Posted on 09/02/2005 1:49:01 PM PDT by Jedidah
This is infuriating:
An angry Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans' emergency operations, watched the slow exodus from the Superdome on Thursday morning and said the Federal Emergency Management Agency response was inadequate. . .
(snip)
Ebbert's job is to coordinate New Orleans' response to emergencies. Somebody should show him this picture and tell him to stop blaming everyone but himself . . .
(snip)
New Orleans owns those buses. Here's their significance:
I count 205 buses. When I was a kid, I remember that school buses could carry 66 people. If that is still the case, 13,530 people could be carried to safety in ONE trip using only the buses shown in that picture.
One trip.
(Excerpt) Read more at junkyardblog.net ...
The problem is obviously lack of taxpayer funding.
Yep. Looks like the whole Democrat Party machine in Louisiana is in full scale spin mode.
Ebbert, 60, has been directing the city's new Office of Homeland Security and Public Safety since his appointment by Mayor Ray Nagin on Feb. 11. A highly decorated war hero and the former executive director of the nonprofit New Orleans Police Foundation, Ebbert has been given major powers and responsibilities as an executive assistant to the mayor. His duties are commensurate with his $114,676 annual salary.
Ebbert is charged with coordinating the city's terrorism response capabilities and obtaining federal and state funds for homeland security. He also will oversee the police and fire departments, the Office of Emergency Preparedness and city Emergency Medical Services, and the 911 Center or Orleans Parish Communications District.
His duties extend beyond a crisis or special events such as Mardi Gras. Ebbert has responsibility for the daily operations and planning of all those departments as well as the management of their budgets, Nagin told Gambit Weekly last week, after presenting his plan to re-organize city government to the City Council. "Mr. Ebbert is responsible for all matters related to public safety," the mayor said.
Looks like HE was in charge, doesn't it?
While I agree, the outstanding questions would be "Will they start? Did seawater get into the engine and foul it? Is the building where the keys are kept still standing? Will the batteries work?"
Or maybe you hadn't heard your racist.
And National Guard personnel could've been mobilized to drive them. Oh, Gov. Blanco....
You are most correct in your statement.
Before the hurricane, when the evac order was given?
Well I'm guessing they started just fine before the storm came in and could have been used to evacuate those with no transportation.
They didn't even have to get them mobilized before the storm. It took considerable time after the storm before the water had risen high enough to stop high clearance vehicles like these buses. If they had just sent over some city employees with orders to take the buses and get people out, they wouldn't have even needed the feds to bail them out.
Democrats are just incompetent. All of them.
And look who appointed him.
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I ccccccccc'zzzz that sur!! Yes, suz.
Hey Terry, after Ivan last year even the Red Cross warned you of your city's inadequacy:
"It's always been a problem, but the situation is worse now that the Red Cross has stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes are too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.
In this case, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs...Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that.."Our main focus is to get the people out of the city,"
Yeah...and that's why we see flooded parking lots of useless school buses that could've been used for evacuating the poor. Hey mayor...forget the Greyhounds from around the country; you had the resources right under your nose to move these people. Just as you (and the Governor) had a National Guard that could've stopped the looting before it got out of hand.
I agree about the lesser capacity, but they didn't need to get as far as Texas. Even Baton Rouge would have been better than in a sunken city.
I'm sick to death of these people and I am fast losing all the sympathy I have for them.
I am with you sir, right beside you on that! You get total agreement and no arguments from me.
They should have been employed prior to the storm to carry out those willing to leave.
If they had carried those willing to evacuate out prior to the storm, they would have been available to come back in and carry out more after the flooding.
The news was liberally laced with the poor being left behind.
They were left behind because the mayor and his minions did not utilize all their resources.
Doug--
Imagine if they'd pre-contracted with Amtrak to have several train runs on short notice for emergency evacs.
And (despite the somewhat ominously German overtone) even freight cars.
You didn't have to carry them to Texas.
KY floods all the time, there are rivers and tributaries every where.
The population goes to school gymnasiums.
They only had to carry these people about 150 miles inland.
I worked a flood here in Ky about 15 years ago. Smallish community but the water was rising fast.
It took all night but starting with the lowest land first, volunteers carted out everything in the house including decorated Christmas trees and presents and deposited them in the school gym on high ground.
No water, no electricity.
Everybody survived, lots of much to clean out of houses but nobody lost their life and nobody lost their stuff.
Everybody helped each other. Everybody worked.
If they got buried under water, at a minimum you would have had to drain all the fluids and replace them. After that they'd probably be okay.
That should have been part of the city, county, and state plan.
That's true, but evacuating the folks from the city to temporary staging areas for further evacuation wouldn't have required a 6-hour ride to accomplish.
Well, all I know is that while growing up, we had fire drills at school to make sure that we could implement an evacuation plan. Hasn't New Orleans ever had a drill or at least some kind of assessment of their capabilities? I doubt it because apparently they never even developed an evacuation plan. Now that is just plain criminal.
Anarchy begins at home
From Reuters:
“Federal disaster declarations covered 90,000 square miles (234,000 square kilometers) along the U.S. Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of Britain. As many as 400,000 people have been forced to leave their homes.”
This is not a Hurricane. This is an atomic bomb. This was worse than 9/11, its worse than the Tsunami.
This is Katrina.
Katrina did not just wipe out New Orleans, it also did Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula. This one storm has effected anarea roughly the size of Great Britain. These cities are not tourist havens, populated with taffy making retirees who can leave town at a moments notice, these are working towns, working ports where people made things and went about their life outside of the bright spotlight of the worlds attention.
We all are affected by what these port cities do, and now that they are gone, we are all going to be effected by their loss. We are all going to be covered by the debris spread by Katrina.
I can deal with the horror of it. I can get used to the word “refugee”, but I cannot sit back and abide the blame game that is going on. Everyone on the left is working double overtime to make Katrina into George W. Bush’s’ Frankenstein monster. To hear some on the left, it’s as if George himself created the Hurricane. And the people on the right are also working overtime blaming the Mayor and Governor of Louisiana. And for gods sake if I hear one more “Christian” blame the gays and Mardi Gras, I’m going to come apart at the seams.
It’s all crap, and it needs to stop.
Does it occur to those of you that are blaming the mayor and the New Orleans police department that the very people you are castigating for a “lack of leadership” also lost everything in the disaster? The people everyone counted on to have the plans and to be on the job afterwards were also wiped out in this disaster. This is not a simple high water mark on some rich folks barrier island vacation homes; this is the utter destruction of 4 major cities.
I don’t remember any of us walking around last week saying how much we knew about how this was going to play out.
We all sit miles away from the disaster ready to pass judgment, but can any of us have any idea what it must be like to be a low paid civil servant reporting to work, knowing that your house is underwater and your family is missing and there’s 100,000 angry, wet and hungry people staring at you for answers?
Should the Mayor of New Orleans have declared martial law and had a forced evacuation 24 hours prior to the landing of the hurricane? Maybe, but would you have supported him? Was 24 hours enough to move 400,000 people? What about 72? Were there any sort of facilities, any people to carry off such a plan? Could you even implement that today even with all the clear need in full light of day? Were not talking about a few office blocks, this is city after city that needed to be fully evacuated, and where exactly would you have evacuated to? It’s just as likely that Houston was going to be hit, as was New Orleans. We have no idea how to do this sort of mass migration, even today. We are now evacuating to Houston in full daylight outside of the storm and it still takes time to move people en masse that far away. And now, Houston is full – that’s how big this is.
Some of you say “ we should bring in the Military” and we are. But lets remember, the military isn’t just sitting at the airport in their cockpits ready to deploy at a moments notice, they have to get ready, it takes time to move men and material anywhere in the world. Now for comparison purposes, if it takes 4 days to organize a military group, trained and driven to take orders on command to go somewhere, how long will it take to move civilians who do not follow orders and cant even be compelled to leave in the face of a category 5 hurricane. How long does it take when to make matters even worse, the locals start shooting at the people trying to help?
And for those of you complaining about the lack of relief workers, remember, relief workers will not go into any area where their security is at risk, and the locals have decided that shooting at the people trying to help is good sport.
Stop thinking of this as a Hurricane and start thinking of this as an atomic bombing and you can start to see what happened here was just beyond anyone local to have the ability to deal with it. The hurricane didn’t just destroy the buildings; it destroyed the authority and the infrastructure of local government as well.
The lesson here is that in true large scale disasters, you can’t count on the locals to even be there to take the lead. The assumption has to be that the locals are gone and cannot take part in their own rescue. That is not an assumption we make today in our planning, all disaster planning says the locals “drive the show”. Katrina showed the weakness in that idea. Katrina changed the paradigm of disasters in our memory. I always wondered what would take the place of 9/11 in my nightmares, and now I know what it is.
I have my issues with the way this was handled, but for now I’m keeping it to my self. None of this half assed Monday morning quarterbacking is going to do a damn thing to get those people out of there but the corrosive effect it will have on our government serves no one. There must be authority and if the left or the right continues on this game of political gamesmanship, the effect is will end in anarchy for all of us.
It must stop, and it must stop now.
We all learned from this disaster, and none of us is going to get out of it without some of it on us. We’ve all learned a valuable lesson that modern man doesn’t like to admit very often but its true nonetheless - there are things in the world that you don’t have control over that are much, much bigger than you, and on occasion they can and often do reach out and bite your ass. Modern man is pretty comfortable in his certainty and has lots of nice toys, like satellites and telecommunications but nature is much bigger than man and in the end, nature will always win.
We are not out of this yet. Things are possibly going to get worse.
Much, Much worse
When you have large numbers of people in that kind of water, Cholera is not far from the future. We Western people have no idea what a cholera epidemic is like, but I fear we are about to learn. Its not funny, its death inside of a day for thousands of people, the young and the infirmed will go even faster. Based on the current conditions, we are probably within 24 hours of a cholera outbreak in this area. Ladies and gentleman, if that occurs and God help us all if it does, you will look back on these last 4 days as “when things weren’t quite so bad”.
Stop looking for someone to blame and start looking for a way to help, were full up on critics at the moment we could use a few more “backs” in the process of getting these people out.
This is not anyone’s fault; this is simply beyond comprehension. We might have talked about it in academic exercises, but no one in the United States has ever seen anything like this. It doesn’t help anyone get out of there to waste your time on that fruitless exercise of trying to blame anyone for this.
We have no time to waste on such fecklessness. People are dying and more are going to die soon if we don’t get those people out of there quickly.
Sorry, forgot to post the link:
http://varifrank.com/archives/2005/09/anarchy_begins.php
When I worked at a nuclear power plant, one of our contingency plans in the event of an abnormally large snowfall event, was to shovel the walk to the Control Room so Operators could get to it. The shovel was therefore "safety related" and had to be kept staged, routinely inspected, and labelled. Any evacuation plan must also inherently have a program for ensuring that necessary equipment MUST be kept available at all times. The plans must be assessed and simulated often.
This was a very good article...but at some point, "blame" is going to have to be assigned in an effort to fix what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. Maybe we should wait on that for a while. I don't view this as a natural disaster. This is a man-made disaster IMHO.
"Actually the planning number is usually 40 - 44 (based on configuration) for military unit movements. But that is for healthy, fit adults. From the pictures being shown on TV, there are a lot of people who need two or three spaces apiece."
From what I have seen, they don't need seats for fathers.
That would make an interesting discussion. All these females with kids, in time of horrible emergency, and no men with them.
>>
. . . lost everything in the disaster . . .
<<
They lost their education, memory and acquired skills?
Curse that George W. War Criminal Bush!
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