Hurricane in context

[Jerome Scuggs]

Oh and most everyone I've talked too today (by that I mean the people at the Hirsch Colliseum where about a thousand refugees are) think that Kanye West & the Bushbashing Co. are all incorrect (yes, this sampling includes Democrats - New Orleans is like Liberal City). It ranges from "We should have seen it coming" to "Noone could have come out of that and not fucked up"

[Arikel]

In my posts in this thread, I count myself using 'pay' once and the word 'insurance' twice. You really don't seem to read my posts carefully.

Ephemeral i was trying to show you that you were giving to much importance to money in your posts at this thread... i didnt went after the words, those 2 words got stuck in my mind after i read your thread... -_-
Im just trying to show you that maybe you guys got your priorities wrongh on the Katrina issue, unfortunatelly

[Arikel]

Oh and most everyone I've talked too today (by that I mean the people at the Hirsch Colliseum where about a thousand refugees are) think that Kanye West & the Bushbashing Co. are all incorrect (yes, this sampling includes Democrats - New Orleans is like Liberal City). It ranges from "We should have seen it coming" to "Noone could have come out of that and not fucked up"

I wont argue with you since, from what i understood you were there. But 10000 death people and 5 days withouth help kinda illustrates lack of planning and lack of means to go against the hurricane.

[Jerome Scuggs]

1a) You point out that the people who didn't leave basically deserved it. Has it occured to you that some people may have been too old, sick, or poor to leave? Sure some young and nimble could have walked 100 miles away, or taken a greyhound for $50. Where were the convoys of $5 buses and free transportation that you just assert existed? In fact a lot of people barely made it out in time thanks to transportation nightmares caused by huge traffic jams and the like. Let's not forget that while some people would have had the money to leave, they wouldn't have had the money to find a place to stay for 5-6 days before they could go home. It's not so simple.

The convoys did exist. Once again, everyone fucked up - "just another hurricane" was the general feeling here. No need to mobilize the army. It's not the best thought, but that's what happened.

Also, you're assuming a skewed thought as well - all these poor, sick, old people, just because they're old sick or poor doesn't mean they don't have relatives that could help them out. (The refugee centers have plenty of old, sick and poor people, by the way.)

1b) The fact is, while the experts have constantly warned about the levees being insufficient, no one did anything about it. There were plenty of people I'm sure who didn't equate a hurricane with the levees bursting and having 80% of the city being flooded with water. Remember, these people survived the hurricane itself, they found places to shelter against the initial rain and wind, it's the flooding that got them. Chiding them about staying is pretty stupid considering it's not hard to see why they thought they would be safe if they could just ride out the storm. Note that this doens't excuse the government's late response because FEMA definately had drills and contingency plans for this exact type of incident in it's past.

Everything works in theory, FEMA fucked up as well.

2) The government created a safe point at the Superdome for those who could not leave. Then they left nothing there, and didn't return for days. No food, no water, no air conditioning (in sweltering 95 degree 100% humidity weather, dangerous for the old and sick). The government not only KNEW about these people, they TOLD them to go there. Yet they were abandoned for days. It's not even a case where people were scattered and no one knew where to find them so it's understandable if the response of the S&R teams was slow... they KNEW these people were there.

"Abandoned" ? My second hour class became a dropoff point for clothes and supplies for these people the day of the incident. I know for a fact my dad was down there as well and he says he oversaw plenty of Red Cross'rs giving help. And once again, the whole "big fucking hurricane oh shit what do we do" clause comes into effect as well.

3) The director of FEMA didn't even know people were trapped at the convention center until a full day after it was reported constantly on every TV channel that people were trapped there. So while help started trickling into the Superdome, people at the convention center were screwed. Yet again, this isn't about a S&R mission gone wrong. If the US military can drop precision munitions 11,000 miles away, why can't they airlift some food or something to these places at least?

Thius is sort of self-answering. It can't airflift food because it's the military. Last time I checked, boot camp was about killing, not saving flood victimes. This hasn't happened before, people were sort of like "what the hell". New Orleans was SUPPOSED to have stocks of supplies already (they did), so the gub'ment figured they had a day or two of prep time while these supplies were dispersed. Sadly, the supply centers were lost because noone foresaw the catastrophe.

4) http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...ck=1&cset=true

Please register or log in
The story you requested is available only to registered members.



Note: Member name is no longer used to log in to this site.
Please log in with your e-mail address and password.

5) Comparing this with Andrew is pretty pointless. Andrew was 13 years ago. Are you saying that it's completely useless to learn from past mistakes? So when the next disaster strikes the US you will just go and say 'see all those people got help at around the same time as they did in New Orleans, so it's okay!'. It wasn't acceptable back then, and it certainly shouldn't have recurred now.

I actually agree, because each hurricane and each city is different, having a bona fide one-solution-for-all plan. As you can see, it fails miserably.

The fact is Eph, the government really dropped the bomb from all levels except perhaps for the mayor of New Orleans with his very limited resources due to a completely ruined city. They knew that something like this was going to happen (they had contingency plans for this type of deal with levees breaking and all) two days before the hurricane actually struck New Orleans. And then it took another 4 days for any meaningful help to actually come when there were ample military and national guard supplies near the vincinity to help... just that no one actually told them to do it.

What? The mayor is first at fault- he basically left everyone to their own means, it was HIS decision not to provide transportation for the poor, sick, and old. (And thanks to USFG v. Lopez, the Feds probably couldn't)

The four days after the hurricane were when the levess broke. Before that, the local Guard WAS going to help, but when 80% of the city flooded, people were like "fuck". And even if Bush said "do it", what? The military would magically know EXACTLY what to do just then? No. Supplies had to be collected and centralized for distribution, forces had to be called in, the city had to be staked out, and pockets of survivors found. Rome wasn't built in a day.

You guys probably have the brains to back this up, but hey. I was far enough away to escape disaster (Actually, probably as far away as you could be while still being in Louisiana), but everyone here is helping out. I have family up from New Orleans, my dad's a cop-slash-recently-made-Orleans-enforcer. We speak to these survivors first hand, and I for one can vouch for the shittiness of Louisiana's response teams (anyone looking at our budgets can deduce that as well).

If this happened in say, Texas, or any other state with a big cash flow, i assure you this would be almost a nonissue. Alot of factors helped the overall fuckup, but at the top is straight up, our incompetence.

[Liquid Blue]

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/...urricane2.html


I'll read up on these posts later.


EDIT: Was looking at another forum, and they were talking about how Bush has turned away help offered from other countries. Here's a quote of some scary shit-

Do you think it possibly did this because they're doing shit that they don't want the rest of the world to see?

I was just told from a friend who got this from boingboing.net that a girl in the superdome was getting raped and stabbed, a guy got sick of the screaming, ran outside to try to get the national guard to help out, they shot him dead.

Man... stuff like this is only helping my argument... not that I'm happy it is =[

[Krusnik]

Maybe mr.Bush is exhausting all the resources in Iraq, and didn't think we would need it here?

[Shas'la T'au Kais]

I'm no expert on this subject, but I seem to remember seeing something on the British media about how all the "specialist" disaster "equipment" (whatever that is exactly) was in Iraq, along with the best trained/equipped 1/3 of the National Guard from the states hit.


Again, I don't pretend to know exactly what happened - that's just what I heard.

[Jerome Scuggs]

Anyways, to all the Euros -

My dad brought this up at the dinner table: what about that Heat Wave a few years back? 20,000 in Italy alone, 14,000 in France. And they didn't just die in one day, no, it was an extended period, where your leaders could have done something about it.

If your answers are something like "Because Europe has many different leaders, they aren't unified, beauracracy, we didn't expect it to be THAT bad, what were we supposed to do, etc etc"...exactly. If not, then I'd like to hear what it was :P

[Blanke]

I too, do not completely understand the subject, but from what I have been told , in government class, the following are true:

-It takes 55 hours for everyone from New Orleans (NO) to evacuate
-FEMA suggested to Mayor Nagin of NO to evacuate everyone Saturday, two days before the storm touched land
-a cornucopia of ambulances and a self-sustaining doctor/hospital organization were turned down because they were passed around and not a real organization, respectively

It's not that it wasn't properly planned for--I'd be lying to say that it was--but that it also had a lot of other unseen factors. For instance, the levees broke and because there were no power lines (they were all down) and no way of communication till Tuesday, the city was flooded.

I'd contribute more, but I'm a little short of time right now soooo, ttyl.

[GoldenPlums]

Anyways, to all the Euros -

My dad brought this up at the dinner table: what about that Heat Wave a few years back? 20,000 in Italy alone, 14,000 in France. And they didn't just die in one day, no, it was an extended period, where your leaders could have done something about it.

If your answers are something like "Because Europe has many different leaders, they aren't unified, beauracracy, we didn't expect it to be THAT bad, what were we supposed to do, etc etc"...exactly. If not, then I'd like to hear what it was :P

Nice.

[Nimrook]

ya i read some articles on newspaper about the aftermath of this hurrican... and yes a lot of young girls who were trapped in superdome got raped.. and some little kids got anal by some adults.. it's scary to imagine these stuff happening to kids.. and i also read this part where this guy was approaching a guard to inform them a girl was getting dragged to the side by some men and were gonna get rapped.. the guard just simply shot the guy and didnt even listened to what he wanted to say... like wtf.. lol

i'm not sure if this is tru.. but i heard Bush knew it was coming and he was still on vacation and didnt give orders to US to react to this matter if it DID hit which it did...

[Blanke]

i'm not sure if this is tru.. but i heard Bush knew it was coming and he was still on vacation and didnt give orders to US to react to this matter if it DID hit which it did...

They were positive that it'd hit. Storms of that magnitude don't just happen to "miss." ^-^

But the government, however, is a little more complicated. It's set up so nothign ever gets done quickly. Well, in making laws and such, but in this case, many organizations had to get the approval of the President to do things, but Bush declared a State of Emergency before..sunday?..so that allowed the organizations, such as FEMA, to do whatever they wanted.

[Facetious]

i dont trust news from people that get their news from a website called boingboing.net

[Liquid Blue]

Hmm, Nim do you remember the site or whatever where you heard about the guy getting shot? Hopefully it's not boingboing (which I admit, sounds funny), so there will be more than one source for that story.


While I agree it's largely the fault of the Louisiana/ New Orleans officials, I still find the government at fault. Not for helping in the evacuation, but in the slow response time to the disaster that struck. Even if people were left behind and stuck because of the local officials idiocy, the government (FEMA in particular) are supposed to be there and ready for such a situation. They knew at least a little bit before hand that those people were crowding in the superdome, and thus they should have prepared water, or at least gotten some plans together on how to react most efficiently and quickly as possible once the hurricane was over. It's inexcusable to have relief for the Tsunami folks 2 days after it happens and yet 5 days go by before a few trucks show up with some aid in our own country.

-FEMA turning away Wal-Mart trucks full of water, the coast guard delivering diesel fuel

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/na...erland&emc=rss

When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, he said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said.

I also hear rumblings about Bush turning away Canadian and Austrailan aid, but I can't confirm that until I get a source for you guys. Even after reading the posts in here, I still think that the government slacked off, and should have been ready for the worst case scenario. I know that the people of NO have been through hurricanes before, but I remember the media claiming this hurricane to be a hard hitter, so I don't see whats the harm in preparting for the worst. Better safe than sorry.

[Da1andonly]

Jerome, your question pretty much explains itself on wikipedia. I'm not from France or Italy (nor have I ever been there) so I can't really even try to explain why thousands of people died because of heat. Except that...heat waves "DO NOT EXIST" in france! It's almost as saying that Bush is a smart man :/

If I remember correctly, there had happened something in France, so that it was almost impossible to get clean water or something anywhere. All the water from the stores were already hamstered...can't remember what it was though.