Department Of Homeland Security Inaction At the Top

Bush will be responsible Bush did it again. Bush again Bush Sr. this time Gotta go with Jeb Bush on this one. Barbara Bush, why weren’t you prepared? How could the Bush twins let this happen? W will be responsible Karl Rove will pull the strings for this one behind the scenes. Arnold this time with help from Bush And no matter what happens, we know who it to blame.

Wrong. FEMA is not responsible for reinforcing the levees. It is the responsibility of the Orleans district levee board working in concert with the Corps of Engineers. Wrong. It is not FEMA’s responsibility to coordinate the evacuation of cities days in advance. It is the state's responsibility and in particular the local authorities, city officials, parish or county officials who have jurisdiction in these affairs. It is the same scenario all over the country in every major metropolitan area. Here is the 364 buses operated by the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority (NORTA) that Nagin should have used to evacuate the poor.Why weren't NORTA's 364 buses used to ferry poor people out of New Orleans before Katrina hit?Nagin said the city could and would commandeer any property or vehicle it deemed necessary to provide safe shelter or transport for those in need. He didn’t exercise his authority. RTA buses never left the RTA lots. There was no water or food provisions brought to the Superdome before Katrina hit. There were no emergency generators brought to either the Superdome or the convention center before the storm hit. These are not the responsibility of FEMA these are local responsibilities. Source FEMA did not do their job. They were too slow to respond when it became blindingly obvious that state and local officials were helpless. Michael Brown is indeed responsible in part for the loss of lives and he should be fired.Some will continue to argue that FEMA should have been involved earlier and that they should have taken over local control of the situation before the storm hit. But that's not how the system works.Federal, State and Local authorities operate under a system whereby powers and jurisdictions are understood. Not just in New Orleans, but everywhere in this country.THE SYSTEM: Either live with it or change it.This message has been edited by Monk, Mon, 09-05-2005 01:28 PM

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?

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. 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. 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.

And who is “they”? It's always about "them", never "us". Stop and consider for a moment if you can. Where was the Democratic Senator or any Democratic leader who had access to the same information regarding the levee situation and could advocate for a multi-billion dollar, multi year project for south Louisiana?I really don't want to keep bringing up the money and the politics side of it but your implication is that the administration knew about this and deliberatly ignored the situation. It wasn't ignored, the issue had been around for many years. There are numerous books written about the levees, but it wasn't going to happen because it wasn't a political reality.Why weren’t the liberals in this country pushing the importance of New Orleans and how important NO is to our so called "oil-based economy" as you put it? Because that would require support of an oil-based issue, funding billions of dollars for all those oil companies in south Louisiana. That's not something a liberal would do.The Bush administration would know they couldn't push that forward. Their ties to big oil, Haliburon, etc. There is no way the president or congress would, even with majority Republicans, stand against the Dems attack on an appropriations bill for levee repair. They would know that the Dems would successfully kill the bill in the media by claiming it to be an appropriations bill for big oil).That's why it didn't happen.But even if you put aside politics, surely someone would have this info at the New York times editorial staff? Why weren’t there any liberals in the news corp asking the administration about NO during news conferences? Why? Why wasn’t Olbermann rhetorically asking the administration about NO before the storm hit? Wasn't he interested in the status of pre-storm planning? Why didn’t Olberman or someone at his organization know that a Cat 5 storm would destroy NO?When they were showing the folks lined up to get into the Superdome, why weren't the reporters asking if the folks had brought enough food and water for several days?Can't we and "they" be "us" on this one?