Tag: Hurricane Katrina

Media matters: Finally, federal agencies have gotten their act together and have established a wireless command center brimming with laptops, cell phones and public information officers ready to meet the needs of the press. Now we’ll get some fair and balanced news for a change.

Ordinarily, following a natural disaster the Federal Emergency Management Agency sets up a shared command center with other federal agencies as a clearinghouse for disseminating information to the media. In the case of Katrina, the devastation was so vast that the feds couldn’t get it together for almost three weeks — after most of the reputation damage has been done.

“Although we are concerned about our image and want to give people information, we are really here to help people,” said Dean Cushman, an official with FEMA, an agency that has received the brunt of criticism. “Our image comes second.”

Uh-huh. What is that warm liquid running down my leg? Oh, it’s raining, is it?

Here’s what’s happening at the command center:

At the joint information center, which is housed at an old department store in Baton Rouge, La., officials have laptop computers with wireless Internet connections and cellular telephones to “rapidly respond” to media questions. In the media monitoring section, eight officials watch the news constantly and track stories online. Another group churns out press releases on the agencies’ efforts, while colleagues respond to inquiries from the media hotline.

Everyone is working 12 hour days, seven days a week, Cushman said.

FEMA has 2,000 laptops in the region, along with 1,000 cell phones and 1,000 land lines and another 2,000 laptops in transit. Let the spin begin!

No answer: James Kitfield, writing in the “National Journal,” makes some interesting observations in the course of examining why the military response was so slow in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

What follows are some of the juicier excerpts. Read the whole article here.

• “My biggest mistake is having a fundamental assumption that … in the country of the United States, that can move whole fleets of aircraft carriers across the globe in 24 hours — that my fundamental assumption was to get as many people to safety as possible, and that the cavalry would be coming within two to three days,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And they didn’t come.”
• The conclusion of the many post-Katrina investigations now under way is likely to be that in a time of mass chaos — just as Iraqis found in the spring and summer of 2003 — even the world’s best military cannot instantly and simultaneously stop the looting, restore order, transport mountains of supplies, and repair badly damaged infrastructure in a place approximating a war zone.
• “Given that the tsunami killed 150,000 people [in Southeast Asia], I frankly think we responded pretty well to a storm that might have done the same, given the density of the population in the area where it hit,” said James Carafano, a homeland-security expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Essentially, Katrina was a nuclear bomb without a mushroom cloud or radiation.”
• “People may want to simplify the chain of command and make one person accountable, but under our federal system,” said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, “responsibility starts at the local level and works its way up from the bottom. And unless you are willing to quickly federalize police, firefighters, and other first responders in a crisis, and re-examine the Constitution and the federalist system that has been embedded in our ethos since 1776, we may have to live with that fact. In the meantime, the sad truth is that the terrorists are likely looking at our response to Katrina and taking notes. As bad as Mother Nature is, she doesn’t intentionally plan to kill people.”

This is it kids. They’re going to vote on a budget resolution that will have a hidden clause that will sneak in drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They’re going to do it tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 20. If you were waiting for the signal in order to act, here it is.

The Sierra Club is exposing the typical Bush shenanigans:

After decades of being told “no,” Big Oil and its allies in Congress — in the face of overwhelming public support for protecting this national treasure — have buried the controversial Arctic drilling measure deep in the budget. And in recent weeks they have exploited the Hurricane Katrina tragedy as an excuse to drill in the Arctic and off our coasts. Don’t let them get away with these tricks!

Go here to the Defenders of Wildlife, and all you have to do is click on “senators” or “representatives” and supply your info. An email will be sent to your particular people in Washington, both senators and representatives. How easy can this be? They’ve already written a message for you, but I redid it a little. Feel free to customize mine to your tastes:

Please don’t give in to anyone who tells you it would be politically unpopular to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Vote against the budget reconciliation package if it allows oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Demand a clean budget bill that doesn’t include a hidden raid on our nation’s wilderness.

We can’t drill our way out of our oil dependence. We consume 25% of the earth’s oil reserves, and if we drilled every last one of ours – in the Gulf of Mexico, in Alaska – we’d only have 3%.

It’s time to start living within our means in this country – that includes oil, other resources, and budget. It saddens me that under George Bush, America is no longer the great country it once was, but all of us alive today have an obligation to keep it from sliding further into selfish oblivion. Please do your job as a public servant, and do what’s right. Vote against the budget reconciliation package.

The site is being heavily trafficked tonight (thank you, Lord!), so it might time out a couple of times before you get in. Keep trying.

Do this. Do it now. It’s just too easy and what will happen if you don’t do it is too frickin’ hard. Come on, click.

FactCheck.org’s Hurricane Katrina timeline is the most detailed I’ve seen. Check it out here.

“In a ruined city – still largely without power, stinking with piles of garbage and still 40 percent submerged; where people are foraging in the miasma and muck for food, corpses and the sentimental detritus of their lives; and where unbearably sad stories continue to spill out about hordes of evacuees who lost their homes and patients who died in hospitals without either electricity or rescuers – isn’t it rather tasteless, not to mention a waste of energy, to haul in White House generators just to give the president a burnished skin tone and a prettified background?

— Maureen Dowd

Scary Prognosis:Jim Diaz, MD, PhD and professor of public health for the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, provided the following assessment of the current state and near future for the health of people along the Gulf Coast:

Vibrio cholerae is not endemic in Louisiana, but more pathogenic non-cholera Vibrios are, and they have already killed and will continue to do so.

I have been [back] to New Orleans, and there are no mosquitoes now; all larvae were killed by floating petrochemicals. The ARBOR diseases [Arthropod-borne viruses, i.e., arboviruses, are viruses that are maintained in nature through biological transmission between susceptible vertebrate hosts by blood feeding arthropods (mosquitoes, psychodids, ceratopogonids, and ticks). ] will return soon, principally West Nile virus — worse than in Mississippi — and spraying will be required later when the floodwaters recede.

Current mild diarrheal diseases are viral and secondary to poor sanitation and endemic RNA enteric viruses. More serious dysenteric disease outbreaks could follow among those who are not evacuating flooded areas and who are consuming contaminated food and water. Dysenteric diseases should not be a problem in well-run shelters.

Baton Rouge will probably have a hepatitis A outbreak in 4-6 weeks, but there are inadequate stocks of vaccine to respond to an outbreak.
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“I think all of those remarks were disgusting, to be perfectly frank. Of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country.”

— First Lady Laura Bush, reacting to statements by rapper Kanye West and others that President Bush is apathetic about blacks. For this statement and more, she is winner of Buzzflash‘s GOP Hypocrite of the Week award

Words as words: This is a lexical analysis of George Bush’s speech delivered Sept. 15, 2005, from New Orleans.

Bush used a total of 1,785 words, 929 of them different words. The lexical complexity of the speech was 52 percent, and the readability factor based on the Gunning-Fog Index was 10.6, where 6 is easy and 20 is difficult. The readability factor was 44, where 100 is easy, 20 is difficult and optimal is 60-70.

Bush averaged 1.68 syllables per word and spoke 162 sentences that averaged 20.8 words per sentence. Bush’s longest sentence was 54 words:

We have also witnessed the kind of desperation no citizen of this great and generous nation should ever have to know, fellow Americans calling out for food and water, vulnerable people left at the mercy of criminals who had no mercy and the bodies of the dead lying uncovered and untended in the street.

Bush used mostly short words, 680 three-letter words, and only one 15-letter word. There were no words or phrases repeated at any statistically significant rate in the 20-minute address.

This speech is comparable to most of Bush’s speeches. He tends to rate in the 40s for readability and in the middle of the difficulty factor (except for the State of the Union speech, which was especially difficult to understand). He uses a lot of little words, but significantly, he did not repeat key words or phrases often in this speech, also a departure from the State of the Union address and other policy-oriented elocutions.

Lame blame: Former FEMA director Michael Brown has apparently decided that the time for putting off the “blame game” has expired. In an interview for an article in the New York Times, Brown has blamed the Democratic governor of Louisiana and just about everyone involved in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster, with two notable exceptions: President Bush and himself.

Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

Mr. Brown … said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an “out of control” situation.

“I am having a horrible time,” Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official – either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin – in a status report that evening. “I can’t get a unified command established.”

Not so, an unidentified White House told the Times:

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