I still don’t know how to even address what’s going on in NOLA, and frankly, my viewpoint means about thismuch when it comes to the relief efforts currently going on. Anger would be a good word, if what I was feeling didn’t pale in comparison to what displaced families must be experiencing more than week after they’ve lost EVERYTHING, for what is definitely looking like no good reason.
So, here: here are some things you should read.
- Keith Olbermann on MSNBC: “No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.
“But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.”
- CNN compares statements by FEMA and DHS personnel last week to on-the-ground news reports. The total and absolute disconnect between them is disturbing at best.
- Leaked memo from FEMA head to DHS head, sent on Monday (at least after the storm came through on Sunday night) purportedly shows request for help within 48 hours (so, that’d be by Wednesday) and indicates that at least one of the duties of all FEMA personnel attached will be to “convey a positive image of disaster operations to government officials, community organizations and the general public.“
- Salt Lake Tribune, yesterday: “As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters – his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week – a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
“Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
“Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
“On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
“Federal officials are unapologetic.
“‘I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,’ said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.
“The firefighters – or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta – knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.
“‘The initial call to action very specifically says we’re looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations,’ she said. ‘So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments.’”
- The President on GMA, 9/1/05: “”I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached.” Possible, one supposes, that he hadn’t seen any of the eight news stories printed or broadcast in the last five years about the potential danger to NOLA from a hurricane, or read any of the FEMA, Army Corps of Engineers, or Louisiana State University studies or computer models indicating what might happen. But it’s pretty damned hard to say he wasn’t directly warned before the storm made landfall. [Froomkin himself addresses the issue in that same WaPo piece from 9/1, here.]
I’m sure I could do more, but that’s about all I can stomach right now.
