Ground Zero - From The Times-Picayune weblog

OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

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Sunday, September 04, 2005

As calm settles over N.O., outrage grows in Washington
FEMA says storm overwhelmed agency

By John McQuaid
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - A semblance of post-storm order has returned to ravaged New Orleans, but the political storm over the disaster is just beginning.

Political leaders, Republican and Democrat alike, have blasted the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for allowing New Orleans to descend into a cauldron of suffering and anarchy for three days and nights last week after Hurricane Katrina passed.

President Bush, himself the target of criticism for the sluggish response, has pronounced the results "unacceptable."

Dozens of others have chimed in with criticisms and proposals. "If we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs announced that they would launch an investigation into the disaster response. Sen. Mary Landrieu, DLa., called on Bush to go over the heads of those directing the emergency response and appoint a Cabinet- level official to take over. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., called for splitting FEMA from Homeland Security.

FEMA officials pleaded no contest. Bill Lokey, chief coordinator for FEMA, said agencies were simply overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. "It’s the nature of the disaster," he said. "This is far beyond anything we’ve ever done in this country. It’s beyond our immediate capabilities for sure."

Lokey said rescue workers have been hampered by floodwaters and by the fact that many of the resources they needed were not available nearby and had to be brought in. And because the storm damage was spread across three states, FEMA’s resources also have been spread out, he said.

Solid answers to the question of what went wrong may take years of study by blue-ribbon commissions and Congress to sort out. Emergency managers will be studying what happened for decades to come. But emergency managers and people who study disasters said several key problems allowed the situation to slip out of officials’ hands and deteriorate.

Part of the problem is that the quick mobilization of massive human and material resources takes expert management from the top, as well as the coordination of dozens of different federal agencies. That would have enabled a quicker entry into the city by National Guardsmen to establish order, distribute food and get people out.

Emergency management plans are for the most part based on the assumption that the people involved will be relatively cooperative.

The eruption of violence, disorder and confusion in and around New Orleans caught many people by surprise. A simulation that emergency management officials ran last year of a catastrophic flood and hurricane hitting New Orleans did not address the possibility of widespread violence and disorder, said Madhu Beriwal, the president of EIM, the company based in Baton Rouge that ran the exercise, which brought together emergency managers from local, state and federal agencies.

Beriwal said the violence issue was to be addressed at a later meeting. "There is a truism among sociologists who study disasters that panic is not a problem," said Rutherford Platt, a disaster expert at the University of Massachusetts. "People are too well-informed about what to do and expect; even low-income people get a lot of information. There are Red Cross shelters, all these things we expect to take up the slack."

There was also no master plan specific to the New Orleans disaster.

Officials attending last year’s simulation - which included tabletop exercises on the response to a fictional Hurricane Pam that flooded the city - produced a document with many contingency plans, Beriwal said.

But the simulation was just an early stage of a multiyear effort to develop a comprehensive plan - one that had been delayed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and competing priorities.

Homeland Security Secretary Donald Chertoff for the first time activated a more generic national response plan developed in the wake of the terrorist attacks that gives him authority over all agencies involved. But it clearly didn’t work as it was supposed to.

"Certainly what happened was some degree of a lack of coordination between federal, state and local folks prior to the arrival of the hurricane and immediately afterward," said Suzanne Mencer, a former Department of Homeland Security official who worked with state and local agencies. "It’s that coordination piece that is always the most difficult."

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Lolis Eric Elie: Crisis needs attention, not fly-bys

Why are we still standing on ceremony?

President Bush finally arrived Friday on the ravaged Gulf Coast as a belated acknowledgement that his previous fly-by in an airplane on the way back to Washington was but the sickest of jokes.

Where did he go?

He went to Biloxi, a city hit hard by Hurricane Katrina, but certainly not the epicenter of the devastation.

What did he do first? The president of the United States of America stood in front of the television cameras and wasted time receiving a briefing, a recitation of facts that the rest of the country has known for days.

What did the governors of Mississippi and Alabama do before they briefed the president on the facts that everyone but Bush already knew?

They thanked him as if he has demonstrated something other than utter and callous incompetence.

Ground zero

Did Bush go to the Superdome or the Convention Center or any other places where the teeming masses were yearning to eat food and drink water and breathe fresh air?

No!

Where did he go in the days after the World Trade Center bombing?

To Ground Zero.

The Bush tour of Gulf Coast devastation seemed to possess little more gravitas than a ribbon cutting.

What is Congress doing in the midst of this crisis?

Well, to its credit, and at Bush's urging, it approved $10.5 billion as a down payment on disaster relief for the Gulf Coast. What is on the congressional agenda next week? Hurricane Relief?

No.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has pledged to move forward with a vote to permanently repeal the estate tax.

Where is the Louisiana Legislature?

Have lawmakers called a special session to redirect any nonessential expenditures to hurricane relief and recovery efforts?

If they have met, they have done so very secretly and very quietly.

Take action

How is the nation to understand the gravity of our crisis if the state of Louisiana doesn't?

I have had dozens of e-mails from friends around the world asking what they can do. I didn't have a good answer. Several dozen fingers in the dike of our misery would do little to stem the tide.

But I have an answer now.

If you live in Louisiana, call your state representative.

Call your state senator. If you're an American living outside the state, call your congressman. Call your senators.

Tell them Americans are dying by the dozens.

Tell them Americans are being raped and robbed by the score.

Tell them it is time to act as if the nation is in crisis!

Tell them to get to ground zero on the Gulf Coast immediately because some crazy columnist claims to have absolute proof that Osama bin Laden blew up the levees!