Open Letter

I think the whole thing is a gigantic mess and that local, state, and federal government all screwed up big time and will be dodging responsibility and pointing fingers.

And how the hell does 11 years as the director of a Arabian Horse organization prepare you to lead FEMA? He might as well seek political asylum in another country.

I didn't read the Michael Moore letter in entirety but would agree that his tone is not one that promotes good will. Like Jenn said, he should get off his lazy ass and go do something instead of writing letters that the addressees will never take seriously.

And I sure hope that something is learned from this. What does it say to terrorists? Bomb and destroy our infrastructure because it will cripple us!?!

[Amiens]

Now they can't get the last 10,000 people to leave. Today they said that the National Guard was withholding food rations from the hold outs to pressure them into leaving. Apparently, they can't force them out because martial law has not been declared. From the interviews, these people don't want to leave. So ...how far do you go to get people out?

We had dinner with neighbors, and the wife was born, raised in Louisiana, and we talked about this very thing. She said "Just as there are wonderful heart of gold people in Louisiana there are also some very "ignorant" people in Louisiana, and very stubborn too. She said that some of the people that stayed behind honestly believed that because they survived Betsy in the 60s that they could survive Katrina, and that some people don't want to believe that the flood waters are contaminated with toxic chemical and infectious diseases. I have heard lots of people on the news lately saying "They gave warnings, I just refused to listen to them, I could have gotten out, and let me tell I wish I had listened." So just as I am sure there are many people who were unable to leave there are just as many who refused and didn't heed the warnings, and allowed themselves to stay in harm's danger.

Overall though FEMA royally screwed up, and in our house we like to think that whoever the brilliant Einstein was that drained a swap and built a city between two giant bodies of water was is partly to blame to--- although admittantly NO is a major port, and is needed at the mouth of the Mississippi, so we can place blame on the local, state leaders and the Army Corps of Engineers for not doing the necessary emergency preparedness to prevent the levies from breaking. There are plenty of people who didn't do their part. It seems like many people/organizations dropped the ball on this one.

I agree with Nellie-- how does this look to the terroists now? If we can't handle responding to a major natural disaster, how can we handle responding to chemical warfare or any other biological terroist attack?

Crystal

:chat: Hmmmm.....I have a few thoughts I've been stewing over & finally decided to share. First let me say that I fully admit I am uneducated when it comes to FEMA or its leaders so I'll be leaving that topic alone. I know I'll probably step in it a bit here primarily because debating makes me nervous when it is obvious no one's mind will be changed....then it just turns into arguing which I don't care to do. That said, my thoughts (and they are not all original to me):

Why do people think the President of the United States is God? Was he suppose to stop the hurricane or keep the rain from falling? Should he have anticipated and seen to it that all the poor people were evacuated from New Orleans and Mississippi, or that the levees were high enough and strong enough to protect New Orleans from flooding? The Constitution requires the President to do certain things and he's given grief for it (nominating justices & ambassadors), but then he's condemned for not doing things he has no power to do. He cannot force the evacuation of citizens from danger zones. He cannot intervene in state affairs without the invitation of the govenor, unless they are in violation of federal law. It is my understanding that LA govenor was asked to give up her constitutional right to direct the LA National Guard, but she refused for several days, not wanting to give up that power & thus rendering the federal government (in effect) powerless to help without her directions. Was the President really suppose to protect us from the weather? People built where they shouldn't have and kept on building. Flooding is a natural part of nature & nature couldn't do it's job because we "tamed" the banks of the Mississippi with levees. New Orleans was BELOW SEA LEVEL! Enough water from any source and the levees were bound to burst & destroy the city in the process. Any president would have been ridiculed for proposing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to raise the levees around New Orleans and establish a fleet of evacuation buses to evacuate the poor from large cities that might be threatened by hurricanes someday. Not to mention protecting the rest of the citizens who may have a different natural disaster strike their area. After disaster strikes, solutions look obvious. Hind sight is as they say: 20/20. Maybe someone "should have known" more or done more (at any point over the last century that it was known this could happen), but that would be second-guessing. I don't believe anyone deserves to have a hurricane destroy their property or to be killed because they live near the coast. Natural disasters happen and we cannot anticipate their destruction nor can we blame the government for them. What we can do is be as prepared as possible to take care of ourselves and then do what we can to alleviate the suffering of others.

One more side note & then I promise to get off my box: Maybe it's time to reinstate some values & morals into our society so that (with any luck) when we are tested to our limits we turn to better solutions than looting, raping & killing those around us. I guess that's a debate for another time...and one I don't have the energy for at the moment! Whew! I promise I'm done now!

Sara

[spotty_dog]

=I have heard lots of people on the news lately saying "They gave warnings, I just refused to listen to them, I could have gotten out, and let me tell I wish I had listened." So just as I am sure there are many people who were unable to leave there are just as many who refused and didn't heed the warnings, and allowed themselves to stay in harm's danger.

"It was mentioned in the comments of that particular entry that the locals shown on the news tended to be the blustery type — “Evacuation be damned! I’m going to stick it out!” It’s easy to put these people on TV, because they make for good soundbytes — and they make it easier for the masses to care less when they get killed. Why, they practically asked for it! Darwin’s system is at work, and those too stupid to escape got what was coming to ‘em.

But the truth is this: people with no resources and no possibility of evacuation would rather look stubborn and angry than helpless and trapped. There is dignity in the appearance of willfullness, and in obstinate defiance of authority. It saves face to say, “Screw you all! I don’t want to leave and you can’t make me!” rather than to admit the truth, which is that they couldn’t go even if they wanted to."

From http://cherie.twilightuniverse.com/2005 ... trina-cont

[Vanquisher]

People screwed up. Yes, there should have been more done to prepare for this disaster before it occured, but that does not, in my opinion, mean that anyone is off the hook for the very poor response after the disaster. So, lets put aside all the what if's and who should have left, and who could have left, and why the levees weren't taken care of. After the hurricane hit, the response to help those people in need has been pitiful at best.

Who's to blame? FEMA, the President, the Governor, the Mayor, Homeland Security, etc. The government and the politicians are to blame.

Yes, the President definitely has blame in this. This is his job. Red tape be damned, get off your butt and do something. Wow, he cut his month long vacation short by two whole days, whoopee doo! Yes, it was a working vacation, but c'mon you are the leader of our nation, and you don't get that much time off, sorry buddy. You are the Commander in Chief and you better freaking command.

FEMA did a horrible, awful job. No excuse.

People let their political b.s. and backslapping get in the way of helping victims, and it is unacceptable.

I have a hard time understanding why the response took so long, why so many people who were asking for help did not get it.

I am sick of hearing crappy excuses. If reporters can get in there, then so can the national guard. If Harry Connick Jr. can get in there, then so can FEMA. Puhleeze. Yes, there was some disorder and criminal behavior. I don't believe that was as detremental as they claim. If they would have got their butts in gear sooner, the problem wouldn't have escalated the way it did. We should have been helping these people within hours, not days. Bus convoys should have been sent in immediately. I am positive school systems from around the south could have sent hundreds of school buses to get hose people out as soon as possible. I've heard reports of Candian officials being there faster than we were. :nono:

It is easy to point fingers at the poor people there and say they should have left. They didn't and in most cases couldn't. Now that they are there and need help, help them, NOW.

Ugh. It all makes me sick.

I agree with Alison's assessment of why people didn't leave.

[DCJenn]

They interviewed a pharmacist who just arrived here in DC. He was told he had to stay because he was considered essential personnel. So....no ,not all of the people chose to stay- he was ordered to. And they're still missing like 400 police officers and a bunch of firefighters. They do0n't know if they've evacuated, or were casualties.

and no, our president is most definitely NOT God, although I guess he likes to think that he's God's Right Hand Man. The bottom line is that it really doesn't matter why they stayed, they did and they need help. It's kind of like blaming the girl in the short skirt for getting raped. Did she need to wear a short skirt- no, but it felt right at the time.

So, we can blame whomever we want, but it's still not going to help the tens of thousands who are homeless and sick and need to rebuild every single aspect of their lives.

Imagine- no house, no job, no car, no food, no water. I was thinking about this in context of DC- it would be like the entire DC metro area, plus parts of Delaware and Virginia would have to be evacuated to Pennsylvania, West Virginia and North Carolina.

Jenn

I don't know if this was true for this particular hurricane but I know that in past hurricanes, residents were directed to the Superdome if they couldn't evacuate otherwise. If that was the case this time, people were doing what they were supposed to do. And if they did have 72 hours of emergency supplies to bring with them, that still wouldn't have been enough.

[Rapunzel]

I just read this editorial and thought it was interesting:

The Jackals after the Storm
By Orson Scott Card

The damage in New Orleans and southern Mississippi from Hurricane Katrina may have taken more lives than 9/11 — at least that’s what experts are estimating right now.

And, as with 9/11, the thousands of tragic stories took place in the context of many acts of heroism, sacrifice, and simple kindness. We hear many of these good stories — and there are doubtless many others, whose participants wouldn’t dream of telling anyone about their own courage or decency.

Whenever there’s a breakdown in the social order there are also people who quickly reveal that with them, at least, civilization is not part of their nature, it’s an external restraint, and the moment it’s gone, they’ll take any advantage they can.

We see the footage of these jackals on television, looting whatever they can take from stores ... or neighbors’ houses. Some of them might be taking it to protect from looters so they can restore it to their neighbors when they come back. We can’t know other people’s motives.

But most of the looters are probably exactly what they seem: thieves. It’s depressing to watch people profiting from others’ misery.

Profiteers

Most depressing, for me at least, are the jackals of the news media. Most are simply reporting what happens. But there are some...

I think of Geraldo, standing in the midst of human misery, condemning those who “allowed this to happen.” He’s hardly alone, though.

The governor of Mississippi, for instance, was pressed hard by a television news interviewer until he finally said, “I know what you want me to say — that the federal government dropped the ball on this. But they didn’t. They were as prepared as anyone could have been, and they’ve done everything that could be done.” (Or words to that effect).

A constant theme in the news media has been: Blame the federal government. Most particularly, blame President Bush.

And there was Jesse Jackson, claiming that if we hadn’t been fighting the war in Iraq, we would have had more resources and money to take care of this disaster.

It’s as if the media jackals and the spokesmen of the Left were all starring in a satire that made fun of their own stupidity. Not even their worst enemy could make them look as foolish as they’re making themselves appear.

They Think That Bush Is God

Even the most rabid Republican wouldn’t ascribe divine powers to President Bush. But the jackals do — in a negative sense. They mock anything he actually does; but let a hurricane strike the gulf coast and a few levees break, and suddenly he has failed us.

Let’s see ... what was it he was supposed to have done?

Stopped the hurricane? Slackened it? Kept the rain from falling?

No, no, of course not, the jackals reply. He should have been better prepared to deal with it, that’s all.

No, says another, he should have seen to it that all the poor people were evacuated from New Orleans and southern Mississippi!

They wouldn’t have had to evacuate, says yet another, if President Bush had seen to it that the levees were high enough and strong enough to protect New Orleans from flooding.

These clowns howl when President Bush does things that the Constitution requires him to do — like, say, nominating Supreme Court justices and UN ambassadors.

But let a disaster strike, and they condemn him for not doing things that no President has the power to do.

Like forcing the evacuation of citizens from danger zones. (Remember Mount St. Helens, and the people who refused to go?)

Or intervening in state affairs without the invitation of the governor, unless they’re in violation of federal law, which nobody was.

As for Jesse Jackson, the problem wasn’t lack of money. All the money in the world couldn’t have made the water evaporate any faster from the below-sea-level streets of New Orleans.

And if every soldier from the Iraq War had been home instead, they would not have been standing by waiting for Katrina to strike so they could rush in and deliver supplies and rescue people that no one imagined would need rescuing.

Of course none of these people really think President Bush could have predicted or prepared any better than he did. There are agencies that are supposed to prepare, and they did their job up to any reasonable standard. Only idiots would really believe that any part of this disaster or its aftermath was the fault of the President.

The trouble is, they think we are the idiots. They think that if they loudly ask, “Why wasn’t President Bush ready for this?” the American people will swallow the implied accusation and blame him for not protecting us from ... from the weather.

Bush was elected President, not God.

The Problem Was Foreseen

The sad thing is that the problem was foreseen. It’s been known for more than a century that New Orleans was one of the most vulnerable cities in the world.

It’s below sea level, for pete’s sake. It wasn’t when they started building it, but it is now. The weight of buildings on the spongy ground of the Mississippi delta compresses it and squishes it out and the ground subsides.

Nature has a solution for this, of course: It’s called “flooding.” The Mississippi is supposed to spill over its banks every spring and when it finally subsides, it’s supposed to have carved itself knew channels and deposited silt from Montana and Minnesota throughout the delta from Natchez to New Orleans.

But that pattern doesn’t fit with our human desire to stake out a piece of ground, build things and plant things on it, and have it stay the way we left it, year after year.

So the Army Corps of Engineers spent many years “taming” the Mississippi — lining it with levees to prevent it from spilling over its banks. The floods that once enriched the soil of America’s middle were ended.

Above all, New Orleans was kept dry. But not high and dry. It got lower and lower and lower, until you look up from the French Quarter and watch big ocean-going ships pass by on the Mississippi, floating so high that you realize their bottoms are higher than the streets of the city.

When I first heard that Katrina was going to be a category five hurricane and it was heading for New Orleans, my immediate statement was, “New Orleans is below sea level. I sure hope the levees hold.” And I’m not even an expert.

Everybody always knew that there was a danger that a hurricane might raise the level of the river and Lake Pontchartrain so high that the levees would break.

Political Reality

But on what day was it politically possible to do anything about it?

For good or ill, decisions like spending enormous amounts of tax money to raise and thicken the levees have to be made by politicians, and the very nature of democratic government makes it highly unlikely for us to get anything done that won’t show benefits in time for the next election.

There are exceptions: The Interstate Highway System only got started because of fear of Communism and nuclear weapons — we needed a road system that would let us move our military swiftly across country. Later, we saw all kinds of economic benefits — but what made it politically possible at first was fear.

The Louisiana Purchase, Alaska (i.e., “Seward’s Folly”) — their benefits were obvious and yet they were sharply criticized. Unless someone saw a way to make quick money out of it, these things rarely happened.

So ... what governor or state legislature, what mayor or city council, what Congress or President could be rationally expected to say, on one particular day, “We’re going to spend a hundred million dollars raising the levees around New Orleans, and another twenty million establishing a national fleet of evacuation buses that will go and evacuate the poor from densely populated cities that might be threatened by hurricanes someday.”

The very jackals who are now criticizing President Bush for not being prepared would have absolutely crucified him for “pork barrel politics” if he had proposed dumping that much money on raising the levees around New Orleans, and as for the fleet of evacuation buses — he would have been mercilessly ridiculed for even proposing it.

It’s only after the disaster that all the solutions look obvious and everybody is full of advice on what should have been done.

Again, the news people who hate Bush for being President (and hate us for reelecting him) know all this. They know that he has done nothing wrong. But it’s an opportunity to damage him, and they can’t bring themselves to let it go by unused. Because there are people stupid enough to think that there really was something the President should have done, and a way he could have done it.

Why Didn’t the People Leave Town?

One question I’ve heard several people ask about the hurricane is, “I’m sorry these people are suffering, but why didn’t they leave town? They were warned!”

They were warned, but they were poor.

The people I’ve heard say this are people who have never been truly poor a day in their lives.

But there were thousands of people in New Orleans who had no money, no car, nowhere to go, and nowhere to stay once they got there.

Did you go down and offer any of them a ride and a few rooms in your house where they could stay till the storm was over? If not, then don’t start judging them because they didn’t get out in time.

Besides, they thought it was a hurricane — high winds, lots of rain. The terrible damage and loss of life came the next day, in the aftermath, as the rains upstream added to the storm damage by flooding so intensely that the levees gave out.

If we find out that somebody knew the levees would break and didn’t give warning, then we have somebody to blame. But my guess is that nobody knew. Maybe they should have — but that’s second-guessing. After something happens, it’s always obvious that people “should have known” it could happen.

Again, I’ll take the critics seriously when one of them shows me footage or paper that demonstrates that they knew and gave warning that the levee would break, and nobody listened.

Geraldo? Did you give that warning? Let’s see you rerun that moment of wisdom and prescience, and then I’ll tolerate your accusations of others for “not being ready.”

When you’re poor you don’t have choices. That’s one of the main reasons we don’t like poverty.

Who Were These People?

And it was one of the main reasons New Orleans was such a good city, despite its many problems. It wasn’t a bad place to be poor.

The streetcar and bus system worked — public transportation could take you wherever you needed to go, and without making you wait for an hour.

The climate is warm so you don’t have to pay for much heating in the winter, and if you don’t have air conditioning, at least you’re no worse off than your ancestors, who didn’t have it either.

You could live there without much money.

As for southern Mississippi, I’ve heard people criticize it — not unfairly — for its having become a gambling center.

But most people there were neither gamblers nor owners of gambling establishments. And even if they were, even the most diehard Bible-thumping anti-gambler would have to agree that the penalty for such sin should not be death.

(Besides, now that North Carolina has decided to adopt a lottery, we have no room to talk. There is zero difference between gambling houses on the waterfront in Biloxi and Pascagoula, and lottery tickets for sale in convenience stores in North Carolina. The customers are still being seduced into giving up something for nothing; and in North Carolina we have the distinction of being the stupidest people in America, since we already had proof that state lotteries don’t help much (if at all) and do as much harm as any other system of vice.)

Nobody deserves to have a hurricane destroy their property, and still less do they deserve to be killed for the crime of living near the coast.

So the “Christians” who gloated of the destruction of such “wicked places” should look up Matthew 7:1-5 and keep your malice to yourselves.

Natural disasters happen. We can prepare for them as best we can, but eventually there’ll be some twist that we didn’t anticipate, or some force greater than we imagined possible, and people will die and property will be destroyed and landscapes will be transformed.

We don’t have to blame anybody — not President Bush, not sinful people, and not God. This is a world where natural forces will organize and distribute disasters in a semi-chaotic way that does not care where people happen to be living.

I believe that what God cares about is not whether or not we are always safe in our houses. As I understand the scriptures, what God cares about is how we act when bad things happen.

Some people were brave and decent and kind and generous and I think that God is proud of his children who acted that way.

Some people looted, and some people exploited the disaster to hurt their political enemies, and some people used the disaster to condemn others and make themselves feel superior to the victims.

I believe that in the eyes of God, that is the real disaster — that so many of his children, when the storm had passed, turned out to be jackals after all.

And that damage has spread far and wide across the country — including places where Katrina did not go.

[DCJenn]

But FEMA had been told by the National Weather Service that the levees were likely to break.

Jenn

[Vanquisher]

No Bush is not God, thank Dog, but it still doesn't explain his or anyone else's colossal failures AFTER the storm to get help to people.

I'm going to stay on my vacation. Then, I'll head to California. Then, I'll go back to Texas. I'll look down from my cushy plane at the icky stuff on my way back to Wahington. People are starting to get all bent out of shape about this thing, so I better make an appearance. I'll go to some damaged areas, but not too damaged. I'll tell the people they need to get to nearby shelters, the Salvation Army has one nearby. I forgot that I was just told it was destroyed too. I'm a little slow sometimes.

He is an idiot! He is too stupid to be president. He is a horrible failure as commander-in-chief.



He is not the only one to blame. Many, many people deserve some blame for this.

FEMA - what a waste.

[fluffhead]

Let's not get into a cut-and-paste war, or I'm gonna start copying stuff from The Onion. You have been warned.

[PrincessFiona]

I don't know if this was true for this particular hurricane but I know that in past hurricanes, residents were directed to the Superdome if they couldn't evacuate otherwise. If that was the case this time, people were doing what they were supposed to do. And if they did have 72 hours of emergency supplies to bring with them, that still wouldn't have been enough.

I had heard this too, Nellie...

Also, even though they were offering free transportation OUT of the area, they weren't offering a free place for these people to stay. I saw an interview with a woman who said basically that she had $100 left until payday and that she wouldn't be able to book a room for more than a night or two on that...let alone survive for longer.

[PrincessFiona]

Let's not get into a cut-and-paste war, or I'm gonna start copying stuff from The Onion. You have been warned.

You crack me up...and isn't the Onion a hoot!!!!

[Sheherezade]

That's the point I've been pondering too, Kris. If they planned on getting everyone out, were they really prepared to house them somewhere? Matt posted earlier that there were plenty of shelters available, but they sure seem to be having trouble putting everyone up now. If I was offered a free bus ride out and had no resources or family elsewhere, what would I do? Take my kids and sleep on the street? That's similar to losing everything after the flooding -- I might also decide to take my chances with mother nature and at least have a roof over my head temporarily.

Onion clips are always welcome in this house.

[Meenah]

Jennifer where did you find that editorial? Just curious.
Luanne