FEMA Death Watch
FEMA proposed a moratorium on news carrying images of bodies discovered and recovered in New Orleans and the gulf coast. They rescinded the idea when CNN filed suit.
While I normally criticize journalists who feel obligated to stick their cameras in the faces of the grieving and distraught for the sake of a cheap rating at the expense of people at their most vulnerable moments, this mandate by FEMA is different.
It is a PR move by an organization that has nothing but PR left in its bag of tricks. Having been emasculated by the White House, and turned into a home for political know nothings, FEMA needs every trick it can find to reduce the perception of their mismanagement of this disaster and enhance the perception that it knows what it is doing. Showing a growing number of recovered bodies will only rekindle the incensed disappointment that the public feels about FEMA and the politicians who failed so miserably in pre-planning and execution.
I have little doubt about the recovery; we are good at throwing hundreds of billions at problems that millions could have avoided. Will our politicians ever learn that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure or will their perpetual search for the sound bite always lead them to ignore the boring planning for the sexy swagger at a crisis?
By the way, what happened to "we'll hunt 'em down, and git 'em". Are we either all talk, or reckless lashing out? Once again... where are the planners?
More Blame - Look Locally
More fingers are pointing to Washington. Washington isn't blameless, but the real blame is local. Whether or not there is enough money from Washington or from the State of Louisianna, local officials have to plan for every calamity. When you live in a city below sea level, with walls all around holding back the sea, you have to be prepared for a break. It appears that the plan was statistical. There odds were greater than 95% that a major hurricane would not hit New Orleans. Therefore it won't, so don't worry.
This is massive government failure. There is nothing more important in a city like New Orleans than water control, levee control and contingency plans. The lack of contingency plans is criminal considering the number of lives lost. This mayor and this governor should be held accountable, as should previous mayors and governors.
Evacuation Plan
At first I thought there was no evacuation plan for New Orleans. How else could you account for lack of transportation for the hundred and fifty thousand poor residents who didn't have cars. Then I realized that was the evacuation plan. Anyone who could afford to would evacuate and the rest wouldn't. So be it, they didn't really count anyway.
Katrina - Tragedy, Accountability, Race
It is a week after Katrina hit the Gulf coast and New Orleans in particular. The recriminations against the lack of preparedness by FEMA, and local disaster and rescue organizations have begun. There will be plenty of blame to go around.
First and foremost blame belongs to whoever was responsible for New Orleans’ planning for hurricanes. It is incomprehensible that there were no credible plans in place to respond to levee breakdown. The existing plans considered the possibility of water rising and spilling over the levees. Massive pumps were in place around the city to capture this water and pump it out of the city. But there were no plans to handle a levee breech, that is when the levee breaks completely and water pours in from Lake Pontchartrain. The water will and indeed kept pouring in, in torrents, until the level of water in New Orleans equaled the height of the water in the lake. It is the incontrovertible law of physics. It is unimaginable, that a city of over one half million people living below sea level, protected by walls of levees does not plan for a levee breakdown.
Water is one of the strongest forces on earth. Complacency, procrastination and sticking the collective head of government in the sand hoping that day of dread will never come is not sufficient to counter its force. What is needed is planning, plan implementation, constant vigilance, constant maintenance and disaster exercises.
Someone has to tell the bean counters that recovery is much more expensive than prevention. An ounce of prevention…
Water damage is monumental and complete. It is even worse than fire. It will quickly cover vast areas flooding all immediate zones of the same height below sea level. Imagine your home flooding with water levels covering the ground floor for an extended period of time. Walls and floors covering are ruined. Wall board crumples like paper. The supporting beams become water logged and will fail if they remain wet for too long. The floors buckle as the wood and the supports become water logged and porous. Everything inside the home is destroyed. The rising water is not clean water. It will be filled with mud, sludge, garbage and sewage. That’s the start if your house does not just wash away.
Worse, of course is the monumental loss of life. In New Orleans people were trapped in their homes as the water rose. There were people who were sick, feeble, old, not mobile, disoriented, mentality incapable of dealing with crisises. Every story, every ability and inability exists in a city of half million people. There are people who need constant attention, medication, medical devices or electricity to survive a day or an hour. The loss of life will prove to be incomprehensible for an advanced society as ours.
And as we watch the TV coverage we are surprised at the face of the tragedy and at the color of the tragedy. Hurricanes are indiscriminant. Where are the white faces? Did they all die? Did they all evacuate before the hurricane hit? Are there any white people in New Orleans?
It appears that the white population predominantly evacuated before Katrina hit. It also appears that populated neighborhoods mostly affected by the rising waters in New Orleans were black.
We are hearing the criticism of the rescue effort. That help was not immediately dispatched. That there were days of delays before massive organized rescue efforts were put into place. And we are hearing criticisms that the rescue effort delays were in part because the faces of the tragedy were black. That the situational gravity would have been recognized earlier had the face of the tragedy been white.
We are hearing criticisms of the media coverage. That black looters of food are called “looters” and white looters of food are called “finders or survivors”. In a city without food, clean water, a dry spot, or a place to shit, raiding a food store for survival is not looting. Stealing a TV is looting.
However it turns out, years from now, with the inevitable congressional hearings and reports, assigned blame and “hero-dom”, there are people who need to be supported and defended. They are the rescue workers and first responders. Whether the larger organization was mobilized in time or not, the rescue workers do their jobs, paid or volunteer, to the best of their ability without regard to the race of the patient or aided.
We, as a society, are to blame that there are ghettos of the poor, that our housing is segregated and that black, Latino and other ethnic under privileged neighborhoods exist. Yet the rescue workers and their effort are not to blame.
It may be true that galvanizing the rescue effort was delayed because Federal Officials saw predominantly black faces. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, for now. I believe that the main cause for the delay is incompetence, complacency, bureaucracy and lack of leadership.
What a marked difference between the immediate visibility of Rudi Giuliani in his city’s crisis of 9/11, marshalling the forces, organizing the agencies and reassuring the peopleof New York, and the country, verses the delayed, stilted, meaningless and scripted reaction from the White House. True to form, our White House seems to go numb in a crisis. The bravado will soon follow.
It is no surprise that the director of FEMA Mike Brown, appointed by this White House, spent the last 10 years preparing for this job of disaster planning and management working as the "Judges and Stewards Commissioner" of the International Arabian Horse Association. Surprised? And he was forced to resign. Need I say more?
