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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