Posts from — September 2005

The US Capitol Police, responsible only for Capitol Hill, has three officers per member of Congress, essentially the same size as the NOPD.

Her report, Hurricane Katrina: Reporter’s diary, ends with this paragraph:

“The story is devastating to cover. It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that if you are black, poor, old, sick or disabled, you are a second-class citizen in this country.”

If you need a break, drop by 3 Old Men and check out Mickey’s China trip.

After you have come to grips with what happened you can hear stories from some of the people swept up by the storm at This American Life, a Public Radio International program, broadcast on NPR stations.

The show, After the Flood, will be available as a RealAudio stream next week, or they would be happy to sell you a CD. Some programs are available as Podcasts, but they can’t always do that because of releases and copyrights.

Don’t listen if you are down.

Brown is toast. How can you expect a man who can’t deal with criticism to handle emergencies?

Maybe he can go out and get a real job for his resumé.

Update: If you are a fan of puns, go immediately to Dark Bilious Vapors and see Len.

Commenting on what happened in his city, Dr. John said:

“It makes me think of what my friend Reverend Goat just told me: ‘Let me say this before it goes any further; New Orleans didn’t die of natural causes, she was murdered.'”

…and the fifth rider was mounted not upon a horse, but a massive pachyderm with wild eyes and no reins; and this rider was called Incompetence and was the most dangerous for his brethren followed close on his path.

The basic school was at Fairchild AFB outside of Spokane, Washington. You learned the basics of escape and evasion: map reading, compass use, unarmed combat, camping, etc. The testing was practical, in the Cascade Mountains with limited food and 50 miles to cover.

Before entering the POW camp you were required to crawl through an obstacle course with things blowing up all around you. In the POW camp you were subjected to duress.

Then there was sea survival at MacDill AFB on Tampa Bay – you got very wet, and the equipment was designed not to work flawlessly, so you could learn to improvise.

For jungle survival you went to the Philippines to get chased all over the place by a local tribe [Negritos] hired to make your life miserable.

Arctic survival at Eielson AFB, near Fairbanks, Alaska provided camping to -40°.

After going through it you supplemented what the Air Force provided with purchases from camping stores.

They ought send FEMA’s management to survival schools.

We could drop a mock-up roof in a swimming pool and let them experience life in an attic while the water rises.

Maybe put them in jon boats anchored out in Lake Pontchartrain for a few days without food and water.

We could use a hog factory barn to simulate conditions in the SuperDome, followed by a couple of days in the yard of an Alabama maximum security prison, during August, without food or water.

After completing all those things I would load them onto buses and take them to one of the current recovery shelters with only the clothes on their backs and nothing in their pockets to experience what evacuees have to go through.

After you go through survival school you have a feeling for how difficult things can be and why people want a rapid response.

In the intervening four years we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars, trampled on peoples rights, created huge new structures, and can’t respond as well as the third world to a natural disaster.

In November of 2004 people assumed they had elected a “strong leader” – where is he?

We don’t need more people to act like they care by talking to victims; we need people with the leadership that would have prevented many of those people from becoming victims.

After the September 11^th attack we were told that nothing could have been done because the information wasn’t specific enough. This time the information couldn’t have been more specific or more accurate, and they still failed to provide protection for the American people.

With our nation’s flags at half-staff in mourning for the lives lost in this disaster, the Pentagon is holding a march and a concert in the nation’s capitol. As Joseph Welch said to Senator Joseph McCarthy: “Have You No Sense of Decency?”

If there aren’t enough regular troops for a period that long, the regular military needs to be increased in size, and only a draft will ensure that the necessary increase will be achieved.

The coastal states should stop acting like a temp agency for Rumsfield.

The BRAC commission reports that $30 billion of the claimed savings are based on a reduction of military personnel on closed facilities. However those people aren’t being eliminated, they are being moved to other bases.

Sixty percent of Rumsfield’s claim was BOGUS!

The Otter, a doctor working in New Orleans, reports that the Army Chemical Corps has found Cholera, Hepatitis A, and Hepatitis B in the water. This is in addition to the fecal and lead contamination already reported.

Anything that was flooded by this mess is going to be next to impossible to disinfect. It’s about time that the debris was treated as hazardous waste, not construction waste. If they don’t keep it out of the ground, it will show up in the water.

Another physician of note is: Ben Marble, MD, the individual who quoted Dick Cheney on live television.

If anyone wonders why he was perturbed, you can see Dr. Ben’s house, after Katrina’s extreme make-over.

United States Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 13 , Section 242

Deprivation of rights under color of law

Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

You might want to get together with some lawyers that have been admitted to the Federal bar. People died because they could not get out of New Orleans.

State and local officials got about 90% of the people to evacuate, and had to deal with the 10% that couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. They didn’t have the resources or time to force people out.

The famous “200 school buses” didn’t belong to the mayor of New Orleans so he would have had to find 200 people who could hot-wire and drive a bus, fuel for the buses, and then travel around the city to transport another 15,000 people – if he had remembered they existed under the pressure of the approaching storm.

It might surprise some people, but bus drivers are not considered “first responders”, or “essential personnel”. The bus drivers evacuated with their families.

While there were about 4,000 Louisiana Guardsmen available, their equipment was in Iraq. Yes, the special equipment designed for use in the swamps of Louisiana was sitting in a desert. That equipment included their generators and communications gear.

At the heart of the problem was a total break down of communications. They were left with short-range radios that quickly failed as the batteries ran down. The vehicles with radios were lost in the flood. Without communications the police in New Orleans couldn’t be used effectively. Without communications, the state didn’t know what was available in the areas that were struck, or what was needed. Ninety thousand square miles of the United States was damaged by this storm. That’s a square 300 miles on a side.

In the aftermath of the hurricane and flood there was no way of coordinating efforts. There was almost no means of transport left in the city, and many of the first responders died in the storm.

As of today, the Federal government as still not delivered communications equipment requested by the governor. Local officials are talking to the media because that’s the only way they have of communicating and it’s one-way.

The bulk of the looting could have been eliminated with food and water airdrops. If food and water are available the majority of people aren’t going to break into stores and there are un-looted stores with food and water in them in the city of New Orleans. The looting started because the local public supplies were generally under water, and no outside supplies were sent in to replace what was ruined.

Along with food and water, it would have been nice if they had dropped a few thousand of these things: light & radio – crank, solar, and battery powered unit that retails for $30, weighs 2 pounds, and can receive AM, FM, & short-wave signals.

I would prefer a stripped down model, perhaps only a single band radio that could be readily available through local emergency management offices for $10, and handed out to food stamp recipients.

Go and read her reasons for yourself.

Katrina Timeline: Unexecuted Plans

Katrina Timeline: Misdirected Aid

Chertoff may think that sending Michael Brown to his room for a “time out” shows leadership, but the Federal government is now paying someone else to do Brown’s job while Brown continues to receive his paycheck.

[Editor: Bloody Blogger is down for “scheduled maintenance” for an hour.]

[of course it can]

You log on only to discover that they require you to use Internet Explorer 6.0 to complete their form, and IE 6.0 doesn’t exist for the Mac.

You have been FEMA’d!

[Editor: Heard on the BBC World Service.]