Wall Street Opinion Journal Friday, September 2, 2005
Of all the bad news from New Orleans, the most disturbing has been the reports of spreading disorder, with looting, marauding gangs and even sniper fire at helicopters and rescue workers. Americans sometimes expect their government to do far too much–such as ensure low gasoline prices–but they do have a right to expect that it will at least provide for the safety of its citizens, even or perhaps especially in a crisis.
One reason for the New Orleans breakdown is the size of the calamity, whose growing severity caught nearly everyone by surprise. Louisiana National Guard troops that were deployed initially for rescue and relief efforts weren’t available for the more basic duties of public security. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is also geared to providing relief, not order, and only yesterday did the federal government begin to focus on the potential anarchy. Among our political leaders, only Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour seemed to appreciate the genuine risk of disorder, with his early warnings that looters would not be given the benefit of the doubt.
By the way, the allegation that enough National Guard troops aren’t available because many are deployed in Iraq doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The Louisiana Guard has something like 3,500 men and women deployed in Iraq, but that leaves another 8,000 or so troops available for post-Katrina duty, and neighboring states undamaged by the hurricane have still others who could be called upon. All told, the Pentagon now estimates that 30,000 National Guard troops will be deployed along the Gulf coast, and another 3,000 regular Army soldiers to pursue the armed gangs on the loose. Our advice is: Do whatever it takes.
One frequent reaction we heard yesterday is that the disorder in New Orleans is typical of Third World countries, something that was thought could never happen in America. This happens to overlook a fair chunk of U.S. history, some of it relatively recent, including riots and violence. But it is also a sign of complacency born of prosperity and the resilience of our legal and civic institutions.
This battle of New Orleans should remind us that civic order, even in America, is more fragile than we like to think. After this week and amid the continuing threat of terrorism, our political leaders at all levels are going to have to think harder about how to maintain order in the next crisis.
President Bush asked for the evacuation.
From NOLA
Paragraph 4:
“Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city, which is prone to flooding.”
Jim, again, it is clear you have no real experience with a major disaster.
Let me say it again: there are natural exigences that simply cannot be overcome no matter how optimistic the relief scenario might be. Some of these are very simple: 1) Day 1 – no emergency service or relief effort can begin until the storm has passed; 2) Day 2 – it takes at least one day to set up emergency and relief services if sufficient planning is done beforehand; 3) Day 3/4/5 – Federal and out of state help can be expected by the fourth day if sufficient planning is done beforehand; 4) around 50 miles or so of the eye expect in interruption in basic services for at least five days; 5) closer to the eye restoration of services make take weeks; 6) direct hit areas will take months to recover.
You can’t get around this. Waiting for a Federal response when local resources are already in place to deal the first stages of emergency response is ludicrous. You simply cannot bring in outside relief that fast.
New Orleans failed because the Mayor and Governor failed. It’s that simple. It took a call from President Bush to get the Governor to even issue an evacuation order. What kind of leadership is that? It’s not what we saw in New York with 9/11 and it is certainly not what we see in Florida.
Note 51 My point was…..
My point was that the only real way to have prevented the disaster, short-term, would have been to have had a mandatory evacuation declared by Friday. [That wasn’t done by either the governor or mayor]Then during this mandatory evacuation, the Mayor should have used fleets of buses available in the city to absolutely require residents to leave. Police should have gone down the street with bullhorns warning citizens that they would not be protected from harm if they stayed and that no relief could be guaranteed for some time.
This would have required an OVERRIDE of the traditional responsibility of the governor and the mayor. DHS would have had to have acted AGAINST the wishes of the governor and the mayor AND THEN DHS would have had to concoct some kind of plan to get NO’s inner city folk out.
Monday: DHS couldn’t do anything while the Category 5 storm raged.
Tuesday: DHS couldn’t do much when the levee broke and the waters began to rise even further
Wednesday: DHS would have been coping with waters that were still rising.
People didn’t know in advance exactly where the storm would it
Meteorologists were trying to predict exactly where landfall would be. Landfall could have been anywhere inside a 150 mile area. How was DHS supposed to choose where to put its people? Was it supposed to have thousands of troops and emergency people in EVERY metropolis? After the fact, we know that landfall was somewhat east of New Orleans, we didn’t know where it would hit prior to the storm.
Jim, you are engaged in a total monday morning quarterback exercise. What we do know and what a former mayor of NO stated on Meet the Press is that the current mayor knew that over 125,000 people would not leave or could not leave. Given that, it was his responsibility to ensure that there were facilities to take care of that many people. The Superdome was not stocked with enough food, water, medicine or law enforcement. That was the mayor’s job to do BEFORE the storm. DHS would have helped with stocking up the Superdome if the Mayor had asked, I’m sure. When the storm hit on Monday it was too late and there was very little anyone could do in the chaos of Tuesday and Wednesday’s raging, rising flood waters. Help arrived on Thursday.
I was too hard on NO police
I probably wouldn’t have held up for a day of that misery.
Missourian writes: “My point was that the only real way to have prevented the disaster, short-term, would have been to have had a mandatory evacuation declared by Friday. [That wasn’t done by either the governor or mayor.] Then during this mandatory evacuation, the Mayor should have used fleets of buses available in the city to absolutely require residents to leave.”
Let’s look at the timeline, as reported in AP and other stories in the the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper web site.
Friday, 8/26/2005, 4:11 p.m. CT “Meteorologist Randy McKee at the National Weather Service in Mobile said it’s unclear where Katrina will make a second landfall. He said coastal residents from New Orleans to Panama City, Fla., should be watchful.”
Friday, 8/26/2005, 5:28 p.m. CT “New Orleans City Hall spokeswoman Tami Frazier said officials were watching the storm, and had activated what she called the lowest alert level â�� monitoring storm movements.”
As of Friday, no one knows where the thing is going. You can’t order a mandatory evacuation of any place at this time.
Saturday, 8/27/2005, 6:18 a.m. CT headline: “Fla. Panhandle prepares for Katrina encore” At that time the expected path was Florida.
Saturday, 8/27/2005, 11:47 a.m. CT “Katrina threatened an encore visit as early as Monday after ripping through southern Florida and leaving seven people dead. Though the storm appeared to have turned more toward the southeastern Louisiana coastline, forecasters were uncertain of exactly where along the northern Gulf Coast it might strike.
So as of mid-day Saturday the path of the storm was still unclear — anywhere from Pensacola to New Orleans. That was about to change:
8/27/2005, 5:59 p.m. CT “NEW ORLEANS (AP) “Coastal residents jammed freeways and gas stations Saturday as they rushed to get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina, a vicious storm that is threatening to gain even more strength and make a direct hit on the New Orleans area. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a test. This is the real deal,” New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said at a news conference. “Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas. Do all things you normally do for a hurricane but treat this one differently because it is pointed towards New Orleans.”
If your plan requires an evacuation that starts Friday, well, no one had a good idea of where the thing was going until late Saturday afternoon.
Missourian: “Tuesday: DHS couldn’t do much when the levee broke and the waters began to rise even further Wednesday: DHS would have been coping with waters that were still rising.
How about helicopters? By Wednesday the Coast Guard had already rescued 1,200 people by boat and helicopter. When you have a news reporter talking on national TV about 1,000 people living on a freeway overpass, how hard can it be to get supplies and troops to them? When that doesn’t happen for three days, I think it’s legitimate to ask why.
The problem wasn’t lack of resources, but lack of information, according to the director of FEMA:
Here’s the resources:
Monday, 8/29/2005, 3:24 p.m. CT “Baby formula from the Agriculture Department, communications equipment and medical teams from the Defense Department and generators, water and ice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are among the assistance ready for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As the Category 4 storm surged ashore just east of New Orleans on Monday, FEMA had medical teams, rescue squads and groups prepared to supply food and water poised in a semicircle around the city, said agency Director Michael Brown. Brown, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said the evacuation of the city and the general emergency response were working as planned in an exercise a year ago. “I was impressed with the evacuation, once it was ordered it was very smooth,” he said.”
But no information:
Friday, 9/2/2005, 7:12 a.m. CT “Interviewed on several network morning news shows, Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, blamed emergency assistance delivery problems on “the total lack of communications, the inability to hear and have good intelligence on the ground about what was actually occurring there.”
Missourian: “Landfall could have been anywhere inside a 150 mile area. How was DHS supposed to choose where to put its people?”
First you say that the entire city of New Orleans was supposed to be evacuated even before anyone knew where the hurricane was going. Then you say that DHS couldn’t put people in place because no one knew where the hurricane was going.
How did the new networks know where to put their people? You can’t cover everything, but you could at least have some communications teams pre-positioned so that you have some idea of what’s going on. By Sunday the path of the storm was predictable within a certain degree of certainty. Remember, the director of FEMA himself said that lack of information was a major problem. Well, there was a way to have helped that.
Missourian: “Jim, you are engaged in a total monday morning quarterback exercise.”
It’s important to understand what happened, don’t you think?
Missourian: “What we do know and what a former mayor of NO stated on Meet the Press is that the current mayor knew that over 125,000 people would not leave or could not leave. Given that, it was his responsibility to ensure that there were facilities to take care of that many people.”
Where do you suggest that he put them? Remember, whatever you think the mayor of governor should have done, you have to ask why the feds didn’t do it too, because they had the authority to assume command of the situation at any moment.
Missourian: “DHS would have helped with stocking up the Superdome if the Mayor had asked, I’m sure.”
The idea was that FEMA had pre-positioned relief supplies and was ready to deliver them.
Missourian: “When the storm hit on Monday it was too late and there was very little anyone could do in the chaos of Tuesday and Wednesday’s raging, rising flood waters.”
Helicopters fly above the water, and at least 20 percent of the city was dry. Troops, food, water, vehicles, equipment, can be transported by helicopter. There was a lot that could have been done.
Mayor had no plan to evacuate inner city poor.
The Mayor’s own plan envisioned that mobile people would be evacuated and poor, inner city people would JUST RIDE OUT THE STORM. Given that the inner city poor were unprotected from the flood which begin on Tuesday. Where is the racism here? The mayor told the 125,000 immobile people to walk to the Superdome. Got that? WALK TO THE SUPERDOME and bring their own food for several days. No provision was made for flooding which would prevent people from getting to the Superdome. The Mayor never made any provision for the inner city poor, the weak, the elderly, and those people too sick to travel. These people were effectively abandoned by the Mayor. He left fleets of buses sitting in parking lots. Those buses were later destroyed by flood waters.
Do you have personal experience with military airlifts? If not, I don’t know how you have decided that an effective military air-lift could have been put in place between Sunday and Tuesday.
On Tuesday the waters were still rising. On Tuesday there were still over 100,000 people in New Orleans. Even the biggest helicopters can only take 10 to 15 people at a time. People who are bedridden cannot easily be hoisted in a helicopter basket. Assuming that each helicopter takes 10 to 15 people a trip, it would take 8,333 trips to empty New Orleans by helicopter. I think you remember that on Wednesday, helicopters sent to evacuate the very sickest people out of the Superdome were shot at.
Where were helicopters supposed to drop pallets of food supplies? The Superdome? The Superdome was totally out of control, the food would have caused a riot because there were so few local law enforcement there to control the crowd. Even if the food were dropped into the Superdome, what about all the people clinging to rooftops with no way to get out? Again 8,333 helicopters trips to get them
What you are proposing is antithetical every orderly disaster plan. Local officials plan and develop evacuation routes and procedures including public transportion for large concentrations of inner city folk. Large populations get evacuated before the storm hits, even if the Mayors and Governors have to err on the side of caution they do it. The Mayor kndw his city needed 72 hours to evacuate.
There will be an investigation
There will be an investigation and we will just see what comes out. Residents of Mississippi and other areas are now complaining that New Orleans has gotten a disproportionate share of the aid, maybe because New Orlean’s Mayor contacted the media and started cursing. I think that is how we should distribute aid, a cursing competition among public officials.
“Senator” Mary Landrieu stated that she would “punch the President” in the face if he blamed local officials. Apparently Landrieu has done a complete investigation and has determined that NO ONE on the local level failed to perform adequately. Sure.They are all her cronies down there.
Note 23: One of my many faults is not paying close enough attention to my references. Too quick with the Post button I guess.
I will say this: I’m doubting that anyone will become an atheist reading religious satire. I’m willing to bet, however, that at least a couple dozen folk in New Orleans will never step foot inside a church again should they hear sermons about “God’s punishment” on Louisiana … especially if they were one of the many who were forced to witness dead bodies floating past them.
From: nhc.noaa.gov
One can find the official forecast probabilities of a strike on New Orleans by Katrina at various times:
Fri 10:30 am 11%
Fri 4 pm 15%
Fri 10 pm 17%
Sat 4 am 17%
Sat 10 am 19%
Sat 4 pm 21%
Sat 10 pm 26%
Sun 1 am 25%
Sun 4 am 29%
Sun 10 am 35%
Sun 4 pm 47%
Sun 10 pm 59%
Mon 4 am 74%
Mon 10 am 99%
So if you had beem mayor of New Orleans, at exactly what point during this development would you have ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city?
Keep in mind when answering my question, that last year Hurrican Ivan at one point had a 26% strike probability for New Orleans, but it missed completely. So as of Saturday night at 10 pm New Orleans time, Katrina looked no more (or less) likely to hit than Ivan had at its most threatening. If it’s obvious now that a mandatory evacuation was needed Saturday night, it would have been equally obvious on September 14, 2004.
Are you aware of the latest report issued by the Pentagon in conjunction with the Bush administration this morning concerning the inadequacies surrounding the Katrina disaster? The main conclusion is that the nation lacked adequate troops as well as specifically, Louisiana guardmen to send into the New Orleans and Biloxi areas immediately after the storm because numbers that would usually be allocated to disaster relief were in Iraq.
I’ve setup a wiki devoted to this issue, and also to the state of Louisiana in general.
Katrina