Katrina Callousness and Incompetence Revisited
10 February 2006 12:43 am by Taylor Marsh
Katrina Callousness and Incompetence Revisited
You'd think President Bush and Laura would understand what went
down at Coretta Scott King's funeral, especially given the abject negligence
of the response to Katrina. But now that we are made aware of all the White
House knew, the shame should weigh our president down to the ground.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director,
is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House
on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the
city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed. "There is no question
in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how
grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
White
House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm (more below)
We don't expect our presidents to be perfect. But we do expect
them to be competent, responsive and compassionate. George W. Bush is zero for
three, with the facts on the ground making him not even a candidate worthy of
recognition for failure. Our president is so inconsequential, so out of touch,
incomprehensibly irrelevant, that he didn't even know what the government knew
when one of our greatest cities was being destroyed like a modern Pompeii. Only
instead of bodies covered with soot, you had bodies covered with newspapers,
the citizenry walking by like they lived in a graveyard.
Local and state officials are not blameless, but the scope and
destruction known from the beginning at the federal level should have warned
everyone at the top that no one below them would be able to handle the carnage.
If they weren't ready, how could New Orleans handle what was to come?
¶Federal officials knew long before
the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no
way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished
only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American
population.¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal
official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission
a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination
of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict
over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr.
Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize
the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said.¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny
B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands
of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators,
"We put no plans in place to do any of this."¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed
his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days
before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while
he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals
and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and
the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm.¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned
to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests
for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply
its emergency workers.¶Investigators could find no evidence that food
and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where
more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided
to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000
ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance
of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
This is no way to run a country. No wonder Iraq is in shambles.
