A View of Katrina from the French Quarter
Matt Haughey pointed me to a slideshow of the preparation and damage to the New Orleans area in and around the French Quarter and downtown. Now, mind you, the Quarter didn’t see the worst of the flooding, but this is the part of the city that most folks know.
After looking at this, I’ve revised my opinion of the craptacular governmental response slightly: judging by the major tourist areas of New Orleans alone, you can see why it didn’t seem that bad before the levee broke. [Of course, the Superdome was a whole other story; any time you get a large group of people together for an extended period of time, a mob mentality will just naturally occur.]
I’m generally critical of every level of government for choices not made in anticipation of the disaster, from the lack of use of any available city methods to evacuate, to the failure to activate and preposition the Louisiana National Guard and other reactionary forces, and to the Federal government for taking so long to realize that the state and local government didn’t have their shit together and to just ignore the law and go in and start saving lives.
Everyone wants to play the blame game right now, but honestly, no one’s going to win on that score. Everyone will be a loser in that, and it’s better to play that in another month or two when you can start to put together an accurate picture. Little tidbits of data like this slideshow are just one datum amongst millions.
Sorry, no, it’s not “the blame game.” It’s called accountability, and the time to start is while people’s memories are fresh.
September 10th, 2005 at 22:41Sorry, should’ve differentiated there. The media wants to play a blame game and get a scapegoat; the politicians and the people get to do the accountability bit.
And the only thing that concerns me with starting so quickly is that there’s a push to end things quickly, when all the information isn’t in place to make a good decision. Yes, you can make some decisions pretty easily—Brown needed canning/recall/whatever you want to call what happened to him—but other decisions, such as the necessary bureaucratic changes that will streamline responses to future events, those don’t need to happen so swiftly. [But they should happen by, say, March at the latest.]
And as for whining from the right that Bush is taking “undue criticism”—hey, sorry. When the Executive Branch can’t execute, the buck stops at Harry Truman’s old desk.
September 10th, 2005 at 22:47Okay, phew. Had I taken a second to think about it, I’d have realized what you meant. But at this point incompetence has killed a lot of people, and there’s been little done to fix the problem fast enough to do people any good. It’s made me crazy.
September 10th, 2005 at 22:59Hey, my folks could easily have been amongst some of those dead people—I don’t view this dispassionately.
The Administration has it half-right: right now, the Executive Branch needs to put 100% of its resources into fixing what’s wrong. That’s a process that cannot be held back by bureaucratic red tape, even if the Feds overstep their bounds at times. [Of course, that was far truer nine days ago than it is right now; unfortunately, the bulk of the people who will have died needlessly at the end of this period have already done so.] When an event happens that is too massive for local and state officials to handle—and this is one of those events—it’s up to the Feds to step in and execute.
But while the Administration is right on that score—slow, but right—it’s wrong in trying to intimate that Congress should be off their backs or something like that. Congress should start up its informational grist mill now, gathering data here in the short-term as well as the medium- and long-terms. It also needs to do so with as little regard to party politics as possible. [Pause for laughter.]
Mistakes have been made at every level of government, mistakes that need to be catalogued so that judgment can be passed. I think the final analysis will find Blanco wanting, Nagin wanting, Barbour wanting, and Bush wanting. Plenty of humble pie is getting baked here.
[Oddly enough, the only official in all of this who'll look good is Bob Riley, who did the right things with Mobile and Baldwin Counties and almost immediately assigned the AANG to help out the MANG. The people of Alabama will not take notice, however, as they'll be far more interested to see if Roy Moore and Don Siegelman make it through the gubernatorial primaries. So help me God, but if they do, I might have a stroke. That, or immediately announce my candidacy as an independent.]
September 10th, 2005 at 23:25On this score, Tim Russert grilled Nagin today, unfortunately trying to play the blame game. He did clearly point out, though, that New Orleans’s evacuation plan was supposed to use any means necessary to get folks out. While Nagin rightly pointed out that there weren’t drivers available—as folks had evacuated—for all the buses that are currently flooded, one has to wonder if calling for an evacuation earlier and activating the drivers to drive those buses would have mattered. But to answer that question, one has to know when the drivers themselves evacuated, etc.
I’m hopeful that the lesson for this is that cities along the Gulf Coast should work together to move folks out earlier than we already do.
[Folks trying to make this a partisan deal will be interested to see that Nagin had good words for Bush---"When I was able to tell him what I knew about the situation, he got people to execute"---and largely threw Kathleen Blanco under the bus. Of course, he also expressed a low opinion for FEMA, which is certainly justifiable.]
September 11th, 2005 at 14:12“On this score, Tim Russert grilled Nagin today, unfortunately trying to play the blame game.”
See, I am all for the media to dig to find out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and why. I don’t think that’s “the blame game,” unless you somehow think it’s fine for the people in charge all up and down the chain to get a free pass. That’s the “accountability game.” And if they settle for Brown being the one scapegoat being thrown from the sinking ship, I will be saddened.
September 12th, 2005 at 23:39See, I don’t mind media asking tough questions. [It's their job.] It’s when non-editorialists start advocating specific firings that I get upset. That’s a criticism of journalism for me. The only concern that I had with Russert’s questions is that he was trying to get Nagin to blame specific people—I think because he wanted the soundbite. [After all, Nagin gave WWL a great soundbite mid-week ... late at night, when he was at wit's end and understandably exasperated.]
September 12th, 2005 at 23:43Now this is what I’m talking about.
September 14th, 2005 at 13:58It’s been made very clear that Blanco did everything she could, and the government did NOT respond. Had she been a good old boy GOPper she might have gotten help[. But she did ask for help before the hurricane and she didn’t get it. So much for the theory that she’s been found wanting.
Additionally, there’s been a lot made about this failure of Nagin (or whoever) to use the busses that were sitting on a city lot. Well, let’s look at the timeline here. By the time the storm turned Category 5, there was NO way that people could have been safely evacuated in those buses, particularly on the elevated portions of I-10 that lead out of town. The death toll could have been higher. To use those buses, the mayor would have had to know 3 days ahead of time that this storm was a) a category 5 and 2) that the whole city was in the path and c) that people would have to be moved. You’re asking him to be a mind reader and weather reporter when not even the experts knew which way this thing was going to turn. Again though, if Nagin had been a white, good ol’ boy GOPper, he’d have all the help he’d need, and Bush would be down there clapping him on the back and telling him that the gubmint would help rebuild his palace–er house.
Sure there’s more than enough blame to go around on a lot of counts, but let’s at least get the story straight before you whining around in true down-country form about how all the darkies and wimminfolk snafu’ed up. As far as I can tell, Nagin and Blanco played by the rules they were dealt. It’s the white boys uptown in D.C. who sat on their hands and strummed the gee-tar while old folks in NO drowned in their homes.
September 15th, 2005 at 18:08Thanks for ascribing racist and classist tendencies to me where none exist.
Comments are now closed. I have Stephen’s number, and he has mine; we can talk about this further if we so choose.
September 15th, 2005 at 18:11