and someone else’s problem.
The first wave of the campaign is a discussion generated about a “blame game” between federal and local officials. This is bogus. There is no blame game. The buck stops at the top – or at least it used to in this great country.
There are Republicans in the Congress who are leery of the Rove method as it is being applied to the administration’s failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their aides have leaked information about the White House rewriting reality campaign to the MSM:
Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.
The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.
Team Rove uses three tactics for changing reality:
Rightwing Pundits Finally Notice That Their Emporer Has No Clothes
Despite the fact that millions of cable news viewers witnessed the Bush Administration’s abysmal performance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the White House political team will soon begin a full-court press to rewrite the reality of what happened – and what didn’t – in New Orleans last week.
One way they’ll try to turn public opinion around is by smearing the news coverage as being relentlessly negative – a product of liberal bias. But they may have a harder time deploying this tactic this time than they usually do because several of their most reliably Rovable pundits have themselves gone off the reservation this time.
On Friday, New York Times rightwing columnist David Brooks cracked up over his disillusionment with the president on the News Hour:
[It] is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city … [People] feel lousy; people feel ashamed and part of that is because of the public presentation. In part that is because of the failure of Bush to understand immediately the shame people felt … Sitting up there on the airplane and looking out the window was terrible. And the three days of doing nothing, really, on Bush was terrible. And even today, I found myself, as you know, I support his politics quite often … [This] is how Mark Shields must feel looking at him, I’m angry at the guy and maybe it will pass for me. But a lot of people and a lot of Republicans are furious right now.
Former Gingrichite congressman from Florida Joe Scarborough, who hosts an hourlong, O’Reilly-lite show on MSNBC, went off book , calling the situation in the Gulf Coast region “nothing short of a national disgrace.”
Jeb’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’ – New Hybrid SUV
The Bradenton Herald:
Less than 24 hours after urging Floridians to turn up thermostats and curtail gasoline use in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Jeb Bush rode Friday in a white Ford Escape Hybrid…
“It’s kind of hard to be arguing to conserve gasoline when you’re driving around in a Ford Expedition that guzzles it down at a 6- to 8-mile-per-gallon clip,” Bush said after arriving at a northeast Tallahassee Mormon Church where hurricane evacuees were staying…
“This baby outside . . . makes more sense,” Bush said.
…Bush ordered state facilities to raise their thermostats to 78 degrees and take other energy saving measures. He asked all Floridians to do the same as part of a “shared sacrifice.”
Success! Arabian Horses Presumably Safe
If you don’t agree with Georgie that Brownie did a heckuva job in New Orleans, think again:
“He’s done a hell of a job, because I’m not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm,” said Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief who oversaw emergency response during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
The Miami Herald published more on the amazingly inappropriate background of FEMA Director Mike Brown today.
Boycott ExxonMobil
[Photo is of an oil well leaking near Port Fouchon, 100 miles southeast of New Orleans and was taken by Scott Saltzman/Bloomberg News]
A coalition of environmental groups is asking us to boycott ExxonMobil, and when you find out all the reasons why, you’ll say, “My pleasure!”
The campaign, called Exxpose Exxon, is targeting the ugly giant because of greed so huge that it blocks out the sun. From a Sierra Club mailing:
Exxon is leading lobbying efforts in Washington D.C to open the pristine Arctic Refuge in Alaska for drilling…after more than a decade, Exxon has still not yet fully paid for the extreme damage that resulted from the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William sound…and while you and I are being gouged at the gas pump, Exxon is reaping record high profits…over $25.3 billion in 2004…money that is paying for junk science designed to stop and stall action on global warming.
Whew. I’m convinced. But just in case you’re not, guess who Bush awarded the oil to that he’s releasing from the emergency reserves?
The Bush administration said it approved a loan of six million barrels from the emergency reserve to Exxon Mobil, and another one million barrels to Placid Refining. A third company, Valero, will receive 1.5 million barrels.
I smell a rat. An oily rat. […]
Message from Katrina to America: Wetlands Matter
The Gainesville Sun examines a critical factor in what happened to New Orleans.
You can call what happened to New Orleans “devastating,” “unprecedented,” “calamitous” and “profoundly disturbing.”
What you cannot call it is “unpredictable.”
…Neither, strictly speaking, can you call what happened to that “city in a bowl” a “natural disaster.” While it’s true that Katrina was a monstrous hurricane, the damage she wrought was equally “man-made.”
…Message from Katrina to America: Wetlands matter.
…But the wetlands of Louisiana’s southeast coast are an endangered species. Because of extensive alterations to the Mississippi River and poorly planned coastal development, Louisiana has been losing 25 square miles of wetlands a year.
…”Because of continuing land loss, many of coastal Louisiana’s populated areas, including New Orleans, are almost completely exposed to the Gulf of Mexico,” Valsin A. Marmillion, spokesman for America’s Wetland: Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana, said this week.
“The sad irony of the situation is that the Mississippi River levees, which were intended to protect lives in the 1930s have had the unintended consequence of laying waste to the very wetlands that are the state’s greatest natural protection,” he said.
