Reports on the disaster
Sep. 11th, 2005 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvin1. The Washington Post has a pretty good summary of the way it played out, and nobody comes out of it looking good; to my eyes the federal and city officials come off somewhat worse than the state ones, but it's not really a competition you want to be in.
One thing I'd like to see that is missing from this particular retrospective is an hour-by-hour specification of how the National Weather Service's storm-track predictions evolved over time on Sunday, August 27, and when aid-distribution decisions were made. The reason is in this paragraph:
However, my own recollection of events, the reports of the content of that videoconference, and the famous apocalyptic storm bulletin issued at 10:11 AM CDT Sunday (which spoke more of direct storm damage than of flooding) suggest to me that the NWS did not think that was happening by midday Sunday; the eyewall was still being predicted to pass closer to the city. So New Orleans was still square in the crosshairs by then.
It's not clear from the paragraph whether FEMA was already planning to send most of its aid to Mississippi and Alabama by midday Sunday. If the decision to do so was made, say, during the wee hours of Monday morning, during the brief "NOLA dodged a bullet" period, then a sympathetic interpretation of events might blame FEMA simply for its abject failure in long-term preparation for a Katrina-sized disaster, and for insufficient respect for uncertainty in the face of its knowledge of New Orleans' unique vulnerability. This would already be pretty bad.
If the decision was made earlier or later, when New Orleans was predicted or known to be devastated, that suggests, at best, incompetence of an entirely different order, incompetence so advanced as to be indistinguishable from malice. I don't want to minimize how badly the Mississippi Gulf Coast was hit, but I also don't want to believe that these guys essentially wrote off a major city.
2. Mark Schmitt points out that Michael Brown's resume wasn't really all that padded, it was just plain lame on the face of it, making it harder to sustain the "if only the czar knew" defense that the White House currently seems to be constructing. This certainly isn't the first administration to appoint hacks to important positions for reasons of patronage, but, damn, it's egregious.
3. Update: Digby is still on fire, with some great posts about people walking out of New Orleans across the Crescent City Connection being turned back by the Gretna police.
One thing I'd like to see that is missing from this particular retrospective is an hour-by-hour specification of how the National Weather Service's storm-track predictions evolved over time on Sunday, August 27, and when aid-distribution decisions were made. The reason is in this paragraph:
At that point [the videoconference with Bush around midday], FEMA had already stockpiled for immediate distribution 2.7 million liters of water, 1.3 million meals ready to eat and 17 million pounds of ice, a Department of Homeland Security official said. But Louisiana received a relatively small portion of the supplies; for example, Alabama got more than five times as much water for distribution. "It was what they would move for a normal hurricane -- business as usual versus a superstorm," concluded Mark Ghilarducci, a former FEMA official now working as a consultant for Blanco.Now, we know that sometime in the following night, the storm swerved to the east and the eye actually headed for Biloxi and Gulfport, meaning that for a while on Monday, August 28, most people thought New Orleans had dodged a bullet (except for the Army Corps of Engineers, who had trouble communicating the significance of the early Monday levee breaks up the chain).
However, my own recollection of events, the reports of the content of that videoconference, and the famous apocalyptic storm bulletin issued at 10:11 AM CDT Sunday (which spoke more of direct storm damage than of flooding) suggest to me that the NWS did not think that was happening by midday Sunday; the eyewall was still being predicted to pass closer to the city. So New Orleans was still square in the crosshairs by then.
It's not clear from the paragraph whether FEMA was already planning to send most of its aid to Mississippi and Alabama by midday Sunday. If the decision to do so was made, say, during the wee hours of Monday morning, during the brief "NOLA dodged a bullet" period, then a sympathetic interpretation of events might blame FEMA simply for its abject failure in long-term preparation for a Katrina-sized disaster, and for insufficient respect for uncertainty in the face of its knowledge of New Orleans' unique vulnerability. This would already be pretty bad.
If the decision was made earlier or later, when New Orleans was predicted or known to be devastated, that suggests, at best, incompetence of an entirely different order, incompetence so advanced as to be indistinguishable from malice. I don't want to minimize how badly the Mississippi Gulf Coast was hit, but I also don't want to believe that these guys essentially wrote off a major city.
2. Mark Schmitt points out that Michael Brown's resume wasn't really all that padded, it was just plain lame on the face of it, making it harder to sustain the "if only the czar knew" defense that the White House currently seems to be constructing. This certainly isn't the first administration to appoint hacks to important positions for reasons of patronage, but, damn, it's egregious.
3. Update: Digby is still on fire, with some great posts about people walking out of New Orleans across the Crescent City Connection being turned back by the Gretna police.
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Date: 2005-09-11 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-09-11 05:36 pm (UTC)nicewhite guy