quote:Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.
This is the part that I just don't get. Why were people left to their own resources to evacuate the city? Why didn't the National Guard come to evacuate them prior to the storm. Once the storm started, why were people taken to a dome with no plan in place to evacuate them from that dome? I have heard reports of hospitals with patients and staff stranded with no electricity, plumbing, and dwindling supplies. These should have been evacuated prior. Prisoners were evacuated by buses after the storm; they should have been evacuated prior, so that the resources used in their evacuation could have been spent in the storm's aftermath.
They saw it coming. I just don't get why people were allowed to remain in the city.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
This is going to be the big aftermath question. There were Greyhound busses, city busses, and military flatbeds that could have been used.
Posts: 514 | Registered: May 2005
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I think a part of the question is going to have to be how serious it was reasonable to have predicted the storm was going to be.
I'm certainly no meteorologist, but I know I was surprised as hell to go to sleep one night and hear it was a Cat. 2 and wake up the next morning and hear it was at a Cat. 5. Perhaps Hatrackers know, since after last year I listened enough to forecasts to know that it wasn't coming this way and didn't pay anymore attention: did meteorologists predict the sudden, dramatic surge in power of the storm?
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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The predictions were dire enough that the mayor told the citizens of New Orleans to evacuate prior to the hurricane making landfall. I just don't understand how that evacuation wasn't facilitated.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote: This is the part that I just don't get. Why were people left to their own resources to evacuate the city? Why didn't the National Guard come to evacuate them prior to the storm. Once the storm started, why were people taken to a dome with no plan in place to evacuate them from that dome? I have heard reports of hospitals with patients and staff stranded with no electricity, plumbing, and dwindling supplies. These should have been evacuated prior. Prisoners were evacuated by buses after the storm; they should have been evacuated prior, so that the resources used in their evacuation could have been spent in the storm's aftermath.
posted
I hate to say it, but it's money. It's always money. No one wanted to spend the money to create an organized plan years ahead of time to get everyone out. No one wanted to spend the money to do it. No one wanted to spend the money, period.
And part of it is denial. There wasn't much they could do in the short-term to protect the city, so they decided to pretend it wasn't going to happen. Which was a stupid choice with all those lives hanging in the balance.
I believe that the people who knew what was coming, or should have, having been informed with reasonable and reliable predictions, and turned their backs on the situation that eventually caused the deaths of those babies and other innocents are going to be held accountable and have to atone. I have to believe that. Otherwise I'd go insane.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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kq, I agree. And it is a question that really needs answering from a national perspective as well as a state and local one. At the national level, we will have to decide what is more important to spend our (ultimately limited) resources on. Should we build and plan or should we go to war? There are those who want to make it seem like we don't have a choice -- if we don't fight terrorism by invading Iraq; if we don't spend huge resources in the war on drugs; if we don't make Homeland Security our #1 priorty then we are doomed.
Well... We have other issues and they cost us far more lives each year and more money than terrorists ever will (if we only just keep doing a good job of law enforcement overall -- I'm not saying we should open our borders and hope for the best, of course).
It's all a question of perspective and priorities. We have the natural reaction to be shocked and want to mobilize when the events are fresh in our minds. As a consequence, we are really crummy at planning and sticking to a plan.
We are knee-jerk reactionaries. All of us. Or at least as a nation we get swept up in the passion of the moment and don't ever stop to think about the long term chronic issues.
Partly that has to do with the way we are governed. We have a President who has to make a splash early in the first term or not be re-elected. Congress is on a cycle that requires near constant campaigning (or at least fund raising).
The only stable force is the SCOTUS and they aren't supposed to make laws or policy, only rule on them after the fact -- sending people back to the drawing board if they find something is unconstitutional.
It's ultimately a dumb way to run a country, IMHO.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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I think it insults Louisiana and takes away from the tragedy to make this into a political statement that somehow blames this situation on President Bush and the war on terror.
Give me a break. We are a big enough, rich enough country to do more than one thing - big thing at a time. It's not BUSH and even though I think she's a ditz - it's not BLANCO or even NAGIN's fault.
It is the combined fault of MANY people each making a bad decision (yes, whoever said it, usually based on the cheapest solution - money driven).
Here is what I know about Charity Hospital from my lifelong friend who is a doctor and teacher there. For years they have had an evacuation plan in place that prior to the Hurricane they would move all the psych patients (her area) to Jackson, LA state mental hospital which has unused buildings. There is housing there for their doctors (her father worked there when she was little and they lived there at the time). There they would stay until able to return to Charity. Simple plan, eh?
RECENTLY a decision from the CEO (unclear if just of Charity Hospital or a hospital group b/c you saw this happened at a lot of hospitals) - changed the plans and the patients stayed to ride out the storm in the hospitals. Doctors were on an emergency rotation schedule where a skeleton crew stayed at the hospital and the others evacuated. She stayed during Hurricane Dennis while her family went to Baton Rouge.
So that's why we saw hundreds if not thousands of hospital patients being stacked on luggage carts and wheeled around New Orleans airport, laying on the tarmac, etc. waiting to be evacuated - dying, thirsty, hungry, in pain, crying out. Like the Civil War battle triage scene from Gone with the Wind sans Scarlett roaming around.
Now these people are in med evac shelters where the doctors don't know their conditions, what medicines they've been taking, anything! And they are trying to treat them. 85 year old Mrs. Eunice may be able to tell them she has bone cancer but will she remember all the other medicines she's taking for her liver or diabetes or what she's allergic to, etc. Of course not!
And the doctors have no idea where THEIR patients have been evacuated to - so they can't find them to help them. You can imagine how important that would be for psych patients going through this ordeal to see their own doctor's face! There was NO plan in place for after the fact rendevous with each hospital's staff, admin, and locating the patients so the doctors would KNOW something at least about them!
No one can be FORCED out in a mandatory evacuation we are told - but then what's the difference between that and the "voluntary evacuation" we sometimes use.
Why state run hospital CEOs have the "authority" to override a state government evacuation is a GOOD question.
The shakedown from this horror has much more to do with decisions on every level than Bush and the war on terror!
Posts: 874 | Registered: Oct 1999
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The first priority is to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the poor, heal the sick, and comfort the widowed and orphaned. But while we are doing this, we can ask questions and brainstorm together about what happened, why, and how to make it better next time. Not to ask questions now (and again, and constantly, and always) is to dishonor those who are devasted now, and those who are in harm's way of being devasted in the future.
Some of those questions are about local response, some about national policy, some about individual people. They all need to be asked, and we all need to think hard about them and offer the best we have to answering them. I'm sorry if that makes us uncomfortable. Truly, I am -- being frustrated, uncertain, and confused is a terrible feeling. But we have to deal with it.
I'm going to be a butt and keep reposting this wherever I see discussion -- any discussion that is not interfering with the ongoing addressment of the first priority -- being shut down. I want to hear it all. We need to hear it all. Praise for the good as well as thoughtful critique of the not-so-good -- we need all we can come up with in the public forum of ideas, and as soon as possible, so long as the first priority is also being taken care of. Sure, one shouldn't be sitting down to shoot the breeze while the bodies pile up next to you, but nobody reading this forum is likely to currently be engaged in a relief effort themselves, this very minute. (If you are, then there are better things to be doing than monitoring the discussion on Hatrack.) I think it is a moral duty for us to engage in such a discussion, and it's our moral duty to get through these uncomfortable feelings in the hopes of averting similar devastion in the future.
You want to honor the dead? Do the very best you can to make sure more don't die like they did. Even if that means listening to people who disagree with you about the reasons why this happened. Nobody -- nobody -- has a lock on the answer, and it's an important and complex enough answer that a multitude of views must be expressed and allowed to stand or fall on their own merits.
posted
I'm going to take a page from CT's book and repost this wherever I see people wondering why there is frustration at much of the discussion about what went wrong:
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What I find incredibly annoying right now is how much of the criticism is based on unconfirmed and verifiably incorrect facts right now. It's tiresome and it's terribly unfair. And at least some of the people (not here) spreading the inaccurate information are doing so for political gain.
A lot of the frustration at the criticism stems from this, I suspect, and spills over into other discussions about what went wrong.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I think all or almost all of my criticism has been verifiable.
(I know what you wrote wasn't addressed at me specifically, but I might as well use the reminder to check).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Edit: In clarification, this is in response to Dagonee:
Agreed. But I think we should still be airing the criticism. Claims of fact without verifiable basis need to be brought out into the light of day and challenged on their own merits. They need to be named for what they are, no?
That doesn't mean we shouldn't be rigorous in parsing through all of this. Be rigorous. Go at it. Get those lies and misleading rumors in your teeth and worry them down to their shoddy bones.
*grin
I, for one, would love to see every lie and misleading rumor going around be brought out into the light of day, and for each to be shown to be the craven or thoughtless claim that each is. On its own merits.
(Actually, I think we are in agreement, Dag.)
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Here is what I know about Charity Hospital from my lifelong friend who is a doctor and teacher there. For years they have had an evacuation plan in place that prior to the Hurricane they would move all the psych patients (her area) to Jackson, LA state mental hospital which has unused buildings. There is housing there for their doctors (her father worked there when she was little and they lived there at the time). There they would stay until able to return to Charity. Simple plan, eh? RECENTLY a decision from the CEO (unclear if just of Charity Hospital or a hospital group b/c you saw this happened at a lot of hospitals) - changed the plans and the patients stayed to ride out the storm in the hospitals. Doctors were on an emergency rotation schedule where a skeleton crew stayed at the hospital and the others evacuated. She stayed during Hurricane Dennis while her family went to Baton Rouge. So that's why we saw hundreds if not thousands of hospital patients being stacked on luggage carts and wheeled around New Orleans airport, laying on the tarmac, etc. waiting to be evacuated - dying, thirsty, hungry, in pain, crying out. Like the Civil War battle triage scene from Gone with the Wind sans Scarlett roaming around.
Evacuating a hospital is dangerous. People die when it's done. On Monday, before the levee broke - after the storm was over - the decision probably looked very good. They had weathered the storm and not had to transport very sick patients.
I'm not saying it was the right decision. I'm saying the decision isn't as obviously stupid as you attempt to make it out to be.
It's a pattern I see repeated over and over again in these discussions. A decision with a bad result is derided as being obviously bad when an analysis made before the results are known at least provides a rational basis for the decision that was made.
By all means, let's analyze the decisions and see what information should have been given more weight than it was. But let's not pretend this stuff is easy. Had the hospital evacuated and the levee not breached, some people (I'm not saying the people complaining about the decision not to evacuate) would have been saying it was obvious they shouldn't have evacuated.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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She was meticulous, thoughtful, and rigorous (in other words, a law student ) in addressing some reasons why so much of this took so long to deal with. It helped me get some perspective.
Although (I think) she isn't conservative, she is not doing the knee-jerk blame-thing re: the current administration. She's sorting her way through to find some truth.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
I don't know whether the war on terrorism can fairly be blamed for anything that's happened in the past week.
But speaking as someone who always thought the war was a case of misplaced priorities, it's been good to see public opinion shift a bit in that direction.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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I'm still trying to figure out whether funding that war was in part responsible for decrease in funding for infrastructure (the Lake Pontchartrain levee in particular), or whether those cuts would have been made, anyway. I really don't know.
I can't make sense of ongoing tax cuts in a time of war, and I think my frustration at that bleeds over.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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quote:Dagonee, did you read the excerpts from my friend Ursula's analysis in the Why the evacuation of New Orleans is such a mess IMHO thread?
I did read that, and it was very well done.
One thing I'd like to see is an analysis of how dangerous evacuations are in general. For example, without the flooding, the looting (of televisions, etc.) and civil unrest would likely be much worse. Of course, the problems caused by the flooding dwarf this, but an evacuation has predictable harms associated with it. As the hurrican got closer, time to evacuate went down, but so did the probability that the hurricane would cause the damage it did. There's a lot to be balanced.
I haven't seen a single analysis of that in the press, and I don't have any hard information to do much more than conjecture.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Another factor is how many "false alarms" (real danger but didn't quite hit as bad as it could have) the area has had in the last 20 years or so. I don't know where to find this, but it I think that would be a useful nugget of info in figuring out how the response played out. Especially given the questions you raise.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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posted
Good point - aside from the injuries, deaths, and costs of evacuations, there's also the effect it has on people heeding future evacuation order.
I've heard something I can't confirm in print. Some guy on the weather channel said that conditions Friday night have existed some 15 times in the last 20 years. Had NOLA been entirely evacuated each time, I bet it would have been even more difficult to get people to leave.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:This is the part that I just don't get. Why were people left to their own resources to evacuate the city? Why didn't the National Guard come to evacuate them prior to the storm. Once the storm started, why were people taken to a dome with no plan in place to evacuate them from that dome?
I can answer some of this.
The military didn't evacuate them prior to the storm because Governor Blanco forbade allowing feds to use troops in her state (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html ) even after the hurricane struck; this decision was since reversed, but not quickly. Louisiana officials balked during negotiations (!) with Washington, saying it sounded too much like declaring martial law.
There was an evacuation plan in place for New Orleans. I think it's at http://www.new-orleans.la.us/home/departmentsAndAgencies/nooep/hurricane_plan.php , but the link isn't working now so I can't confirm I have the right page. I don't know why it wasn't implemented, though. I guess we've probably all seen the picture on Yahoo! News of the school buses sitting on a flooded lot; no word as to why they weren't used for evacuation.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Full scale evacuations of cities are just not done on whims. It costs money, it can cost lives, and there is never a way to ensure everyone gets out unless you arrest them and force them to move.
More people evacuated in MS (more people not necessarily in numbers, but a larger percentage of the population) because that coastal area has been hit with hurricanes a lot more often than N.O. and those people generally know it's a good idea to leave. And yet, thousands did not. You can go through with bullhorns warning people to leave, you can send out notices, you can make evacuations mandatory and some people just will not leave. Not even cannot - but will not, out of choice. My mother in law is a prime example - she had a car and plenty of money in the bank and places to stay and yet just refused to go.
What are you going to do next time a hurricane is bearing down on a city? Does anyone think it's a good idea to force people to evacuate at gunpoint? How would people be reacting today if armed National Guard members with M16s had pulled flatbed trucks into the 9th ward of N.O. and told everyone to get on the truck? That would be tantamount to declaring a sort of martial law and taking away the civil rights of people before a disaster ever struck. Do we really want to do that? Now we can say "That would have been better than what happened after wards but imagine if the hurricane hadn't hit or even more important - the levee hadn't breached? Would we not be upset at the blatant violation of people's civil rights? I would.
I don't know about everyone else here, but some of the suggestions made to improve on things "next time" do not sit well with me. I don't want us to have in place plans that would allow the president to send the military down to force citizens to do things at gunpoint even before we know for sure that something is going to happen. I don't want the federal govt to have the power to override the powers of the governor and assume command of the national guard anytime they think there might be a reason to need them.
I posted in another thread about how even the SAR teams can't come into an area until official requests are made by local govt. That may sound crazy, why wouldn't we just let any rescue teams go down there, but think about it - dozens of teams comprising hundreds of people pouring into the city and saying "Okay, mayor here we are - where are we going to park our equipment, where are we sleeping, and where's the food - we're hungry?" You can't bring in teams until you know where to put them. And you can't just let anyone go out and do SAR, you have to coordinate it so that teams don't duplicate some areas and leave others unchecked.
You also have to make sure you have the right people that you need. SAR teams usually don't do much body recovery. They rescue live victims and mark the area where they find bodies. Most of the SAR teams in Gulfport right now can't do recovery - they don't have the right training and strange as it sounds, they don't have the right shots. Not all cities require mandatory vaccinations of their paramedics - Birmingham is one that does, so my husband's team is one of the few that can be sent in to do the recovery process.
What would happen if everyone came without coordination and without advance permission and they come to find out nobody has the training or the protection needed to do recovery? And the groups you did need are sitting at home because no one told them to come, and they figured there were enough teams down there already. Also, you don't want so many teams down there you can't feed and house them. I know when we're thinking about starving victims, it may sound callous to say you must feed and water the rescuers first, but it's a fact of life. You do no one any good if your rescuers are dropping from dehydration and hunger. They must be cared for first so they can in turn rescue the victims.
As tough as it sounds, the truth is there are not that many things you can do in advance until you know the scope of the disaster and where you need people and what you need. You can have teams ready, but it's not such a great idea to pre-deploy them because you could guess wrong. Hurricanes turn - this one did, very much at the last minute. It could have shifted just a bit more and N.O. would have been spared but Mobile completely wiped out.
And look at our team from Birmingham - they were called up, volunteers asked for and some preparation made, but they couldn't leave until the hurricane had passed through Birmingham. What if we had sent all our people down south immeidately and Bham got hit by a swath of F5 tornadoes spun off from the hurricane? Now we've got our own people in desperate situations and most of our rescuers gone.
Those are the kinds of things that must be considered, and they are the reasons why things are done the way they are. Now, I'm all for looking for ways to improve. But most of the people who say things on the media like "They should have had teams standing by in Baton Rouge so more lives could be spared" don't know exactly what all that entails (and they apparently forget that FEMA did in fact have some teams in Baton rouge doing exactly that.) It's not that easy, it's not that simple and the reasons it's not that easy and simple are actually pretty good ones, and not likely to change.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Some of the problems with FEMA lie in the fact that they have lost much authority in the Homeland Security reshuffle. Many of the decision makers were hamstrung by beaurocracy. There was little, or in many cases no coordination with local authorities, because there was no authorization to do so. Some of the local FEMA officers made spot decisions that were later revealed to be poor ones. Did you see Meet the Press this morning? The story from the President of Jefferson Parish was absolutely heartbreaking.
Posts: 514 | Registered: May 2005
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Yes, it was heart-breaking. So sad, I can't even repeat it. I've never seen an elected official lose it like that on live TV, it was shocking. That poor guy, both the Parish President and the guy the story was about... Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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[Note: this post has been evaced from Chad's thread due to the shocking breakdown in law and order, as evidenced by the loss of orderly margins. Widespread looting and arson could break out there any moment.]
More helicopter rescues have been performed by the Coast Guard and others since Katrina than the TOTAL for the last 3 years. That's impressive.
On a technical note, I wonder if seich dynamics were responsible for the levees breaking, after the storm had passed? This was suggested by one expert, and is one reason the timing of the levee breaks was surprising to non-experts, including me. I thought NO had dodged the bullet. Lake Pontrechain is said to be vulnerable to seiches, which is sloshing of a lake that continues for hours or days after being disturbed by storm or earthquake.
Resources, especially helicopters, could have been allocated and committed around the area, only to have the levee break cause a massive need for reprioritizing. Which seemed agonizingly slow, but it takes time to gear up for disaster #2(levee breaks and flooding of NO) while already dealing with the worst natural disaster in US history, with the possible exception of the 1906 San Fran quake or the 1900 Galveston hurricane and flood.
That said, I think there is blame to go around for the slow response in NO, both locally, state and federal. Poor planning all round, and poor execution by FEMA.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote: Some of the problems with FEMA lie in the fact that they have lost much authority in the Homeland Security reshuffle. Many of the decision makers were hamstrung by beaurocracy
Someone on the news called it "murder by bureaucrats." I agree with the post, the Homeland Security department only works if you have a real leader in the cabinet post, who knows when to cut the red tape.
The guy in charge now strikes me as a typical CYA bureaucrat.
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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) in addressing some reasons why so much of this took so long to deal with. It helped me get some perspective.![[Cry]](graemlins/cry.gif)
