| |
|
Truth Be Told
A few facts are in order:
--President Bush declared Louisiana a disaster area two days before the hurricane struck the New Orleans area.
He did this because the governor of Louisiana asked him to do so.
--President Bush urged New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to order the mandatory evacuation that was issued on Sunday, August 28. I would be interested in finding where this person found the information that says Bush urged the evacuation. All of my google searching indicates that Mayor Naygin ordered the evacauation, and non of them mention anything like 'at Bush's urging.'
--First responders to a disaster are always state and local emergency agencies. FEMA is there to supplement the state and local activities.
While this is true, FEMA's job is to respond to FEDERAL emergencies. I think it's quite clear that the destruction of a whole city is a federal emergency. Additionally, once a state of emergency is declared in a city or state, which it was by the governor of Louisiana 3 days before Katrina struck (see above), the emergency response is the responsibility of the federal government. From wikipedia: Federal
A federal emergency declaration allows the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to exercise its power to deal with emergency situations; federal assistance also become available to areas that are declared to be in a state of emergency. For FEMA, emergency declarations are different from the more common disaster declarations done for hurricanes and floods.
So, whose responsibility is it then?
--The hurricane threatened an area as large as 90,000 square miles covering three states. Immediate relief could not possibly have been delivered to all the places that required attention.
I'm sorry, but what is FEMA's job? To respond to emergencies! If there is any organization that should be ready for an unprecedented catastrophe, it is the organization that is designed to deal with catastrophes. The United States is much, much larger than the affected area; FEMA should have been prepared to deal with an emergency that affected people from coast-to-coast. It makes logical sense, no?
--An AP photo showed a large fleet of New Orleans buses soaking in six feet of water. The mayor apparently had the means to evacuate many of the folks who ended up stranded at the Superdome and the convention center.
I do think the mayor could have handled things a bit better in terms of having a plan to evacuate those without the means to get out on their own. That said, this disaster was quite clearly larger than what a local government could handle on its own. Again, that is why the state of emergency was declared!
--FEMA began its activities immediately, not expecting the magnitude of the flooding, the non-response at the city and state level, and the anarchy that resulted.
Again, if any organization in America should have been prepared for the flooding, the inability of the municipal and state governments to adequately repsond, it should have been FEMA!!
--The local and state governments had rehearsed for a different scenario. Disaster drills in New Orleans had taken place, but with a false assumption that the levees would hold.
Again, as the top 3 likely disasters to hit America were:Terrorist attack on New York, Hurricane to hit New Orleans, and earthquake in San Francisco, I think the that FEMA should have a bit more of a clue than reading in the paper on Tuesday that the levees had held. They are FEMA - they have the money and the manpower to know that a levee break is a real possibility.
Both the law and protocol prohibit the president from ordering military troops into a state without a formal request to do so from the governor of the
And the Bush administration has always followed the law and protocol, as they did in their invasion of Iraq?
Now you know what to say in response to all of that malarkey. |
|
|
