shemp said:
The only negative thing I will say regarding him is that if we didn't have this silly war going on, we would have more Guardsmen available for relief efforts.
That I'm not upset about, as they seem to have more National Guardsmen on the outskirts of town than authorities are willing to send in at this time.
Where I think the administration can reasonably be criticized is in not beefing up the Army Corps of Engineers to handle domestic tasks while also handling Iraq. I busted on them in another thread, but for better or worse you can't do anything around water without them around so they should be around. It would not have prevented this disaster (indeed, it might have worsened it -- imagine a temporary lock busting and inundating an entire levee line which was being rebuilt), but it would have signalled a committment to domestic needs. And if it wasn't New Orleans this time it could have been Charleston, or Coastal Carolina (north and South) or any of a bunch of other places that have flood control or erosion abatement programs on hold waiting for the Corps to come back. So that's the Bush-specific criticism.
Federal-government wide but not specific to any president is the failure to drill for this. This particular hurricane was a tricky one -- it entered the Gulf barely a category 1. But more generally everyone knew that eventually a Cat 5 would hit New Orleans. Everybody. I'm a person who believes that local things like this are best handled by locals, but the reality is that FEMA is the big mama-jama of disaster preparation. There should have been a big notebook somewhere with an updated list of where to find 1,000 busses and drivers on a moment's notice, where to store and man 500 flat boats, which sections of the city would flood first if each levee broke, etc. The M in FEMA stands for Management, and managers have contingency plans.
On the state and (mostly) local level is where the big breakdown seems to have occurred. OK, they had 10 shelters. But most of them were in the very areas to flood first, and even the Superdome is a little below the lake, it turns out. Again, if the whole city's in a bowl you need busses not buildings to escape flooding. That's particularly true in poor urban areas where much of the populace does not have a personal automobile. Also, if the primary risk to your city is water and wind and water kills electricity and wind kills towers, it seems like in investment should have been made in battery-operated, easily-placed radio repeaters.
And either with FEMA or without them, they should have drilled, drilled, drilled. Again, the city's topography is known and gravity is pretty well understood. Someone could have known what parts of the city would flood first under a variety of scenarios. There was literally nothing about this situation which wasn't easily predictable except for the free hours between the passing of the storm and the failure of the levees
I'm hesitant to bring up another failure because I'm sure that law enforcement is doing its level best and acting heroically right now, but the issue of crime has to be addressed. New Orleans was one of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation and the police force was widely seen as both incompetent and corrupt. How many people could have evacuated but didn't precisely because they feared that if they left their possessions would have been stolen even if the storm had missed? If you want people to obey your order to evacuate, you have to give them confidence that they will have a life to return to the 99 times the storm doesn't do what it did this time.
There's also some criticism for both the Mississippi and (to a lesser extent) Louisiana governments for allowing and building a huge new industry, gaming, but forcing the facilities to be on boats. The initial idea was for actual, sailing riverboats which could have been moved, but the governments got addicted to the easy tax revenues and allowed the casino industry to push for larger and larger "boats." The industry, in turn, played right along and you can see the results along I-90 in Biloxi.
There are also some big-picture items like the unwillingness to allow drilling and new refineries in different places which is leading to the supply emergency we're seeing right now, but those are my initial thoughts.
), but I hope you get my point. Surviving a disaster like this needs much more planning then what is available when you only start once you see the hurricane on the horizon. The 3 or 4 days before the hurricane should be spent executing plans developed way before hand.
