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Author Topic:   Department Of Homeland Security Inaction At the Top
RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 1 of 297 (240108)
09-02-2005 8:51 PM


For those who think I am just spouting liberalist propaganda bush bashing empty talk on the Homeland Security responsibilities:
FROM: Department Of Homeland Security, The OFFICIAL Vision and Mission Statement, etc: The DHS Strategic Plan -- Securing Our Homeland (click)
The National Strategy for Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act of 2002 served to mobilize and organize our nation to secure the homeland from terrorist attacks. This exceedingly complex mission requires a focused effort from our entire society if we are to be successful. To this end, one primary reason for the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security was to provide the unifying core for the vast national network of organizations and institutions involved in efforts to secure our nation.
Mission
We will lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation. We will ensure safe and secure borders, welcome lawful immigrants and visitors, and promote the free-flow of commerce.
Strategic Goals
Awareness --
Identify and understand threats, assess vulnerabilities, determine potential impacts and disseminate timely information to our homeland security partners and the American public.
Protection --
Safeguard our people and their freedoms, critical infrastructure, property and the economy of our Nation from acts of terrorism, natural disasters, or other emergencies.
Response --
Lead, manage and coordinate the national response to acts of terrorism, natural disasters, or other emergencies.
Recovery --
Lead national, state, local and private sector efforts to restore services and rebuild communities after acts of terrorism, natural disasters, or other emergencies.
Download the DHS Strategic Plan. February 24, 2004 (PDF, 31 pages - 8 MB)
(GREEN and underline mine for emphasis, bold and italic in the original)
So is there any question about who (1) should have coordinated the plan (2) made the plan and (3) implemented the plan?
That's three years in the making to arrive at the plan that was implemented for New Orleans? This is NOT a failure of the {joes\janes} on the {street\boat\truck\plane} that are doing their jobs, it is a failure from the top down to MANAGE the system.
Now lets look at what is high on their MANAGEMENT priority list (based on their own Press Release)
FROM: DHS Press Room (click)
Fact Sheet: National Preparedness Month and Public Preparedness
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact 202-282-8010
Stacey Grissom, American Red Cross Press Office, 202-303-4462
September 1, 2005
National Preparedness Month
National Preparedness Month is a nationwide coordinated effort held each September to encourage Americans to take simple steps to prepare for emergencies in their homes, businesses and schools. National Preparedness Month 2005 is being co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Green Cross.
Public Preparedness
During September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross will urge all Americans to take some simple steps to become better prepared for emergencies including:
* Get a Kit - Get a kit of emergency supplies that will allow you and your family to survive for at least three days in the event an emergency happens. Go to Plan Ahead for Disasters | Ready.gov and http://www.redcross.org/Preparedness for a complete list of recommended supplies.
* Make a Plan - Plan in advance what you and your family will do in an emergency. Go to Plan Ahead for Disasters | Ready.gov and http://www.redcross.org/Preparedness for more information and templates to help get you started.
* Be Informed - Learn more about different threats that could affect your community and appropriate responses to them. Go to Plan Ahead for Disasters | Ready.gov and http://www.redcross.org/Preparedness for more information about natural disasters and potential terrorist threats.
* Get Involved - After preparing yourself and your family for possible emergencies, take the next step: get training in first aid and emergency response and get involved in preparing your community. Visit http://www.citizencorps.gov or http://www.redcross.org/Preparedness to find out about training and volunteer opportunities through your local Citizen Corps Council or American Red Cross Chapter.
And be sure to stock up on duct tape and plastic .... pack it in a picnic basket for ease of use.
Expect this document to be removed shortly, if they have any shame. Look at the freaking date of the document!
Once again this administration has botched it's duties, but now it just isn't soldiers dying in a mistaken foreign war, it is people here in the USof(N)A that are dying from the failures.
{{abe underline for more emPHAsis, removed sig as unsuitable here}}
{{fixed result of global change of "red" to "green" -- that got ugly}}
This message has been edited by RAZD, 09*02*2005 08:56 PM
This message has been edited by RAZD, 09*02*2005 08:58 PM
This message has been edited by RAZD, 09*02*2005 09:35 PM

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by arachnophilia, posted 09-02-2005 9:40 PM RAZD has replied
 Message 8 by Peal, posted 09-03-2005 4:56 PM RAZD has not replied
 Message 11 by DBlevins, posted 09-03-2005 9:21 PM RAZD has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 3 of 297 (240118)
09-02-2005 9:42 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by arachnophilia
09-02-2005 9:40 PM


Re: natural disasters
yep.
and the definite mission to LEAD ...
Looks like another job done by the Botch Administration.

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by arachnophilia, posted 09-02-2005 9:40 PM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4 by arachnophilia, posted 09-02-2005 10:14 PM RAZD has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 5 of 297 (240216)
09-03-2005 7:17 AM
Reply to: Message 4 by arachnophilia
09-02-2005 10:14 PM


Re: natural disasters
where is the rest of the armed forces?
My understanding is that the armed forces are restricted from stateside operations by some legal issue. This certainly would be an argument for expanded National Guard proportions within the armed forces units
Perhaps all those base closings could be decommissioned as federal armed forces and recommissioned as national guard units.
... last year's frances knocked us on our asses for a good week ... but even last year's smaller disaster was so mismanaged that nearly every resident ... were outraged. the reasources and people just were not there ... fema and the dhs were a joke to us. they barely did anything. fema threw some money at the situation, but that was about it.
Seems the failure to deal with nola started earlier eh? Yeah, I think they have "underplanned" for a while, especially to deal with the increased residency\value issues of a lot of vulnerable coastline: outerbanks NC is another ...
where is the dhs?
and what have they been doing for the last 3-4 years if they haven't even thought of creating evacuation plans for major cities.
From "breaking news" - Under-fire Bush pledges to fix hurricane misery (click)
... returning to Washington late on Friday from nearly seven hours touring some of the most devastated areas of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana ...
In New Orleans ... Bush talked about the suffering of the people who have gone days without rescue, food, water or medicine — some dying in the process.
But what he experienced of the crisis there was mostly by air.
... He issued a memorandum saying Hurricane Katrina had created a severe energy supply interruption that could damage the national economy ...
Aides arranged for a hurricane briefing to be the first item on Bush’s daily agenda for the foreseeable future.
I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen, the president said in New Orleans as he ended his tour. I understand the devastation requires more than one day’s attention.
President George W Bush today promised stunned and suffering hurricane victims along America’s battered Gulf Coast that he would fix what’s not going exactly right in the storm’s aftermath.
He heard some things he didn’t want to believe at first, said Mary Landrieu, a Democratic senator from Louisiana. The president is starting to grasp the magnitude of the situation.
I could make some suggestions on how to fix some of it ... fire the top management (can he fire himself?).
There certainly weren't any "pre-emptive" actions taken to {prevent\reduce\mitigate\aleviate\help\etc} ...

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4 by arachnophilia, posted 09-02-2005 10:14 PM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
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RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 6 of 297 (240220)
09-03-2005 8:23 AM


Newt, Mitch .... liberals?
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=154626708&p=y...
If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack? asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.
Republican Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts called the government’s response an embarrassment.

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 12 of 297 (240315)
09-03-2005 9:43 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by DBlevins
09-03-2005 9:21 PM


Re: Bush administration cuts funding
What I find telling is that people of all political stripes find the {federally managed anticipation\response} (excluding coast guard) to be inadequate at best, intolerable at worst.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by DBlevins, posted 09-03-2005 9:21 PM DBlevins has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 13 of 297 (240316)
09-03-2005 9:45 PM
Reply to: Message 10 by arachnophilia
09-03-2005 6:56 PM


Re: Let's not forget the upcoming tragedies.
well you do know that {ATLANTIS} is supposed to be just off Cuba, right?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 10 by arachnophilia, posted 09-03-2005 6:56 PM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 22 by arachnophilia, posted 09-04-2005 10:23 PM RAZD has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 16 of 297 (240350)
09-04-2005 7:42 AM
Reply to: Message 15 by Sylas
09-04-2005 4:08 AM


Re: Let's not forget the upcoming tragedies.
My immediate reaction was that they were comparing a tidal wave that was focused by a fjord-like valley (steep sides, narrowing to a fine point) with one generated in the middle of the ocean, where the wave would have to be radial and dissipate the energy with the square of the distance (even if it is just a semi-circle arc).
Take out the focusing effect and reduce the wave with distance and it would have to be a truly massive slide to make more of a wave than has been observed.

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This message is a reply to:
 Message 15 by Sylas, posted 09-04-2005 4:08 AM Sylas has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 19 of 297 (240393)
09-04-2005 1:35 PM


Failing to plan is Planing to fail ...
Folks the absence of planning just gets worse. Consider "They've got to open the base" (click)
Sept. 3, 2005 | BATON ROUGE, La. -- I got on a bus with California Rep. Maxine Waters Saturday afternoon, not sure where we were going, just knowing we were headed to New Orleans to pick up Hurricane Katrina victims. Even as television news is showing pictures of people being rescued by military helicopters and chartered buses, local and national black leaders are seething at the mismanaged evacuation, as well as the haphazard way even the rescued people are being handled. So they've come up with their own plan: to load the remaining residents on buses they've chartered and bring them to England Air Force Base, a shuttered military installation in Alexandria, La.
"My soul wouldn't let me sit and watch this on TV," says Waters, who represents South Central Los Angeles. "I'm just shocked that people have been living for five days, and dying, on the streets of this country. So I came down here, and my friend Cleo Fields came up with this wonderful possibility."
That wonderful possibility, hatched by state Sen. Cleo Fields and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, is to house the displaced residents at the Air Force base instead of shelters and sports stadiums like the Astrodome, many of which are full anyway. They haven't gotten permission to do that, but that's not stopping them. The black leaders say racism is behind both the late response to the emergency and the dispersal of rescued residents far away from New Orleans ...
So now we have junior senators coming up with ad hoc solutions that are better than anything the feds in general and the "professional" leaders in DHS and FEMA have yet proposed?
How come nobody thought of this before? Before the Astrodome, before the Superdome, before the hurricane?
Where is the leadership?

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Replies to this message:
 Message 20 by Nighttrain, posted 09-04-2005 9:51 PM RAZD has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 21 of 297 (240450)
09-04-2005 10:11 PM
Reply to: Message 20 by Nighttrain
09-04-2005 9:51 PM


Re: Failing to plan is Planing to fail ...
Yes, my experience on the Gulf Coast (way before DHS however) was that radio and tv were broadcasting ways to prepare, secure your home, where to go to evacuate, what to take. Certainly you see this happening in the coverage of florida's hurricanes.
The problem you have is that there are always people who want to stay and people who have to stay (cannot move or have jobs to do) -- and the US is kind of based on personal freedom -- so there will alway be some to go back for, if they are still {there\living}
Secondary problem is that this usually drives {overbuying\shortages} of necessities, so the first few buy up more than they need and the last ones get empty shelves.
In fact the second DHS webpage that I linked talked about this kind of personal preparedness (albeit with no link to local or federal type programs).
Surely survival starts with the individual?
Individual survival does. Social animals can be expected to work together to overcome obstacles: bison forming circles with the young at the center to protect them from wolves.
Folks were surrounded by water and dying of thirst.
Perhaps they were lulled into a false sense of security, that it would blow over, and that the {locals\feds} would be there the next day to start picking up the pieces, as they had in florida and other cases.
in both threads, blame seems to be loaded on local and Federal authorities, but where is the citizen preparedness?
For myself the question is not one of preparedness so much as management of the situation that I found to be so lacking.
and yes, anyone that had an opportunity to get out and didn't gets no sympathy, imho, unless they stayed to help those that couldn't leave (hospitals etc).

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This message is a reply to:
 Message 20 by Nighttrain, posted 09-04-2005 9:51 PM Nighttrain has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 25 of 297 (240458)
09-04-2005 10:34 PM
Reply to: Message 22 by arachnophilia
09-04-2005 10:23 PM


Re: Let's not forget the upcoming tragedies.
all one has to do is google {atlantis cuba} and you can see by the volume of websites that there must be something to it
I remembered it more as the version
"7.7 square mile area 2200 feet below the sea's surface off the western tip of Cuba."
that puts is closer to the yucatan

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This message is a reply to:
 Message 22 by arachnophilia, posted 09-04-2005 10:23 PM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 27 by arachnophilia, posted 09-04-2005 10:48 PM RAZD has replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 29 of 297 (240468)
09-04-2005 10:58 PM
Reply to: Message 27 by arachnophilia
09-04-2005 10:48 PM


Re: Let's not forget the upcoming tragedies.
But it sure displays the willingness of people to believe the most uncredible things.
There is also one greek town that was sunk by earthquake and that may have been the origin, if I remember correctly.

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 27 by arachnophilia, posted 09-04-2005 10:48 PM arachnophilia has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 32 of 297 (240506)
09-05-2005 7:00 AM
Reply to: Message 30 by jar
09-04-2005 11:07 PM


Lose the excuses.
The best way to start planning how to make sure we will be ready next time, is to make sure that the people that were responsible for this debacle are not anywhere near involved next time

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by jar, posted 09-04-2005 11:07 PM jar has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 47 of 297 (240636)
09-05-2005 4:34 PM
Reply to: Message 45 by nwr
09-05-2005 3:54 PM


Re: once again, monk misses the point
If the government would just get out of the way, we wouldn't have these problems.
Looks like that theory was just tested ... and invalidated.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 45 by nwr, posted 09-05-2005 3:54 PM nwr has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 48 of 297 (240637)
09-05-2005 4:36 PM
Reply to: Message 46 by jar
09-05-2005 4:16 PM


Re: once again, monk misses the point
Perhaps
We should ask Cuba how they are so successful at it?

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 46 by jar, posted 09-05-2005 4:16 PM jar has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 49 by arachnophilia, posted 09-05-2005 5:09 PM RAZD has not replied

RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 65 of 297 (240717)
09-05-2005 9:22 PM
Reply to: Message 62 by arachnophilia
09-05-2005 8:55 PM


Re: FEMA -- flip side
and the flip side is that if you cannot economically afford to make the city safe from a cat4 plus hurricane, that then you look at mandatory enforced evacuation to a pre-arranged location and by a pre-arranged plan, using national guard to implement. {abe} you move them by neighborhoods: cuba has a good system that moves doctors with patients -- this has been done elsewhere and it ain't rocket science.{/abe}
the problem is not that DHS\FEMA did nothing about ensuring the safety of the city before hand to protect it from a cat 5 storm but they also had NO other plan to deal with the eventuality.
I can forgive one if the other is done.
It wasn't.
This message has been edited by RAZD, 09*05*2005 09:24 PM

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 62 by arachnophilia, posted 09-05-2005 8:55 PM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
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