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SIEGE -The surrounding and blockading of a city, town, or fortress by an army attempting to capture it.

By now everyone has heard that assistance was prevented from entering New Orleans for days after it was available and people were begging for it. The reasoning put forward by Homeland Security was: if food and water was allowed into New Orleans people would refuse to evacuate.

I was somewhat stunned to be asked to accept that the Federal officials in charge of this effort actually believed that human beings would choose to live in the abject conditions of filth, discomfort and danger seen in and around the SuperDome and Convention Center if you gave them something to eat and clean water to drink. I can only conclude that Mr. Chertoff assumes that the residents of New Orleans are less than human.

The Federal officials wanted people out of New Orleans, so they laid siege to the city. They sealed it off from the outside world. They didn’t provide the communications equipment that was sitting in warehouses and might have helped the overwhelmed public safety personnel maintain control of the situation. On Meet The Press Mr. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, tells us that FEMA cut emergency communications in his area. They might have been successful if members of the media with satellite phones hadn’t managed to get in before they could complete their encirclement of the area.

They are still intent on starving out any stragglers. They have declared war on the city. They didn’t want civil order to be maintained, they have done everything they could to prevent it.

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I’ve written an external page to give you a feeling for my experience in dealing with FEMA over the course of 10 years.

This page will open in a new window. I’ve read the glowing reports about the response to Florida’s storms last year. I wish that people could listen to the local Emergency Operations Center briefings up here on the Panhandle. Many of our local officials are not quite as thrilled with the response as some national media outlets.

Update 1: This is from the archives of the Pensacola News Journal [no link because they charge for archived articles] an editorial from March 22, 2005:

Will FEMA deliver before the next storm? It’s getting to be an old, old story. But that makes it even harder to understand. So just what is the Federal Emergency Management Agency waiting for before it reimburses area governments for Hurricane Ivan cleanup — another hurricane season? A few months ago, that might have been the tag line for a bad joke. Now it looks like a serious possibility. We could go through another hurricane before FEMA finishes reimbursing expenses from the last…

Update 2 [Ivan response]: The “Blue Roof” program is only for owner-occupied homes. If you rent, you can drown while your landlord tries to find a roofer or a tarp.

FEMA distribution points are only for vehicles: people don’t count. You can only get food and water if you drive through, and every vehicle gets the same ration. If a group of people pool their gas to get one vehicle to the distribution point, they are only going to get one ration.

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