Split Thread Michael Brown and Katrina

[RandFan]

This is killing me. Bush being blamed for 1000+ deaths of people that should have not been there as the state and city dropped the ball on evacuations.

I have already posted that there is blame enough to go around.

Then I don't understand your original complaint. The purpose of the OP is to blame Brown and by extension Bush. Not to the exclusion of all others. Don't we agree or is it a problem of degree and you feel it wrong to blame Brown to the exclusion of the others (even though I acknowledged in my second post that Nagin was culpable)?

 

[Wolrab]

....Later, it was found that FEMA had provided these supplies,.....
The large numbers were a direct result of the insufficient mobilization and evacuation before Katrina's arrival, primarily due to city and state resistance to issuing an evacuation order and risk "crying wolf" and losing face should the hurricane had left the path of model prediction.

It doesn't let Bush off the hook but it sure places plenty of blame on the city and state.

 

[RandFan]

It doesn't let Bush off the hook but it sure places plenty of blame on the city and state.

I addressed this. In fact, I was the first to point it out. In any event, from my second post I made clear that others were culpable.

This thread was never about placing all blame on Brown. It's purpose was to highlight the gross negligence of Brown.

 

[sunmaster14]

Maybe, but also claiming that the people who were stuck in NO 'shouldn't have been there' is quite the straw target as well.

I'm not sure what you mean by a straw target, but the battle plan for a hurricane hitting New Orleans did not envision so many people being left in the city. Was that reasonable, and was the evacuation plan reasonable? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that it was. Certainly there were hundreds of school buses right there in New Orleans that were never used. In any case, there was never any discussion of whether the battle plan itself was flawed before the entire media complex started dumping on FEMA. Whether or not FEMA did a worse than expected job really had nothing to do with the perception that it had done a worse than expected job. The severity of the catastrophe and the much greater number of people who did not evacuate were the main drivers of the perception.

No evacuation is ever perfect, even with the threat of arrests there were still folks on the barrier islands of New Jersey when Sandy hit. Given that a large percentage of NO residents were poorer and had fewer resources than the barrier island crowd it is not a surprise. I find the whole 'They shouldn'a been dere' attitude to be victim blaming at its worst.

Any reasonable disaster plan would take into account that an evacuation can't be perfect, and we actually know that FEMA prepositioned enough supplies to care for 15,000 people for 3 days. So that is something of a red herring to imply that FEMA's plan was unrealistic because no evacuation is 100% effective. As for the article you linked to, I would take it more seriously if the author hadn't misspelled the word "breaching."

Now keep in mind that one of the reason for Federal agencies is to help or enforce when the state agencies fail . It took to the FBI to investigate civil rights activist murders when the local police showed no inclination to do so. It is also why FEMA is supposed to help with the aftermath of natural disasters when local systems break down.

This takes time. First, you have to recognize that the state and local authorities are dropping the ball, and then you have to prompt them to do the right thing or grant the federal government authority to take over. People seem to forget that all of this supposed incompetence and chaos happened in just the handful of days after a huge catastrophe occurred. The levees were breached mid-day on Monday, and by Saturday, the situation was under control. In the interim, the US Coast Guard rescued over 30,000 people. I think people just had unrealistic expectations about how responsive the federal government could be. In fact, it's not clear that anybody was permanently harmed by the alleged delay - inconvenienced maybe, but there have been far worse consequences of bureaucratic bungling that have been given a pass by the media. Do you remember how long it took to solve the problem of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf? Before I give you the answer, just try to think back and come up with an estimate yourself.^*

Brown showed zero competence in this area as he interfered more than helped.

How do you know this? I've read the so-called criticisms on the wiki page, and they look pretty thin if you ask me. You're always going to be able to point to a few fubars in any government undertaking. I was actually surprised at how few there were and how immaterial they were.

Not surprising given how it was just a patronage job to him, his emails revealed a massive lack of professionalism and people suffered and even died for it.

He actually was not that inexperienced. He had been at FEMA since 2001 and had been in the top position for two years by the time Katrina hit. Before that he had been a top level manager. People made fun of the fact that he ran some Arabian horse show association, but a managerial job is a managerial job. There's a common thread that runs through all jobs like that. You have to delegate tasks and monitor who's doing a good job of completing them.

You can blame Chertoff, sure, but you can still put your sites on GWB as well. You'd think the guy who saw his Dad be just a one term Prez a dozen years before would have taught him a lesson. Daddy in 1992 had to scramble after FEMA and other agencies showed massive incompetence there as well, although the situation was not as 'floody' as with Katrina. Bush barely won Florida only after essentially throwing tons of money at the state.

For the most part, people think that Bush 41 was a competent President. So perhaps you should consider the proposition that major disasters like Hurricane Andrew or Hurricane Katrina make everybody look bad.


^* 87 days

 

[sunmaster14]

<snip>

This thread was never about placing all blame on Brown. It's purpose was to highlight the gross negligence of Brown.

Which you have utterly failed to do. You have not given any evidence whatsoever. All you do is say that Brown did nothing or that Brown was incompetent, but you don't actually give any reasons for believing that.

 

[RandFan]

I wanted to come back to this.

I was really ticked off when U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff made the comment on live television that “No one could have foreseen this.” Here is a bit of the foresight that we did have about what could happen (taken from a blog I wrote a few years ago. I wrote the following paragraph to make a point about something else. The rest of the blog is actually irrelevant here):

Prior to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in August 2005, several reports, studies, models, and even television documentaries had been made which, we later came to learn, accurately described the level of devastation from such an event. Louisiana State University in conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed a model and published a report in 2002 predicting the effects of a category 5 hurricane striking New Orleans; the Houston Chronicle and the New Orleans Times-Picayune published articles in 2001 and 2002, respectively, on just what would happen were a powerful hurricane to strike New Orleans; National Geographic had published a story in 2004 describing a hypothetical hurricane strike on New Orleans that was so prescient as to eerily appear to be actually describing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and the first episode of the Weather Channel’s then-new series “It Could Happen Tomorrow”, was already in the can by mid-2005 and depicted what would happen if a category 5 hurricane made a direct hit on New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina struck before the episode ever aired.

I think this was the biggest wake up calls of my life. Sunddenly I realize that of this hucksterism "who could have known" was as obviously as phony as Clinton's "meaning of the word is" nonsense.

I don't think anyone is going to come to this thread and say that the administration had no way to know that disaster from a large scale storm like Katrina could have had the results that it did.

 

[sunmaster14]

I wanted to come back to this.



I think this was the biggest wake up calls of my life. Sunddenly I realize that of this hucksterism "who could have known" was as obviously as phony as Clinton's "meaning of the word is" nonsense.

I don't think anyone is going to come to this thread and say that the administration had no way to know that disaster from a large scale storm like Katrina could have had the results that it did.

The disaster scenarios did not anticipate that levees would be breached. It's as simple as that. Had the levees not been breached, FEMA probably would have looked reasonably competent. The fact is that FEMA had a plan, and FEMA had run exercises and workshops to deal with a hurricane hitting New Orleans in just the 14 months prior to Katrina. Frankly, I'm not sure why the results are considered evidence of incompetence. If somebody had told me that the levee system would fail around New Orleans and the whole place would be flooded up to sea level (indeed higher because of storm surge), I would have thought you would be looking at tens of thousands dead. In the event, only 1,800 died, and many of those deaths were outside New Orleans.

 

[kookbreaker]

I'm not sure what you mean by a straw target, but the battle plan for a hurricane hitting New Orleans did not envision so many people being left in the city. Was that reasonable, and was the evacuation plan reasonable? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that it was. Certainly there were hundreds of school buses right there in New Orleans that were never used. In any case, there was never any discussion of whether the battle plan itself was flawed before the entire media complex started dumping on FEMA. Whether or not FEMA did a worse than expected job really had nothing to do with the perception that it had done a worse than expected job. The severity of the catastrophe and the much greater number of people who did not evacuate were the main drivers of the perception.

I call it straw because it tries to shift all the fault onto the city. Wolrob specifically said 'those people shouldn'a been there'

Any reasonable disaster plan would take into account that an evacuation can't be perfect, and we actually know that FEMA prepositioned enough supplies to care for 15,000 people for 3 days. So that is something of a red herring to imply that FEMA's plan was unrealistic because no evacuation is 100% effective.

And yet when that was seen to be inadequate the repsonse was to make a hash of continued supply.

As for the article you linked to, I would take it more seriously if the author hadn't misspelled the word "breaching."

You gotta find a reason to dismiss, I guess. A typo is as good as a real argument in your book.

This takes time. First, you have to recognize that the state and local authorities are dropping the ball, and then you have to prompt them to do the right thing or grant the federal government authority to take over.

In the wake of most hurricanes the dafult assumption should be state agencies will be overwhelmed and be prepared. Witt seemed to have no trouble realizing this. What was Brownie's problem?

Even after it was painfully obvious to everyone that the situation was falling apart Brown showed he was completely clueless. I beleive the media even called him on it "How can we know these things are happening but you don't?"

People seem to forget that all of this supposed incompetence and chaos happened in just the handful of days after a huge catastrophe occurred. The levees were breached mid-day on Monday, and by Saturday, the situation was under control.

Oh yeah, that's a real notch in Brownie's belt.

In the interim, the US Coast Guard rescued over 30,000 people.

Mostly by working independently of Brownie's mismanagement.

I think people just had unrealistic expectations about how responsive the federal government could be. In fact, it's not clear that anybody was permanently harmed by the alleged delay - inconvenienced maybe, but there have been far worse consequences of bureaucratic bungling that have been given a pass by the media.

Nobody expected Brownie to walk in to Louisiana and lift New Orleans out of the water with his Force powers, but his mismanagment screwd the pooch on multiple levels.

Do you remember how long it took to solve the problem of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf? Before I give you the answer, just try to think back and come up with an estimate yourself.^*

Solving the problem involved a very tricky underwater capping procedure, its relevance to Katrina is pretty sketchy. Did FEMA interfere with cleanup supplies being sent to the coastlines? Did they grab boats to help with the cleanup and send them elsewhere?

How do you know this? I've read the so-called criticisms on the wiki page, and they look pretty thin if you ask me. You're always going to be able to point to a few fubars in any government undertaking. I was actually surprised at how few there were and how immaterial they were.

I expect some screwups. I don't expect that level of screwup. I didn't expect that someone so ccritical on the chain of command would be so clueless about what was going on in NO and elsewhere on the coast.

He actually was not that inexperienced. He had been at FEMA since 2001 and had been in the top position for two years by the time Katrina hit.

And all the while he treated the FEMA as nothing more than a place to put his fellow patronage job people.

Before that he had been a top level manager. People made fun of the fact that he ran some Arabian horse show association, but a managerial job is a managerial job.

Except that he failed there as well. He was forced to resign.

There's a common thread that runs through all jobs like that. You have to delegate tasks and monitor who's doing a good job of completing them.

So maybe hiring politcal cronies and displacing the veteran emergency management people wasn't a very good idea, eh?

For the most part, people think that Bush 41 was a competent President.

I'd like to know what people you talk to then. Because even my most conservative of friends think he was an unmitigated disaster.

So perhaps you should consider the proposition that major disasters like Hurricane Andrew or Hurricane Katrina make everybody look bad.

^* 87 days

They make your incompetent patronage job 'managers' look even worse. And then people suffer and die.

FEMA was competent with proper management under Witt. But GWB just felt it was a place to tos incompetent cronies.

 

[RandFan]

They [major disasters] make your incompetent patronage job 'managers' look even worse. And then people suffer and die.

FEMA was competent with proper management under Witt. But GWB just felt it was a place to tos incompetent cronies.

So, we had 9/11, a wake up call. Most everyone felt we should do something to make us safer against major disasters. We were motivated and I was glad GWB was the president because he wasn't just going to engage in theatrics to make us think we were safe. Right?

To me, Katrina was the proverbial Canary in the coal mine. Very little had changed. I think Bush didn't care. He was most interested in eliminated Saddam Hussein. He admitted he didn't spend much time on Bin Laden.

 

[sunmaster14]

<snip>

You gotta find a reason to dismiss, I guess. A typo is as good as a real argument in your book.

Well, that was really just a nitpick. The article itself is fine, but completely irrelevant to the discussion. If you want to argue that FEMA dropped the ball in not making sure there was a reasonable evacuation plan in place, taking into account the high percentage of poor people without adequate transportation or information, then that's one thing. But I haven't actually seen that argued anywhere. Instead, I've seen arguments to the effect that FEMA should have been more aggressive about making sure the state and local governments adequately implemented the emergency plans that did exist.

In the wake of most hurricanes the dafult assumption should be state agencies will be overwhelmed and be prepared. Witt seemed to have no trouble realizing this. What was Brownie's problem?

There are degrees of being overwhelmed, and they should be measured against reasonable expectations. That's what you're doing for FEMA after all. Why can't FEMA's critics understand that the default assumption should be that federal agencies will be overwhelmed by a disaster of this magnitude? Do we really even have a basis for comparison at the Federal level? We can certainly compare Louisiana's preparations before Katrina hit, against, for example, New Jersey's preparations before Sandy hit and find that New Jersey was a bit more on the ball. But does the comparison between Katrina and Sandy make sense at the Federal level? I don't think so. It was a different kettle of fish after the storm hit, in part because of the unequal preparations at the state level.

Even after it was painfully obvious to everyone that the situation was falling apart Brown showed he was completely clueless. I beleive the media even called him on it "How can we know these things are happening but you don't?"

It certainly looked bad that he didn't know about the people trapped at the Superdome until he heard about it on TV. But what do you think the reasons for that were? Was it because he didn't care? Or that he was off playing golf? Or do you think he just was overwhelmed with all of the other disaster management stuff going on? I mean there were millions of people, spread across thousands of square miles, who were affected by Katrina. Perhaps the plight of 30,000 people stuck under uncomfortable conditions in a shelter was not at the top of his list. It was at the top of the media's list to be sure, but that was only because that's where their reporters could get to a good story.

<snip>

Solving the problem involved a very tricky underwater capping procedure, its relevance to Katrina is pretty sketchy. Did FEMA interfere with cleanup supplies being sent to the coastlines? Did they grab boats to help with the cleanup and send them elsewhere?

Not FEMA specifically, but actually, yes, the Federal government did in fact make those mistakes. They turned away oil skimmers from other countries, and imposed ridiculous delays on people and equipment that were sent to help. That kind of thing always happens of course because the government is very bureaucratic. Sometimes, the positives of an extensive bureaucracy outweigh the negatives, but sometimes (usually, when time is of the essence) they don't.

<snip>

Except that he failed there as well. He was forced to resign.

From the wiki page on Brown:

Before joining the DHS/FEMA, Brown was the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, (IAHA), from 1989-2001. After numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions that Brown took against members violating the Association's code of ethics,[10] Brown resigned and negotiated a buy-out of his contract.

A March 2000 two-part report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, chronicling one of the disciplinary actions, lauded Brown for pursuing an investigation against David Boggs, "the kingpin of the Arabian horse world", despite internal pressure to end the inquiry.[11] The Brown-led investigation found Boggs performed medically unnecessary surgery on horses to enhance their visual appeal. An ethics board suspended Boggs for five years. Boggs protested through multiple lawsuits against both the organization and Brown, alleging slander and defamation. Brown and the IAHA prevailed in each of the lawsuits brought by Boggs but the lawsuits nonetheless took a financial toll. Some members interviewed felt Brown showed an imperious attitude, and nicknamed him "The Czar."[12]

Brown started his own legal defense fund before resigning, a move he said was necessary to protect his family's assets.[13] However, some IAHA insiders claimed that this was what really led to his ousting. He raised money from breeders for the fund as well as IAHA, creating what some called a conflict of interest. Despite his contract stipulating that IAHA was to pay all his personal legal expenses, on top of his $100,000 annual salary, the Association refused initially to pay the legal bills, and Brown created the legal defense fund on the advice of IAHA's own legal counsel.

It doesn't seem to me that his being forced out of the IAHA should be counted against him.

<snip>

I'd like to know what people you talk to then. Because even my most conservative of friends think he was an unmitigated disaster.

Conservatives think Bush 41 was a disaster on ideology, not on competency. He was a bit of a RINO actually.

They make your incompetent patronage job 'managers' look even worse. And then people suffer and die.

FEMA was competent with proper management under Witt. But GWB just felt it was a place to tos incompetent cronies.

How was Brown even a crony? Was he directly connected to Bush's campaign? He was a friend of a friend as far as I know.

 

[sunmaster14]

So, we had 9/11, a wake up call. Most everyone felt we should do something to make us safer against major disasters. We were motivated and I was glad GWB was the president because he wasn't just going to engage in theatrics to make us think we were safe. Right?

9/11 was a wake up call to protect ourselves against hurricanes? Really? Note also that the bipartisan decision to fold FEMA under the umbrella of a newly created Department of Homeland Security may have had the opposite effect in terms of protecting ourselves against hurricanes. Perhaps it was a bad idea from the start, or perhaps it takes time to get the coordination of various emergency response agencies right. But the post-Katrina investigations did cite the DHS structure as disruptive to the operation of FEMA.

To me, Katrina was the proverbial Canary in the coal mine. Very little had changed. I think Bush didn't care. He was most interested in eliminated Saddam Hussein. He admitted he didn't spend much time on Bin Laden.

Well, except that your perceptions of the Katrina response appear to be founded on untruths. In my mind, there's no question that Bush cared about the victims of Katrina. He's actually a very empathetic person. I can see somebody like Obama, or even Bill Clinton, not giving a ****, except to the extent that it would affect them politically.

 

[RandFan]

Except that he failed there as well. He was forced to resign.

Let's assume for a moment that we learned some valuable lessons from Katrina. Doesn't that mean experience in dealing with disasters is critically important to being head of FEMA?

In another forum someone made the argument that the administrator is largely a figure head and the actual planning and implementation is delegated to subordinates. "Oh I said, how well did that work out"? "Doesn't the job of administrator include assessing the competency of subordinates and to review the plans and preparations of subordinates?"

How would Brown even know if his agency was up to the job?

Would you hire a disgraced horse race manager to run the surgery dept of a local hospital?

 

[sunmaster14]

Let's assume for a moment that we learned some valuable lessons from Katrina. Doesn't that mean experience in dealing with disasters is critically important to being head of FEMA?

In another forum someone made the argument that the administrator is largely a figure head and the actual planning and implementation is delegated to subordinates. "Oh I said, how well did that work out"? "Doesn't the job of administrator include assessing the competency of subordinates and to review the plans and preparations of subordinates?"

How would Brown even know if his agency was up to the job?

That is part of being a good manager. It doesn't really require expertise in the thing being managed. There have been good CEOs of software companies who couldn't even program their TIVOs. Good managing is about dealing with and motivating people, and people are people.

Would you hire a disgraced horse race manager to run the surgery dept of a local hospital?

Not a disgraced one, but I might hire an effective, courageous, and honest one, as Michael Brown supposedly was (at least if you can believe the wiki page).