(no subject)

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Linking to naomikritzer's far-from-comprehensive but still bloody appalling list of fuck ups by FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

And also to add that there's a opinion piece in the Business section of today's edition of The Herald-Sun which says:

It's going to be hard to sustain the new meme that 'Bush ho(lied)ayed, thousands died', beyond the obvious inept and grossly negligent behaviour of the city and state authorities that did cause deaths.

Indeed, but for Bush's demand before the hurricane hit for the city to order its first ever mandatory evacuation, it would have been: 'hundreds of thousands stayed, tens of thousands died'.

OK, I may just be cynical here, but can anyone verify that it was Bush's call?

Comments

[rosethorne.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure it was either the mayor or the governor.

[valamelmeo.livejournal.com]

Really in cases like this, jurisdiction to call for an evacuation belongs to the state and local governments. It falls on the city leaders first (in this case the mayor), and then on the governor. Bush didn't have to call for an evacuation, and it looks like if he hadn't, there wouldn't have been one.

Basically, there were a lot of failures all around. And it's not as if nobody saw this coming. It's been known for years that if a major hurricane ever hit New Orleans, that this was what was going to happen. But it just didn't get fixed, due to disagreements over what needed to be done to fix it.

But what some people fail to understand is that relief efforts take time to organize. You can't get tens of thousands of people out of a flooded area within 24 hours. And it doesn't help that some of these trapped people were being complete asshats...which is something that probably happens in nearly all disaster situations, but you usually don't hear about it until significantly afterward, and it's all the more surprising when you hear these things about supposedly civilized parts of the world. (Whether or not New Orleans could ever have been considered a 'civilized' part of the world is a separate question...It never seemed particularly civilized to me, anyway.)

But what we're hearing from evacuees who've ended up here in Dallas, for the most part, is that they're not going back. They're looking for jobs and places to live here in Texas. And apparently those who ended up in Houston are saying the same thing. Kids are being bussed to local schools from the Convention Center and Reunion Arena where they're living for the time being, and many others have already found places to live. We're doing our best to help them. Not that that excuses any of the gross incompetence on behalf of...well, a lot of people, but I don't think it does any good to be angry.

Also, every President has taken vacations, but for some reason anytime Bush leaves Washington, it's portrayed as a vacation by the national media, when a lot of the time he just happens to be at his ranch in Texas, still doing work. I wonder if there's data anywhere on how much time the average President spends away from D.C....

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(Whether or not New Orleans could ever have been considered a 'civilized' part of the world is a separate question...It never seemed particularly civilized to me, anyway.)

I remember that Dangerous Places included it amongst it's top 10 cities at one stage. :-)