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Member (Idle past 1430 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Department Of Homeland Security Inaction At the Top | |||||||||||||||||||||||
jar Member (Idle past 419 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
Not true. Google any major city in the US and use key words "evacuation plan" and you will find that every city has them. Should these evacuation plans, developed by local authorities who know the city the best and understand the most efficient means to accomplish wholesale evacuation, be subjugated to some form of generic FEMA plan? First, if the evacuees don't know about the plan long before hand they aren't worth very much. Second, I've been involved in developing some such plans and frankly, most are pure crap. For example, one part of Savannah, GA's plan involved putting new signs on the Evacuation Route roads warning that many would be underwater and unpassable. Third, hell yes individual plans should be subjugated to a master plan. Preparation for this type of event will extend way beyond local, county or state borders. They have to be coordinated so that the folk in Michigan know their part in Katrina-like events. Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1430 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1430 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1369 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
fascism.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1492 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
THE SYSTEM: Either live with it or change it. Well, we did change it. Remember? That's what the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security was. That's why Bush spent all that money on an entirely new federal bureau - to coordinate disaster/terrorism response at the Federal level. We were supposed to be prepared for stuff like this. Do you imagine that, had it been a terrorist bomb that breached the levees and not a hurricane, that the response would have been any better? Things like this weren't supposed to happen again. Bush promised that, after the lessons of 9/11, our responses to these threats would be immediate and effective. Bush promised. What happened? That's a failure of leadership, incompetence that he needs to answer for.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1369 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
think the right will find a way to slime and spin their way out of this one? i think it's pretty obvious that the dhs and fema have utterly failed.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Yes, but the massive damage to Miss.--not expected.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1492 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
think the right will find a way to slime and spin their way out of this one? Think? You haven't been paying attention? Monk's already leading the charge.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1369 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
Yes, but the massive damage to Miss.--not expected. *shrug* they need to find better people then. i mean *I* expected it. you don't have a storm the size of the entire gulf of mexico and expect nola to be bonkered but not mississippi.
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1369 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
Think? You haven't been paying attention? Monk's already leading the charge. no, i mean, do you think enough people will take them seriously for them to actually SUCCEED this time around?
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Looters. Let's shift the discussion to looters. That usually works.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1492 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
I don't know. The Bush faithful don't need much spin to salve their guilty consciences. But Bush's brand of crap is wearing pretty thin with normal people, as I think the polls show. And his support amongst African-American voters evaporates every time CNN shows the sea of black faces stranded on their own rooves.
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jar Member (Idle past 419 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
By whom?
Ever been through a Hurricane? Ever seen the results from a Cat 3 Hurricane? How about Cat 4? If you live anywhere near a coast, ask to see the Hurricane Prepardness Maps. They've been available for at least 20 years now. Look at the storm surge limits for each classification. If the folk in Mississippi were surprised, then they just hadn't looked at the available data. If folk elsewhere were surprised, then they simply had not looked at the available data. If they were surprised about changes in the track, they simply had not looked at what happened when it went across Florida a couple days before. Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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Monk Member (Idle past 3949 days) Posts: 782 From: Kansas, USA Joined: |
yes. fema is responsible for reinforcing levees. they are supposed to coordinate efforts with levee boards and the army corp of engineers. they are responsible for managing that sort of thing on a federal level. thus their name. you see, that falls under the first two categories of their duties. they are supposed to reduce the likelihood or severity of possible disasters, and help prepare for the ones that are foreseeable. You confuse a FEMA mission statement with operational procedures. “Reducing the likelihood or severity of possible disasters” is a very broad statement that represents the over arching philosophy of the organization. It is not meant to be operational guidance as to specific local actions. You use the term “responsible” as if that covers all meanings and contexts for its use. Day to day operations of the levee system is performed by the Orleans levee district. The Corps of Engineers are involved in longer range projects not included in routine day to day operations. FEMA is not directly involved in these operations. Reinforcing the levees were in process and managed by the Corps of Engineers. Why? Because it was a longer term project whose scope is beyond day to day operations of the Levee board. Again FEMA is not directly involved in these projects. The decisions made in 1996 to reinforce the levee system to Cat 3 at a cost of $750 million was made by the levee board and the Corps of Engineers, (COE). FEMA was not directly involved in making those decisions. Many organizations knew that a Cat 4 or 5 hitting NOLA was only a matter of time. The levee board knew, the COE knew and FEMA knew. But so what? Everyone knew a Cat 3 improvement would not suffice, but they all bowed to the political reality that Cat 5 protections would be prohibitively expensive. They knew that unless someone went to Washington to beat the drum loud enough to get the attention of law makers, $750 million was all they could get. Should FEMA have taken up the drumbeat and put reinforcement of the levee system in NOLA at a cost of approximately $14 billlion above all other funding priorities? Yea, maybe, but without the political clout of someone very influential within DC politics, it simply wasn’t going to happen.So the levee board, the COE, FEMA, NOLA city officials, the governor, most state politicians and a majority of Louisiana citizens understand that South Louisiana wasn’t going to be the beneficiary of a $14 billion pork barrel project. Even if that so called “pork” wasn’t really pork but actually a means to save lives. FEMA’s budget is around $7 Billion. Are they supposed to spend 2 years worth of their annual budget on one project in south Louisiana? Of course not. Or for that matter, should DHS with an annual budget of $40 Billion spend 35% of that on one project in south Louisiana? Of course not. In hindsight, should they have spent that money? Yes they should have, but only in hindsight. One can look at the DHS list of top potential disasters and say we should be fully funding prevention on all of those plus all other potential disasters. It's a cold hard fact, we simply cannot prepare for them all.
yes, state and local officials are helpless. that's the idea behind having fema. they're supposed to take charge. i don't expect you to understand this, really. you live in kansas. not that there's anything wrong with kansas, but it's not florida. you have no reference for understanding the madhouse an entire state can become when a category 4 or 5 hurricane is beating down on your coast. And you make the false assumption that my current address in Kansas has been the same since my birth. I’m a relatively recent transplant to Kansas having lived the first 20 years of my life in Louisiana. I’ve been through 4 hurricanes including living through the eye of Betsy in 1965. My sister and her family are homeless due to Katrina. I’ve lived through the madhouse you describe and I am intimately familiar with New Orleans, so yes, I do understand exactly what you are speaking of. I understand it more so than you do.
you have no way to understand activity, panic and mass hysteria on a state level. these things don't happen in kansas. but we're pretty familiar with it down here. there are not enough police officers, army reserve, fire fighters, paramedics or whatever in the entire state to deal with even the craziness BEFORE the storm, let alone after. Some places are like this, others are not. Areas that have practiced local emergency preparedness do not succumb to mass hysteria. I'm not defending FEMA. They were negligent in being too late responding after it was apparent local officals couldn't handle the situation. I've called for Michael Brown to be fired. The difference is between prevention and reaction. I don't hold FEMA responsible for prevention, (specifically the NOLA soup bowl). I do hold them responsible for their delayed reaction.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1492 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
“Reducing the likelihood or severity of possible disasters” is a very broad statement that represents the over arching philosophy of the organization. It is not meant to be operational guidance as to specific local actions. So, in other words it's your view that FEMA's mission is not one it's supposed to actually do?
It's a cold hard fact, we simply cannot prepare for them all. So shouldn't we prepare for the most likely, most catastrophic ones? They don't call it "hurricane season" because it's dollar shooters at Applebee's, Monk. What happened in New Orleans was predicted to be one of the most likely catastrophic disasters to affect America in the immediate future in 2001. Don't you think that calls for preparedness? I realize we can't prepare for them all, but what's the rationale for not having prepared for this one? The expense? The damage is going to cost ten or a hundred times that. They knew it was going to happen. They knew what it would do not only to NO, but to our oil-based economy. They knew how much it was going to cost us to prepare and how much it would cost to not prepare. By not spending the former they've forced us to spend the latter. How is that a defensible action?
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