Maybe that's because the City of New Orleans had a disaster plan in place and the resources to effect it, while the rural towns and parishes to the north did not. Only after the storm did people realize that New Orleans officials didn't have a good plan and didn't have the leadership skills to even attempt what they had.Shockwave wrote: According to the white house website, federal aid was not available to the city of new orleans or the surrounding area before the storm hit.
The federal government is not a first responder--it is a backup to help the first responders when they need it. First, they have to ask for it. It took Governor Blanco at least two extra days to request federal control of the disaster response, which is legally required before the federal government can step in and assume control. Why did it take so long? Maybe because she did not want to give up the power? Mississippi requested and received aid much more quickly, but then Barbour was a little quicker to ask for it.
The emergency plan in place in New Orleans did not have an answer for the problem of what to do with those who could not evacuate. It did identify the problem. They had years to think about what they might do. There were 2000 school buses, all gassed up for the start of school, available before the storm hit, and the local officials had the authority to use them in an emergency. The federal government does not have that authority. Remember, we are a federal system with a limited central government.
If the storm surge had been 25 feet instead of 15 feet, as predicted the day before it hit, we would not be having this discussion. Most of those 100,000 people who stayed (and didn't go to shelters) would be dead--their roofs would not have been high enough and they would not have had time to get onto them. Ask the folks in southern Mississippi who have faced MUCH more damage than those in New Orleans--a sudden storm surge generally just flattens houses. We'd be having a different discussion now, and I'm sure there would be people still blaming the federal government (and specifically the president).
Now, we see all sorts of claims that we need to carefully plan where people should be moved to to consider the power of nature in the future and to be environmentally sensitive. Am I the only one who finds this distasteful? In a free country, we each decide for ourselves where we will live, and live with those choices if they turn out badly. Why don't those who want to plan our lives for us (or those of the residents of New Orleans) just get out of the way? If it makes sense to rebuild in certain areas, people will rebuild there. If not, they will move elsewhere and create new lives, and they should be allowed to do so. That's the problem with welfare and how it comes into this discussion--it makes people the charges of the state rather than free agents responsible for their own choices. It's mighty dangerous for an entity as callous as government (and I don't care at what level or who is running it--even official generosity will be callously implemented) to ever promise to anyone that it will make them happy.
I also find it ironic that those complaining that government responded too slowly are now bleating about how the rebuilding has to be done according to their vision of what is right, even if they live 1500 miles away and don't even know how to say "Nwawlins". That is guaranteed to confuse and slow down the process of recovery.
What if a category 4 or 5 hurricane hit Long Island and New York? (It has happened before.) What if it hit Houston? (It has happened before.) We are entering a more active hurricane period like what we had in the 40's and 50's, and that was like what we had in the first part of the last century. The only difference is that lots more people have decided to live in these areas. Oh, well. Lots more people live in California, Oregon, and Washington, too, and they are also subject to wholesale natural disaster. There is no way we can prevent people from living in dangerous places, because every place is potentially dangerous for one reason or another.
It annoys me when Katrina is declared to be the worst hurricane strike in American history, when the Great Storm of 1900 killed 6000-8000 people in Galveston. If Katrina had brought a 25-foot surge to Lake Pontchartrain like they predicted, it might have. Let's be thankful it didn't.
If this hurricane had hit a city of a million in most places on this earth, the death toll would have been in the tens of thousands instead of in the hundreds. The strength of our system is that even in one of our poorest cities, we still responded remarkably effectively compared to most places, at the government level and especially at the private level.
Rick "fresh from meeting with state officials in Montgomery and hearing all sorts of interesting stuff" Denney
