Re: Looting in New Orleans

Vince <firelaw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>news reports agree
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1762948,00.html
>
>Catastrophic mistakes by the planners who forgot city's poor
> From Tim Reid in Washington
>DISASTER experts said yesterday that the anarchy that engulfed New
>Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was in large part caused by an absence
>of plans to evacuate the poor.
>
>Officials say that about 100,000 of the 500,000 residents of New Orleans
>live on or below the poverty line, or are elderly and sick, mostly in
>African-American neighbourhoods. But after years of anticipating a
>hurricane, officials in effect ignored that this ?low-mobility?
>population would have neither the money nor the transport to flee.
>
>Brian Wolshon, a former consultant on the state?s evacuation plan, told
>The New York Times that at disaster planning meetings, whenever the
>question was raised about how to evacuate the poor and infirm, ?the
>answer was often silence?.
>
>Experts also listed other crucial errors made before Hurricane Katrina
>hit and expressed bafflement over how the most anticipated natural
>disaster in US history brought such a slow and chaotic response. Despite
>dozens of plans and models over decades predicting a big hurricane hit,
>including one last year that predicted 10ft to 15ft of water in New
>Orleans and the evacuation of one million people, local, state and
>federal officials have been overwhelmed by the disaster.
>
>Several experts said yesterday that a crucial error may have been the
>failure to predict that the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain would
>be breached. It was an omission that appeared extraordinary given the
>parlous state of the defensive walls and the near certain belief among
>federal and state officials for years that in the aftermath of a
>hurricane, New Orleans would be flooded.
>
>Eric Tolbert, a former senior official in the Federal Emer-gency
>Management Agency (Fema), said that after the Asian tsunami last year:
>?New Orleans was the No 1 disaster we were talking about. We were
>obsessed with New Orleans because of the risk.?
>
>Martha Madden, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of
>Environmental Quality, said that it was incomprehensible that immediate
>federal help, particularly troops on the ground, had not been provided.
>She said: ?They can?t drop some food on Canal Street in New Orleans
>right now? It?s mind-boggling.?
>
>In 2000 and last year, disaster plans were prepared for a significant
>hurricane hit, but officials say that nobody thought that the levees
>would be holed. Greg Breerwood, of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which
>is responsible for maintaining the levee system, said: ?We knew . . .
>some levees and flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they
>would be breached.?

Then he is an idiot. What if a Cat 4 or 5 hurricane hit? The levee
with the weakest support will fail if it is overtopped, just as the
one on Canal Street did. Assuming that they won't be breached but
overtopped, without realizing what happens when water overtops a
structure, is just stupid.

>Budget cuts to the city?s defences by successive administrations in
>Washington compounded the problem. Last year the army engineers sought
>$105 million (£57 million) for hurricane and flood programmes in New
>Orleans. The White House slashed the request to $40 million and Congress
>approved $42.5 million. Mr Tolbert said that funding dried up after the
>hurricane exercise last year, leading to the shelving of plans to
>shelter survivors. Last year Al Naomi, the head of the army engineers in
>New Orleans, complained that federal budget cuts had halted work on the
>city?s east-bank levees for the first time in 37 years.
>
>Analysts expressed amazement that despite Hurricane Katrina?s slow
>approach from the Gulf of Mexico, large numbers of National Guardsmen
>were not in place before it made landfall, and that it took until
>yesterday, four days after the disaster, for troops to arrive.
>
>Charles Boustany Jr, a Republican Louisiana congressman, said that he
>spent 48 hours after the hurricane calling the White House to impress
>upon Mr Bush the scale of the crisis.
>
>Terry Ebbert, the chief Homeland Security official in New Orleans, said:
>?This is a national disgrace. Fema has been here three days, and we have
>no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami
>victims, but we can?t bail out the city of New Orleans.?

The projected path of Katrina was known reasonably accurately at least
4 days before it made landfall; somewhere between just west of NO to
Mobile. They could have stockpiled everything they needed, including
NG troops, food, clothing, medicine, etc, to the east and west of that
area and moved into the affected region immediately after the storm
passed through.

It sounds as if everyone was waiting on someone else to move first.

John Lansford
--
The unofficial I-26 Construction Webpage:
http://users.vnet.net/lansford/a10/
.

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