AWOL
Among the most galling traits of the Bush administration are lack of foresight and absence of practical problem-solving abilities. Examples abound in Iraq, but sadly, the response to Hurricane Katrina shows the same failings.
This morning on Good Morning America, the President paid lip service to the growing frustration with the federal response. With that odd half-smile that one assumes is meant to be charming, he said "I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday." From the way he said it, it was clear he was using the idiomatic sense of "wanting it yesterday", which shows his disconnection from the idea that many things could have happened literally yesterday, August 31, but didn't, 48 hours or more after the storm.
Mr. Bush expressed surprise at the New Orleans flooding, saying "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Mr. Bush may be the only one in the country for whom the levee breaks came as a surprise. It was clear last weekend that a hurricane of record-setting intensity was headed for New Orleans. And it took only a few seconds on Google to find a Times-Picayune series about what might happen in such a storm. The only surprise was that the levee breaks happened in the hours immediately following the storm, not during its peak.
Katrina crossed Florida at the end of last week. Once it was in the warm waters of the Gulf, it was predicted to gain strength, and it was probable a major hurricane would hit the Gulf Coast. By early in the day on Sunday, it was clear that a Class 5 hurricane was on a track for New Orleans.
Let's imagine a world where our expectations hadn't been diminished by years of living with this President. Let's mentally place ourselves in a world where we are governed by thoughtful and talented leaders who truly care for our nation and its people. What might that have been like?
On Sunday, the White House gets news about the hurricane bearing down on New Orleans. In a truly happy world, it's because they've been getting frequent updates on the storm from the National Hurricane Center ever since it approached Florida, but maybe in this case it's from watching the TV news. Whatever. Bush did, in fact, sign the paperwork to declare a disaster area before the storm made landfall. But not much else happened. In our happy imagination, people understanding the threat of such a storm would have ordered the federal government into action Sunday, deploying resources in anticipation of the needs. But not in our world, Bush-world.
Apparently no one dusted off the "Gulf Coast Disaster Plan" and the "New Orleans Disaster Plan." Those plans seem to have been lost, and never re-written. No one dispatched ships out of Norfolk, so that they could have already sailed most of the way to where they were needed. The Bush administration says that a hospital ship will be leaving Baltimore on Friday. James Lee Witt, Clinton's FEMA head, said there was a plan in the 90s for pre-deploying Navy hospital ships and ships with huge pumping capacity to drain the city. What happened to that plan?
The problem isn't that this disaster is a surprise. The problem is that this administration has been dropping the ball, and worse, ripping the ball out of the hands of those that have been trying to work on it.
Why is it that the City of Houston, and its school district seem to be the only ones able to respond quickly? This morning they were able to have perfectly aligned rows of cots on the floor of the Astrodome, and the schools were making plans to enroll refugee children. One assumes they figured all of that out since Tuesday. One assumes that the city budget doesn't happen to have a line item for "rushing to the aid of a nearby metropolis", but somehow they've been able to get it done.
Is anyone on the federal level addressing the need to relocate the entire population of the City of New Orleans, much less Gulfport or Biloxi? Are cots, feeding stations, sanitation and medical care being set up at military bases across the South and Midwest? Today? Have we started organizing trains, planes, trucks and busses to simply move all those people? Has anyone in the federal government actually yet developed an off-the-shelf scheme for transplanting the population of a city?
And if not, why not? We've had four years of color-coded terror alerts and fear-mongering. Hasn't it occurred to someone that we might be in this position? The sad fact is that for all the talk about the war on terror, the emphasis has been more on attacking Iraq than on preparing at home. Despite years of warnings about the horrors threatening from the yearly hurricane season, or an attack on the petrochemical nexus of southern Louisiana, our government is unprepared.
Yes, this time it was a massive hurricane that has flooded a city and left it uninhabitable, but it could have been the long-predicted terrorist strike. What if the levees had been breached by explosive devices, not storm waters? What if the as-yet-unquantified horror leaving a city uninhabitable for weeks or months wasn't the toxic soup of petrochemicals, sewage and rot that is cooking in the Big Easy, but radiological waste, or biochemical weapons? Or that same soup with radiological components?
The Coast Guard and the other first-responders are doing what they are trained to do - rescue people. And they are working hard at it. And local governments, and local level representatives of federal agencies, have been at work. But the overall response has been chaotic and slow. It's over 72 hours since the storm made landfall. The clock is ticking. We can forgive the people on the scene for being overwhelmed, and they are focussed, properly, on saving lives. It is the responsibility of leaders outside the disaster zone to provide forward-looking assistance, and to be taking the pressure off those on the scene by solving the problems the locals aren't able to get to. Like cots for the Astrodome. Or what the heck we're going to do with all those people while we're rebuilding New Orleans, or Biloxi, or Gulfport. And how to rebuild in ways that make sense ecologically, so we can spare ourselves a repetition of this.
This morning on TV, Bush called for the people in the disaster zone to "take personal responsibility and assume a civic sense of responsibility" and to not "exploit the vulnerable." He was talking about looters and price-gougers, but I couldn't help thinking we needed him to take that advice. Sadly, he's a believer in "do as I say, not as I do."
As if all that weren't bad enough, interviewer Dianne Sawyer asked him about the potential costs of the recovery, particularly in view of the huge cost of the war in Iraq, and our burgeoning deficit. According to Sawyer, he said we would be able to both recover from this disaster and continue funding the war in Iraq, without the need for a tax increase. (I'm guess he has had time to decide about a tax increase. Maybe while he was looking out the plane window?)
This morning on Good Morning America, the President paid lip service to the growing frustration with the federal response. With that odd half-smile that one assumes is meant to be charming, he said "I fully understand people wanting things to have happened yesterday." From the way he said it, it was clear he was using the idiomatic sense of "wanting it yesterday", which shows his disconnection from the idea that many things could have happened literally yesterday, August 31, but didn't, 48 hours or more after the storm.
Mr. Bush expressed surprise at the New Orleans flooding, saying "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Mr. Bush may be the only one in the country for whom the levee breaks came as a surprise. It was clear last weekend that a hurricane of record-setting intensity was headed for New Orleans. And it took only a few seconds on Google to find a Times-Picayune series about what might happen in such a storm. The only surprise was that the levee breaks happened in the hours immediately following the storm, not during its peak.
Katrina crossed Florida at the end of last week. Once it was in the warm waters of the Gulf, it was predicted to gain strength, and it was probable a major hurricane would hit the Gulf Coast. By early in the day on Sunday, it was clear that a Class 5 hurricane was on a track for New Orleans.
Let's imagine a world where our expectations hadn't been diminished by years of living with this President. Let's mentally place ourselves in a world where we are governed by thoughtful and talented leaders who truly care for our nation and its people. What might that have been like?
On Sunday, the White House gets news about the hurricane bearing down on New Orleans. In a truly happy world, it's because they've been getting frequent updates on the storm from the National Hurricane Center ever since it approached Florida, but maybe in this case it's from watching the TV news. Whatever. Bush did, in fact, sign the paperwork to declare a disaster area before the storm made landfall. But not much else happened. In our happy imagination, people understanding the threat of such a storm would have ordered the federal government into action Sunday, deploying resources in anticipation of the needs. But not in our world, Bush-world.
Apparently no one dusted off the "Gulf Coast Disaster Plan" and the "New Orleans Disaster Plan." Those plans seem to have been lost, and never re-written. No one dispatched ships out of Norfolk, so that they could have already sailed most of the way to where they were needed. The Bush administration says that a hospital ship will be leaving Baltimore on Friday. James Lee Witt, Clinton's FEMA head, said there was a plan in the 90s for pre-deploying Navy hospital ships and ships with huge pumping capacity to drain the city. What happened to that plan?
The problem isn't that this disaster is a surprise. The problem is that this administration has been dropping the ball, and worse, ripping the ball out of the hands of those that have been trying to work on it.
Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.Short-changing disaster preparedness and pre-planning might not be so bad, if there was a clear ability to rapidly respond when needed on an ad hoc basis. If we knew we had a capability to quickly assess and respond to needs, creatively and without confusion, that would be different. But we don't have that.
This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens. But funding for that planning was cut, said [former FEMA disaster-response chief Eric] Tolbert, who also was disaster chief for North Carolina.
"A lot of good was done, but it just wasn't finished," he said. "I don't know if it would have saved more lives. It would have made the response faster. You might say it would have saved lives."
FEMA was not alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.
Federal flood-control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped, from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers' budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.
Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.
In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency-management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper.
Why is it that the City of Houston, and its school district seem to be the only ones able to respond quickly? This morning they were able to have perfectly aligned rows of cots on the floor of the Astrodome, and the schools were making plans to enroll refugee children. One assumes they figured all of that out since Tuesday. One assumes that the city budget doesn't happen to have a line item for "rushing to the aid of a nearby metropolis", but somehow they've been able to get it done.
Is anyone on the federal level addressing the need to relocate the entire population of the City of New Orleans, much less Gulfport or Biloxi? Are cots, feeding stations, sanitation and medical care being set up at military bases across the South and Midwest? Today? Have we started organizing trains, planes, trucks and busses to simply move all those people? Has anyone in the federal government actually yet developed an off-the-shelf scheme for transplanting the population of a city?
And if not, why not? We've had four years of color-coded terror alerts and fear-mongering. Hasn't it occurred to someone that we might be in this position? The sad fact is that for all the talk about the war on terror, the emphasis has been more on attacking Iraq than on preparing at home. Despite years of warnings about the horrors threatening from the yearly hurricane season, or an attack on the petrochemical nexus of southern Louisiana, our government is unprepared.
Yes, this time it was a massive hurricane that has flooded a city and left it uninhabitable, but it could have been the long-predicted terrorist strike. What if the levees had been breached by explosive devices, not storm waters? What if the as-yet-unquantified horror leaving a city uninhabitable for weeks or months wasn't the toxic soup of petrochemicals, sewage and rot that is cooking in the Big Easy, but radiological waste, or biochemical weapons? Or that same soup with radiological components?
The Coast Guard and the other first-responders are doing what they are trained to do - rescue people. And they are working hard at it. And local governments, and local level representatives of federal agencies, have been at work. But the overall response has been chaotic and slow. It's over 72 hours since the storm made landfall. The clock is ticking. We can forgive the people on the scene for being overwhelmed, and they are focussed, properly, on saving lives. It is the responsibility of leaders outside the disaster zone to provide forward-looking assistance, and to be taking the pressure off those on the scene by solving the problems the locals aren't able to get to. Like cots for the Astrodome. Or what the heck we're going to do with all those people while we're rebuilding New Orleans, or Biloxi, or Gulfport. And how to rebuild in ways that make sense ecologically, so we can spare ourselves a repetition of this.
This morning on TV, Bush called for the people in the disaster zone to "take personal responsibility and assume a civic sense of responsibility" and to not "exploit the vulnerable." He was talking about looters and price-gougers, but I couldn't help thinking we needed him to take that advice. Sadly, he's a believer in "do as I say, not as I do."
As if all that weren't bad enough, interviewer Dianne Sawyer asked him about the potential costs of the recovery, particularly in view of the huge cost of the war in Iraq, and our burgeoning deficit. According to Sawyer, he said we would be able to both recover from this disaster and continue funding the war in Iraq, without the need for a tax increase. (I'm guess he has had time to decide about a tax increase. Maybe while he was looking out the plane window?)
posted by Paul at 7:37 AM |
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