There’s been some interesting debate on the ‘Blogs I read about the slinging around of blame in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Before hosting a more-heat-than-light comment scrap, Harry’s Place has posted a couple of extended contributions from readers, one broadly critical, one trying to put events in context. Yesterday Norm drew attention to a National Geographic article from last year warning about the increased chance of such a disaster, which (unknown to me before I commented there) prompted civil mechanical engineer Tim Newman to make some points about acceptable risk. Before doing so, he rounded up some of the partisan nonsense being written about the US government response. Judy at Adloyada does the same and suggests a new PooterGeek competition…
…for the best blame-quote on Katrina. Just to start you off, Damian, my entry would be Ahmed Qurei speaking on behalf of the Palestinian Authority:
“Whilst we regret the tragic loss of life in Katrina, we must remember that as long as the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine continues the Palestinian Authority will be powerless to prevent its ally Jesse Jackson from making damnfool statements blaming President Bush for the disaster.”
I have a feeling some of the real blame quotes yet to come will trump even that suggestion. And I also have a Kanye West post brewing.
How about this “quote” from Nelson “the US wants a holocaust” Mandela:
“This racist storm was deliberately caused by George W Bush’s policies to promote global warming. It was designed to kill black Americans and leave the oil wealth of New Orleans for white imperialists.”
Civil engineer? Eek! I’m a mechanical! Mechanical, I tells ya!
Is that in the Midsummer Night’s Dream sense?
[…] Link via Damian Counsell’s Blamestorm post […]
From what I can make out, talking to friends in America, the key, the main culprit has been lack of co-ordination. FEMA has been drained of funds, siphoned off to homeland security. The Feds thought the state would take care of it, the state thought FEMA would. In third world countries, because no-one expects the government to be able to handle such an emergency, the aid agencies come in, who are skilled at this kind of work, and they establish tent cities for a good reason, because they are a structured ‘society’ with centralised points for information, medical care, handing out food and water, even schools. Because this was America, no-one thought the government would need such assistance. Everything has slipped through the rents formed out of lack proper co-ordination, the absence of a strong, centralised, functioning bureaucracy. The assumption was the business and churches could take up much of the slack. Fine, but without an overall plan, and mechanisms for implementing the plan, what you have is chaos. Call me a socialist . . .
As I understand it, the attack on London was dealt with by various emergency services, few if any of which were under the direct authority of the mayor.
And there is FEMA whose mandate it is to deal with exactly such emergencies as these
The problems in N.O. really escalated because of the collapse of order. The city government, including the police, basically abandoned the city. That would not happen in, say, NYC. The federal government cannot by law send troops into an American city without authorization from the state authorities, and they were slow to give it. People in N.O. were shooting at rescue helicopters and trying to hijack ambulances. FEMA can’t deliver aid under those circumstances.
Inna, that’s the very problem that I’m addressing. The issue of states’ rights causes a weakening of the ability of the state (by which I simply mean government in all of its branches) overall to act in co-ordination, and coherently.
Sue the violence and rioting started AFTER no aid had arrived for days. The delay in providing aid was not caused because it had taken the troops all that time to restore control, the delay was the lack of a coherent strategy to deliver it, which in turn exacerbated the violence.
There is a very long article by Andrew Sullivan in yesterday’s Sunday Times detailing the myriad of things that went wrong. No-one comes out well from this:
Some examples:
As for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it soon became a joke. After CNN had shown scenes of chaos in the New Orleans Convention Center—with bodies, looters, people dying of diabetes, children lacking basic amenities, and disease spreading—the head of the agency, Michael Brown, went on television and said: “We just learnt about that today, and so I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water, the medical care that they need.”
The same day, Chertoff scolded a National Public Radio reporter for asking about the chaos at the convention center, telling him not to believe rumours, and that food and water were being delivered to anyone who needed them. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality seemed vast. Anyone with a television seemed to know more than the men assigned to manage the disaster. To add insult to injury, President Bush appeared with Brown and congratulated him for doing “a heck of a job”.
. . .
In fact, there are plenty of troops and National Guardsmen who could have responded adequately. Iraq holds only 10.2% of army forces. There are 750,000 active or part-time soldiers and guardsmen in the US today. The question then becomes: where were they? The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi, said last week: “On Wednesday, reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High school shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw air force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.”
Where was the urgency to get these soldiers to rescue the poor and drowning in nearby New Orleans, or the dying and dead in devastated Mississippi? The vice-president was nowhere to be seen. The secretary of state was observed shopping for shoes in New York City. The president had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans’ levees.
Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn’t help coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two.
Read the rest, as bloggers say http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1764115,00.html
Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades.
Well yes, it was forseen along with: eruption of supervolcano in Yellowstone national park which removes the west coast from the map, a landslip in the Canaries which wipes out the Eastern Seaboard, enormous earthquake in the San Andreas region which wipes out Northern California, collision with stellar body causing 2 mile high tsunami and nuclear winter, and a plague caused by a superbug resistant to modern medicine.
All these things have been predicted, and the consequences dramatised on many a TV programme. But as I have pointed out, the likelihood of occurence tends to get left out, and those who bother to calculate the likelihood come to the conclusion that they represent Low Risk scenarios. It is Risk, not Consequence, which determines where the limited pool of money is spent.
In that case Bush is simply a fool. For he did not say, we thought the risk was not that great. He said, ‘no-one could have foreseen.’
On the blame issue, the Daily Telegraph today has a list of questions and answers which settles this very succinctly.
As for “no one could have foreseen”, Norm at Normblog quotes a National Geographic article from last year foreseeing it with uncanny prescience and including this telling statement:
“But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.”
Michael Brown, the director of FEMA, is a former selector of horse show judges (and fired from that job apparently) who was given the post due to friends in high places. He is pleading ignorance too.
I’m an idiot. Damian had already posted about the Geographic. D’oh.
Further, CA is trying very hard (and I think will shortly succeed) in passing and enacting laws that are substantivelly in compliance with Kyoto. This is bound to have a trememndous impact on US’ envirnonmentalpolicy.
Turn on spellchecking by default, PG?
My two prize-winning entries for All-Time Dumbest and Most Offensive Comments About the New Orleans Catastrophe (drumroll…):
1. The Christian Evangelist who said that the citizens of New Orleans had earned inevitable divine retribution by living in such a sinful city
2. The Greater Israel advocate who said that the New Orleans disaster was God’s revenge on George Bush for strong-arming Israel into giving up Gaza to the Palestinians
Here’s a contest entry from me and Denning. Courtesy of “Repent America”.
The last two posts highlight an important reason why the US must pour its energies into rebuilding New Orleans. If god can send a category five into it two years running then even I will believe that he’s trying to tell us something. On the other hand, should NO survive 2006’s hurricane season intact, maybe those god-bothering nutbags (no offense) will shut up once and for all.
Interesting reading in the comments. Linda seems to think State’s rights weaken the ability of the state; I suppose a free-market over central planning weakens our economy in the same way. Yes you are a socialist, and that’s no compliment. Gov. Blanco despises Bush as much or more than Ralph Neas, and her inaction is the where the real blame lies. Her and Mayor “I left 1,000 buses parked near the Superdome to get flooded” Nagin. Bush offered to federalize the efforts immediatly, and Blanco said “I need 24 hours to think about it”. In between crying and thinking a lot of people died. Nagin didn’t even declare the Superdome a shelter until the very last minute, because, you know, there was a Saints game this weekend, and we can’t have all those filthy people tearing up the Dome and ruining a couple of football games for the city. 100 years ago, both would be twisting in the wind from the nearest tall tree. Just know this, for that Louisiana has going for it, it is not honest local politics, the corruption is worse than Chicago. The Democrats have had a stranglehold on this state since the civil war by keeping a lot of people on the dole, and I suppose that’s just another thing that is Bush’s fault. Ultimately though, thinking that any amount of money or height of levees could have “saved” New Orleans from mother nature is preposterous arrogance. The French bulit a city in the worst imaginable spot, so I blame them completely.