FEMA CHIEF TOASTS OWN NUTS

[mburbank]

This guy must have gone to the George Bush school of seeing what he wants to see.


FEMA chief: Victims bear some responsibility

Brown pleased with effort: 'Things are going relatively well'



(CNN) -- The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

[Cosmo Electrolux]

I guess he'll be needing a security detail like the energy secretary does......nice.

[mburbank]

"Hurricane Katrina caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated," Brown said Wednesday. "So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Okay, okay, wait a sec here, now. The first serious national aid reaching the imacted area four days after the event was PART OF A PLAN?!

[VinceZeb]

Originally Posted by mburbank

(CNN) -- The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Max, you have to agree with him to some degree. If there is a mandatory evac, the warnings from the National Weather Service are basically copied from the worst parts of the Bible, and Bush already declares NO a federal disaster area and you still choose not to leave... well, sorry, there are conquences to your actions. The people who couldn't leave but wanted to deserve pitty and help. The people that were recalcitrant I don't feel sorry for.

Originally Posted by mburbank

"Hurricane Katrina caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated," Brown said Wednesday. "So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it."

Okay, okay, wait a sec here, now. The first serious national aid reaching the imacted area four days after the event was PART OF A PLAN?!

The responses by everyone at the local, state, and fed level have given me the utmost assurance that the goverment could handle a dirty-nuke set off in the U.S.

/sarcasm off

[mburbank]

"The responses by everyone at the local, state, and fed level have given me the utmost assurance that the goverment could handle a dirty-nuke set off in the U.S. "
-Vince


I'm sorry, I don't follow you.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

/sarcasm on.

[mburbank]

Oh, and as long as you're back, Vinth, can youy stop telling me what I have to admit and or agree with? 'Cause I don't.

[mburbank]

"Bush, during an inspection tour of the devastated region last Friday, praised Brown, telling him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.""
-AP wire



Start polishing that medal o' freedom! 'Brownie' is getting promoted to full fledged 'Girl Scout'!

[mburbank]

FROM CNN ARTICLE

Conditions in the Convention Center

# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. -- 2:11)

# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin's angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)

# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you.

# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

Uncollected corpses

# Brown: That's not been reported to me, so I'm not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I'm just not going to speculate.

# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, 'People are dying in front of us' -- 4:36 )

# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy -- that's how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I'm like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just -- I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He's dead.

Hospital evacuations

# Brown: I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

# CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It's gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's over 200 patients still here remaining. ...We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly ... where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells -- 4:45 )

# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty rough.(Mayor's video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix -- 1:03)

Violence and civil unrest

# Brown: I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that.

# CNN's Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they're losing control of the city. We're now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn't safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire -- 2:12)

The federal response:

# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.

# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

# Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there.

# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

Security

# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty's rant on the government's 'bungled' response -- 0:57)

# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.

# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.

# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.





and I'd just like to add:


# Bush: Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.

[mburbank]

From the Times Picayune's open letter to the President

" In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable."

[KevinTheOmnivore]

This guy goes blah-blahing on on about looters and stuff, but he raises a good counter-argument on FEMA's role in the disaster.


http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05249/566101.stm

Craig Martelle: FEMA is not a first responder

Don't be so quick to pillory the federal response in New Orleans. Immediate emergency management is primarily a local and state responsibility
Tuesday, September 06, 2005

As one who has received training by FEMA in emergency management and also training by the Department of Defense in consequence management, I believe that the federal response in New Orleans needs clarification.

The key to emergency management starts at the local level and expands to the state level. Emergency planning generally does not include any federal guarantees, as there can only be limited ones from the federal level for any local plan. FEMA provides free training, education, assistance and respond in case of an emergency, but the local and state officials run their own emergency management program.

Prior development of an emergency plan, addressing all foreseeable contingencies, is the absolute requirement of the local government --and then they share that plan with the state emergency managers to ensure that the state authorities can provide necessary assets not available at the local level. Additionally, good planning will include applicable elements of the federal government (those located in the local area). These processes are well established, but are contingent upon the personal drive of both hired and elected officials at the local level.

I've reviewed the New Orleans emergency management plan. Here is an important section in the first paragraph.

"We coordinate all city departments and allied state and federal agencies which respond to citywide disasters and emergencies through the development and constant updating of an integrated multi-hazard plan. All requests for federal disaster assistance and federal funding subsequent to disaster declarations are also made through this office. Our authority is defined by the Louisiana Emergency Assistance and Disaster Act of 1993, Chapter 6 Section 709, Paragraph B, 'Each parish shall maintain a Disaster Agency which, except as otherwise provided under this act, has jurisdiction over and serves the entire parish.' "


Check the plan -- the "we" in this case is the office of the mayor, Ray Nagin who was very quick and vocal about blaming everyone but his own office. A telling picture, at left, taken by The Associated Press on Sept. 1 and widely circulated on the Internet shows a school bus park, apparently filled to capacity with buses, under about four feet of water. If a mandatory evacuation was ordered, why weren't all the taxpayer-purchased buses used in the effort?

Who could have predicted the anarchy resulting as a consequence? The individuals who devolved into lawless animals embarrass the entirety of America. (I worked in a U.S. Embassy overseas for a couple years and I can imagine what foreign diplomats are thinking.) What societal factors would ever lead people to believe that this behavior was even remotely acceptable?

The folks in New Orleans who are perpetrating the violence and lawlessness are not that way because of low income or of race, but because they personally do not have any honor or commitment to higher ideals. The civil-rights leaders should be ashamed at playing the blame game.

The blame is on the individuals. The blame is on the society that allowed these individuals to develop the ideal that the individual is greater than the national pride he is destroying. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was very clear in her comments that she was offended at those who suggested the suffering in New Orleans was prolonged because of race.

As a retired Marine, I hang my head in shame to see my fellow Americans degenerate so far. I spent so many years in the Corps helping the citizens of other countries rise to a higher level of personal responsibility to ensure that in case of emergency, anarchy did not necessarily follow. When people are held to a higher standard of personal responsibility and they accept that, then they will do the right thing when the time comes.

It seems that the mayor of New Orleans is leading the effort in not taking responsibility for his actions. The emergency managers for the state of Louisiana do not have much to say either. The failure in the first 48 hours to provide direction for survivors is theirs to live with. When FEMA was able to take over, it started out behind and had to develop its plan on the fly. Now the federal government has established priorities -- rescue the stranded, evacuate the city, flow in resources and fix the levee. It appears that now there is a plan and it is being systematically executed.

Hurricane Katrina was a national tragedy -- not just in the number of lives lost or the amount of physical damage, but also in the failure of people to do what is right when no one is looking.

Craig Martelle, retired as a major in the U.S. Marine Corps, lives in North Huntingdon. He recently launched the Strategic Outlook Institute, a public-policy organization.

[mburbank]

I would say that this argument might hold some sway regarding the immediatte aftermath of the event. It was pretty evident that first response, ill prepared or not, got wiped out. Needing almost a week to get up and running, claiming to be unaware of things you could watch on the local news, claiming to be doing things you'd been preparing to do for years, claiming to have done things that hadn't happened... that shit is certainly cause for getting fired.

As for the rest about a Marine hanging his head in shame... Marines have a whole fully functioning and funded system to back them up. The poor of new Orleans had squat. I'm not excusing violent behavior. But it's nice that this guy in his safe, warm life knows exactly how he'd behave if he had nothing, no food, no water, and no way of knowing when or if help was coming. Pride goeth before the fall.

[mburbank]

From an article in salon;

Days before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the city of Chicago drew up a list of resources it was willing to make available for relief efforts in areas that might be hit by the storm. Chicago told the Federal Emergency Management Agency that in the event of disaster, it could spare more than 100 Chicago police officers, 36 Fire Department personnel, eight emergency medical experts, more than 130 staff from Chicago's Department of Public Health, 140 staff from the Department of Streets & Sanitation, dozens of trucks and two boats. These teams, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley told federal officials, could work in affected areas independently, bringing their own food, water and other supplies with them. But FEMA apparently wasn't interested. Despite the host of resources Chicago offered, and despite the televised lack of resources in New Orleans, as of late last week, FEMA had requested only one thing from Chicago - a single tanker truck. "I was shocked," Daley said at a news conference on Friday. "We are ready to provide considerably more help than they have requested. We are just waiting for a call."

Daley wasn't the only generous donor to be rebuffed. Throughout last week, various local and state governments, corporations and nonprofit organizations across the nation attempted to help in the relief effort, only to be snubbed by federal officials - officials who were themselves providing precious little aid to those in need. Citing security concerns, the Department of Homeland Security barred the American Red Cross from entering New Orleans with food. Five hundred Floridian airboaters were ready to rescue people stranded in inundated homes, but FEMA turned them down. Twenty sheriff's deputies from Loudoun County, Va., suffered a similar fate. And Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, La., said on "Meet the Press" on Sunday that FEMA declined to let him accept three tanker trucks of water donated by Wal-Mart, as well as 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in a Coast Guard vessel docked in his district.




"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

[KevinTheOmnivore]

I believe that this happened, but I think we should all be aware of the politics in this.

Mayor Daley has been sort of grand-standing over this FEMA issue, holding a press conference to discuss how Brown never returned his phone call.

This could be a way for Daley to show Chicagoans what a great guy he is, despite the lack of interest from FEMA.

[ziggytrix]

kinda a moot point Kev, unless FEMA had a good reason for turning down the offer.

[mburbank]

I don't think any political player (with the possible exception of Bernie sanders) ever says anything without a political motive.

Like Chavez, he may have made the offer to score political points in the first place, may be personally overjoyed it ws turned down. I don't really care. I only want to know, did he make the offer, was it turned down?

[KevinTheOmnivore]

Originally Posted by ziggytrix

kinda a moot point Kev, unless FEMA had a good reason for turning down the offer.

Read between the lines: "MAYBE IT DIDN'T GO DOWN PRECISELY THE WAY MAYOR DALEY CLAIMS."

He says he offered certain resources, manpower, materials. We don't really know what FEMA needed in terms of resources and help, do we? Was the problem really about lack of resources, or was it simply bureacratic incompetence on the part of FEMA (and the local govt., for that matter)?

"Daley wasn't the only generous donor to be rebuffed. Throughout last week, various local and state governments, corporations and nonprofit organizations across the nation attempted to help in the relief effort, only to be snubbed by federal officials - officials who were themselves providing precious little aid to those in need."

See, this strikes me as a very loaded statement. I know, for example, that a bottling company offered tons and tons of free bottled water for relief aid. However, relief agencies tend to prefer cash, b/c to transport all of those water bottles poses a logistical problem that would ALSO have to be met.

[mburbank]

Well, I'm certain the truth will come out in the Whitehouse investigation which George Bush says he will personally lead, once the recovery effort is over. Which should happen right around the time he leaves office.

Oh, hell, I'm being cyncial. I'm sure it will happen as soon as public outcry for it becomees %100 impossible to ignore. And I bet Mayor Daley's complaints will get a thoroughly appropriatte place on the list of issues to be discussed, right after Brownie gets a medal of freedom for doing a heck of a job.

I know, I know, I'm all rabid and shit, but Kev, I'd give these bastards the benefit of the doubt if they didn't have such an ugly, thugish track record of what they do with the benefit of the doubt.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

Well, Senator Clinton has called for an investigation, supposedly in the likes of the 9/11 commission. We'll see what happens.

[Abcdxxxx]

CNN had reported on the Wednesday following Katrina that out of State relief aid was being turned away until they got special licenses to operate in LA.

There are plenty other indications of relief efforts being turned away, and we know that even today (9days according to the MSNBC clock) many areas are functioning from private donor supplies only.

Based on that, it's likely there's some truth to Tom Daley's story.

[VinceZeb]

Originally Posted by mburbank

"The responses by everyone at the local, state, and fed level have given me the utmost assurance that the goverment could handle a dirty-nuke set off in the U.S. "
-Vince


I'm sorry, I don't follow you.

I was being sarcastic.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

Originally Posted by Abcdxxxx

CNN had reported on the Wednesday following Katrina that out of State relief aid was being turned away until they got special licenses to operate in LA.

There are plenty other indications of relief efforts being turned away, and we know that even today (9days according to the MSNBC clock) many areas are functioning from private donor supplies only.

Based on that, it's likely there's some truth to Tom Daley's story.

I'm certain, unfortunately, that there is some truth to it. But I also know that the Salvation Army for example is turning away food and clothing, simply because cash is better.

I think an interesting question might be how much of this is due to simply incompetent state representatives, and how much of it is simply do to a financial inability on the part of the states to meet these relief needs....?

[mburbank]

Vinth... are you saying that four years after 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security has not developed the ability to do any better than this in the event of a terrorist strike, something the administration has repeatedly said is a matter of 'when' not 'if'?

'Cause that would sound like a pretty huge admission that you think our President has failed in one of his major goals.

If it had been a dirty bomb in NO instead of a hurricane, with no warning instaed of a coule of days would the Chertoff really have said "well, you know, disaster relief starts at the local level. We couldn't do anything for them until they asked us to."