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NO Local Officials Release Taped Conference Calls with Feds Starting August 26th
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| occrider |
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Conference Calls Detail Katrina Concerns, Failings
by Daniel Zwerdling
Morning Edition, September 23, 2005 · In the days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, officials in local, state and federal governments held a series of telephone conference calls aimed at coordinating their responses to the storm. The sessions were recorded by Walter Maestri, emergency manager for Jefferson Parish, who shared them with NPR.
In tapes of the disaster planning meetings, emergency managers and civic officials evinced a growing concern with the strengthening hurricane's possible effects -- and after the storm made landfall, a growing frustration with the aid effort mounted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
As emergency preparations gave way to coordinated actions and pleas for equipment, the recorded calls depict an emergency command center in Baton Rouge that became a center of frenzied activity.
As late as Saturday morning -- 48 hours before the storm struck -- officials were debating how best to handle an evacuation. At one point, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans brought up a troubling issue: If community leaders simultaneously told residents to leave, gridlock could result.
Throughout the weekend, local officials continued in their plans to open disaster shelters. In detailed plans drawn up several years ago, state and federal governments agreed on the need for a network of "special needs" shelters, with emergency generators that could power medical equipment. But in a series of phone calls, officials complained they couldn't find the generators they needed.
Dozens of key officials from state and federal agencies spoke with local counterparts like Walter Maestri, of Jefferson Parish, a large suburb of New Orleans hit hard by the storm surge and the flooding that followed.
On the morning of Monday, Sept. 5, with Katrina making its way inland from the Gulf Coast, Maestri said on the call, "Things are collapsing." And questions persisted over who was in charge: "So FEMA will coordinate emergency supplies?" Maestri asked. Soon after, communications were lost, and the next conference call took place nearly two weeks later.
The calls could play a role in any investigation -- whether by the White House or by Congress -- into why the initial response to Katrina failed to match the scale of the hurricane's impact on the region.
This piece was produced by NPR's Katherine Davidson.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...storyId=4859329
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Visit NPR for the audio recordings. |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Visit NPR for the audio recordings. |
Wasn't September 5th an entire week after Katrina hit? I thought the city had been completely evacuated by then, so I'm not sure what that's all about. In any event, here's a scathing rebuke for Anne Rice...
| quote: | September 07, 2005, 8:26 a.m.
We Failed You? Try Again.
Anne Rice blames America, not local officials.
"To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs."
- novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice
Let me get this straight.
Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River. All of which are above you.
Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for decades.
I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to attract tourists, from which to collect taxes.
Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these life-preserving necessities.
Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our darkest hours. You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you guys did.
Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid?"
Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the Superdome? JunkYard Blog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans." (See more here.) Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and useless.
But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming. They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them before and... oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a better evacuation plan.
I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad-Max style post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be nightmarishly prescient.
We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame-shifters who lost their head in a crisis.
Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs.
If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy. Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon.
I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to refresh your memory - four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next... and the cops, among others, showed up to work.
To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less "you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson." |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
Wasn't September 5th an entire week after Katrina hit? I thought the city had been completely evacuated by then, so I'm not sure what that's all about. In any event, here's a scathing rebuke for Anne Rice... |
The first conference call was taped on Saturday and Sunday requesting FEMA assisstance with particular goods. The subsequent call was the following week whereby local officials had stated that FEMA had supplied none of the items they requested.
While the rebuttal of Ann Rice (who?) does correctly outline the failings of the local government to evacuate people, it does nothing to dismiss any of the following incompetances of FEMA and the federal government after the fact, as outlined by this thread:
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...threadid=291920 |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
While the rebuttal of Ann Rice (who?) |
Some nut in California (though originally from NO). She wrote The Vampire Chronicals among other things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice
Rice's Editorial
| quote: | ...I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"
Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.
Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?
Well, here's an answer. 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.
What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.
And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.
And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.
Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt |
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