September 9, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Perish the poor
For all that I cringed in reading the self-satisfied proclamation that the Katrina disaster is the inevitable result of American's political sins, I do think that the catastrophe has a lot to do with poverty. But as I said in my previous post, I think that the interaction of the poverty with the hurricane to produce a social disaster is extremely complicated.
The problem of the poor is that the poor have more than one problem. In America, in these days, people who don't have more than one problem usually don't end up being poor. The poor lack education; they lack robust networks of family and friends to weather them through a crisis; they lack resources to draw on in emergencies, and yes, conservatives, they lack middle-class behaviours that could help pull them out of the underclass. We saw all of those things operating in New Orleans.
The poor, because they were uneducated, did not understand as readily as the middle-class that fled that this time, it was really a good idea to evacuate, even though the last seven times you evacuated nothing happened.
The poor lived on the lower ground, where flooding was worse, because housing that tends to flood is cheaper than housing that stays dry.
The poor did not know anyone with a boat they could call when the water started to rise.
The poor did not have any far-flung family, spread around the country by the modern educational and professional employment system, to stay with outside of New Orleans. Many of the refugees have reported that this is the first time they've left the city.
The poor did not have any money to stay in a motel, because it was the end of the month (government checks come on the first of the month) and the pay period (which generally spans two weeks), and few poor people have savings.
The poor were less likely to have cars, or know people with access to cars. They are less likely to be connected with churches or other social organisations that could have functioned to make sure they got out.
The poor do not listen to news as frequently, or as intently, as the middle class, meaning that they had a much hazier idea of what was going on, even if they had had the education to understand what a Class Five hurricane was.
The poor were angry about the divide between them and the middle class, particularly since the middle class is mostly white, and the underclass is mostly poor. When the refugee relief efforts broke down, the belief that they were being targeted because they were black seems to have led to violent and anti-social behavior.
Those with behaviour problems and anti-social personalities tend to be poor. (This is not to say that poor people all have behaviour problems: all rabbis are jewish, but that doesn't mean that all, or even a majority, of jewish people are rabbis). When the middle-class fled the city, the concentration of the dangerous among the population rose precipitously.
The poor had nowhere to put their pets (they were not allowed in the Superdome), leading many to stay with their animals rather than abandon them. Middle class people who went to motels or friends didn't have this problem.
The poor are vastly less responsive to public education efforts than the middle class (I've seen few good theories as to why). This meant that they didn't take evacuation warnings seriously.
The poor have a harder time missing days of work than those on salary; undoubtedly, some were worried about losing time if they evacuated.
The poor tend to be more passive than the middle class. That not only prevented evacuation; it probably prevented some possible self-rescues.
The poor tend to have less rich social networks, which meant fewer people looking for those who were trapped; that's the repeated lesson of heat waves in America.
The poor lack access to credit. Without credit it is hard to get a motel room; it is also hard to comply with an emergency evacuation order if it's the end of the month and you're out of cash.
The poor are the ones who mostly make up gangs, who are organized, have guns, and take very little effort to turn into a marauding mob. This is only a tiny fraction of the population, but a tiny fraction is enough to terrorize the rest.
As you can see, few of these are directly reparable by the government in any sort of reasonable time frame, and I'm not sure a lot of them are reparable at all; as far as I know, people on the dole in Europe live from check to check too. Other things, like gangs, are something the government has been fighting for some time.
But the government could have rectified this by building an evacuation plan that included:
1) Shelter for all the people without means to stay in hotels, not a small fraction of them
2) Provision for pets
3) A serious, door-to-door evacuation effort
4) Transportation to shelters from NOLA
Why didn't New Orleans do this? Some combination of cost, ignorance, and the wishful belief that something that hasn't happened yet won't happen tomorrow, I expect.
But what about Bush? I hear you cry. Look, the Bush administration undoubtedly screwed up in many ways, but as far as I can tell, none of their preventive failures would have made much difference. The majority of people are expected to have drowned because they were trapped in their attics in the relatively early hours of the flood--when there simply wouldn't have been any way for even a crackerjack FEMA effort to have rescued the majority of the dead. Once the levee broke, those people were mostly doomed. And responsibility for evacuation rests with the local government.
Now, perhaps it shouldn't. Perhaps the Feds should do that job. But those are big questions of federalism--and I think that Mickey Kaus is right that this disaster has shown one of the major weaknesses of federalist government, though I also agree with a colleague that there's simply no other way to organize a country as big as the US. And given the fact that the administration was apparently prevented from deploying some troops because of jurisdictional clashes with the Louisiana governor after Katrina struck, it seems unlikely that the administration would have managed to secure such powers before the disaster that showed how badly it was needed.
But I also think there's a wishful tone to the belief among many liberals that this all could have been prevented had only a Democrat been in charge. Exhibit one for this is the mendacious charge that Bush somehow cut funding to levee building efforts that would have prevented this. Exhibit two is the more plausible assertion that FEMA was better under Clinton. But I'm not quite sure how we know it was better. We had one major disaster under Clinton, Northridge, in which local services remained intact, communications were fine, and most of the rescues seem to have been performed by private citizens at the site. What we may have just learned is that when it's needed, as it was in 1992 and 2005, FEMA doesn't do a very good job. And if that's so, there are deep systemic problems having to do with the bureaucratic and legislative structure of the US government that will not be changed by changing the party affiliation of the five guys at the top of the pyramid. Yet no one's really looking at changing the system that broke down--only at changing out some of the cogs in the machine.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 9, 2005 1:57 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksThat was an excellent summary of the issues that contributed to the disaster. Well said.
I don't visit this blog much but damn, this is good stuff...a couple of very thoughtful and well written little essays.
Indeed, wonderfully written. Although I'd have some points of disagreement, and one extremely cheap shot in the post immediately below, I applaud you.
...but other than that, the poor are doing all right.
I don't get how Brittain33 accurately predicted the cheapness of the shot in Dylan's simultaneously-posted post, "immediately below." Oh wait ... maybe I do.
Much of the anger at FEMA's performance stems from a misunderstanding of FEMA's job. FEMA is NOT supposed to be rescuing anybody after a disaster. FEMA does not deliver food, nor does it provide shelter. Instead, FEMA's proper job is to coordinate these activities. FEMA let's the National Guard, the full time military, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and countless state and local organizations know where the help is needed most. FEMA's job is to cut the red tape so aide can reach people quicker. However, if the governor of the state or the mayor of a city (or both) refuses to cooperate with FEMA, FEMA can do nothing. The state must cede its authority to FEMA. In theory, governors should be quick to turn over the requisite authority -- doing so increases the aide available to the citizens of their state.
Twice now, with Andrew in Florida and Katrina in Louisiana, a governor has refused to cede authority while at the same time blasting the federal government for failing to respond. In Governor Blanko's case, her reluctance may have resulted from a lack of faith in the federal government or from her acknowledged tendency to think things out be for acting. Regardless of the motivations, the governors' actions delayed assistance to thousands of people. There should be some mechanism that would allow the feds to assume control for a brief period if needed to respond to a disaster.
Perhaps part of the education can be explained by being penalized for "acting white". A good place to start further exploration, I think.
The poor do not listen to news as frequently, or as intently, as the middle class, meaning that they had a much hazier idea of what was going on, even if they had had the education to understand what a Class Five hurricane was.
From what I heard on a radio interview, the day before the storm the TV stations in NOLA were telling everyone to get out of town ASAP, but radio was ignoring the evacuation order. If so, a few licenses should be suspended.
I agree w/the general tone of "thumbs-up for this post". Two quibbles:
(1) The "see, federalism doesn't work! big gov't is no help!" line - pursued much more strongly by blogs much more right wing - really gets on my nerves because from a leftist perspective, the Bush administration has been something like a cruel parody of our conception of what gov't could be...all bloat and no muscle. This is not to say that everything would be hunky dory under a Democrat, but that Bush is a really *really* bad test case for the merits of big gov't.
(2) The "mendacious charge that Bush somehow cut funding to levee efforts that would have prevented this." Whether or not the blame falls on Bush or not (now people hear the the Army Corps of Engineers was mostly charged w/pork barrel projects in LA, and question whether funding would have done any good), the levees should have been improved. The process of improving them should have been underway. After 9/11, what just happened in New Orleans was essentially brainstormed as one of the three most horrific natural disasters that could potentially happen in America, and other than a half assed evacuation plan I'm unaware of any action undertaken to prevent it from happening. Whether or not the construction would have been completed, the fact that it wasn't underway and didn't look to get underway any time soon is, in my mind, criminal. It's not that they tried and were sadly too late in starting; there was not try.
Everyone should read the full story at this link:
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006754.html#006754
This is a story about some people at a paramedic's convention in the French Quarter, who did everything right to get themselves out after the hurricane... only to:
- Have their (chartered and PAID FOR) buses commandeered by the government, which then failed to make arrangements for them.
- Be lied to by the police command staff to get them away from the police HQ, where they had camped to make their plight more conspicuous;
- Be turned away at gunpoint when they tried to escape the city on foot; and
- Have their found food and scavenged shelter confiscated and destroyed by the police when the news media reported where they were.
Note that these were educated people, employed, probably white - they were treated in a way that we would expect Soviet guards to treat prisoners in a gulag, not citizens in need of assistance. And if that happened to tourists, can we blame the poor and black for blaming the government agents' behavior on racism?
One thing is for sure. If many, many heads do not roll and there are no criminal convictions (not prosecutions, convictions) of police and others for crimes including felonious assault and wanton disregard for human life, every government involved in that clusterfuck needs to be utterly bankrupted by the damage awards to the people so cruelly abused and placed at risk of their lives by these "civil servants".
But how would you resolve the fact that it was one of the improved levees that failed and the ones that need upgrades did not?
Latent in the debate over FEMA, blame, and the lackadaiscal preparation/reaction by N.O. and LA more generally, is the simple issue of which way you want the government run.
Lots of people rushing to castigate Bush/FEMA/etc. are simply expressing a preference for big government to solve all our problems, while ignoring that FEMA has been roughly as effective (or ineffective) in Katrina as it has in every other major disaster is addressed, regardless of who was in power (see also: Andrew, Floyd...).
On the other hand, people wishing for pure federalism need to look long and hard at whether we really want to consign thousands of people to their fate, just because they have the misfortune of living in a city and state marked by corruption and incompetence. Many of them were simply born there, and had little resources for moving elsewhere in the country even if the idea had occurred to them.
My broader point? It would be nice to see more plainly-stated admissions that many of the complaints many people are raising are, in fact, fundamentally partisan on principle, rather than results-driven. The plain evidence from Katrina is that screw-up and failure are shared equally among both approaches, so instead of arguing "more of my way would have worked better," what we should be saying is "overhaul X entirely and restructure it as..."
I need to say two things:
1) About the poor being "not connected to churches": have you ever been to the South? That statement couldn't be further from reality. Maybe it's true in New York, but honestly, that statement is almost laughable.
2) Engineer-Poet: Hold your fire, for now. For one thing, there are many who believe that to be an urban-legend story (already)--presumably to add fuel to the fire. I'm far from one to defend the incompetent, corrupt local authorities, but I don't buy that story at all.
More to the point, if that group of people was so affluent and educated, why were they so utterly stupid as to NOT EVACUATE before the storm? I've got less than zero sympathy for those who chose to not evacuate when they clearly could have. And pets wouldn't be the excuse in said case either, since they were at a French Quarter hotel at a convention.
Urban legend? The story is TOLD IN THE FIRST PERSON and HAS LINKS TO THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE IT.
As for why tourists didn't evacuate, recall that bus service to N.O. was shut down on Saturday, just about the time the evacuation order went out. I don't know if the airport was open any later, but flights out would have been packed; anyone who came to town without their own car would have been in a similar position to the carless natives.
Also note that this is not the only story from stranded tourists; there was a previous tale from a group including some Australians who were caught at the Superdome.
"And if that's so, there are deep systemic problems having to do with the bureaucratic and legislative structure of the US government that will not be changed by changing the party affiliation of the five guys at the top of the pyramid."
No question that's so. But what are you going to change? I'm afraid you're gonna get what you've been investing in for years. Free market barbarianism.
I like your spirit, Engineer-Poet. If anything, that, and not this tongue-wagging, will get us through.
Can you make the same argument about people living in New York City? Out of a population of over 8,000,000 this many folks own cars:
City car ownership peaked at 2.04 million in 2000, but fell to 1.94 million last year in 2003, despite population growth. Experts blame the economy, sky-high insurance prices, spiraling gas costs and the increasing nightmare of finding parking spots. Basic car insurance in New York City can cost as much as $1,600 a year, and much more for younger motorists.
NYC Car Ownership
Citywide: Down 4.9%
2000 - 2,044,373
2003 - 1,943,854
Manhattan: Down 1.6%
2000 - 255,780
2003 - 252,209
Brooklyn: Down 11.9%
2000 - 486,987
2003 - 428,839
Bronx: Down 5.2%
2000 - 268,910
2003 - 255,103
Queens: Down 4.6%
2000 - 784,848
2003 - 748,695
Staten Island: Up 4.4%
2000 - 247,848
2003 - 259,008
Source: New York State Department of Motor Vehicles
http://www.transalt.org/press/magazine/042Spring/19metro.html
>>>" Subways are a fast, easy, and inexpensive way to get around the city. Trains run 24 hours a day, with waiting time between trains normally just a few minutes, depending on the time of day. The 714-mile New York City subway system has 468 stations serving 24 routes - more than any other system in the world. It operates 24 hours a day, is safe, and is used daily by more than 3.5 million people."
http://www.nycvisit.com/content/index.cfm?pagePkey=530
Given the fact the a roughly 75% of New York City residents DON'T OWN CARS, what is the evacuation plan for NYC?
>>>"Officials would discourage people from using cars to avoid potentially crippling bottlenecks on the roads, bridges and tunnels leading out of the city.
Those who can't stay with friends or relatives elsewhere would head to 20 "reception centers" around the city, where they would be shuttled in buses or vans to up to 300 shelters.
City officials are confident that New York's cops, firefighters and other emergency workers - who earned acclaim for their response on 9/11 and are constantly undergoing training for all kinds of disasters - would lead a successful evacuation effort.
The officials also count on New Yorkers to be cool-headed if a hurricane looms - and point to the evacuation that got 1 million people out of harm's way in the Gulf Coast before Hurricane Katrina hit."
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/344477p-294002c.html
We've seen by the results of last year's power grid failure
This illustrates the difficulties that large cities have in evacuating people without vehicles. If we have a power grid failure, as we did last year.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/14/power.outage/
Not even the Subways and transit trains would be available for use.
As the article itself says, the plan doesn't even CALL for ALL of New York's citizens to be transported a great distance out of the city limits, something it seems the entire media is intent upon blaming New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for.
--Cobra
Cobra,
NYC is almost unique in the country among big cities in that it's incredibly expensive to insure and garage a car, and also more or less unnecessary to have one, at least to get around Manhattan. Still, I don't see how you leap from one in four NYC residents owning a car to one in four having private vehicular transport. For one thing, at least some substantial fraction of the NYC population is below driving age. For another, one car per household (rather than one per adult) is not at all uncommon in a packed and public-transit-heavy city. I'd say that the fraction of NYC households without a car is likely a lot smaller than three out of four.
So far as I can see, NYC has about as good a plan as is reasonably possible there. It does not, I notice, involve tens of thousands of people holed up in a couple of vast buildings, nor specifically prohibiting deliveries of food and water and other supplies to such shelters on the grounds that doing so would attract other people there. (I would love to know just how people were supposed to have found out that there was [hypothetical, turned-back] food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center in the first place, given that the power was generally out and most phone service as well. Evidently the idea was that people would descend like flies on any source of food and water, and there were just too damn many people to deal with; but even flies don't descend on food thoroughly wrapped in plastic, and I don't see how most people could have known what was going on at the Convention Center, say, short of going there and seeing for themselves.)
One natural diaster?
Well, I'm sure there was more than 1 hurricane that made landfall during Clinton's years in office.
And then there was that whole Oklahoma City thing.
And for a decent account on the role of FEMA, how it behaved pre-Clinton, and how it changed under Clinton, see http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0509.franklin.html
Kilroy Was Here
BTW, Hurricanes under Clinton: Floyd, Fran, and Opal. All in the top 20 of costliest US hurricanes according to Wikipedia.
KWH
Floyd never exceeded Category 4 and made US landfall as a 2; Fran made US landfall as a 3; Opal reached 4 but was, again, a 3 by the time of US landfall. Also, none of these made a direct strike on a large city situated below sea level, which kinda changes the dynamics. In terms of windspeed and landfall location, and the consequent loss of infrastructure and complete breakdown in personnel coordination, Katrina was something special.
As for OKC, not to slight the dead or those who lost loved ones in the blast, but that was ONE modest-sized office building. What kind of template does that provide vis-a-vis an entire city?
"the plan doesn't even CALL for ALL of New York's citizens to be transported a great distance out of the city limits"
So? NYC is neither below sea level nor situated between the ocean and a swamp. I doubt you'd have to evacuate ANYONE beyond city limits to get everyone into shelter above a 20-foot storm surge. For some other emergencies you might need to evacuate people a few miles beyond the city limits, where they could be temporarily housed in the gyms of hundreds of suburban schools (to cite just the most obvious place). A few miles beyond New Orleans city limits, you're either under water even in good weather, or in an undeveloped swamp.
IIRC, New Orleans is the only major city which is below sea level, and one of perhaps two which can be flooded long-term by natural events (the other which comes to mind is Salt Lake City). As susceptibility to flooding goes, N.O. is sui generis.
As someone somewhere noted, the human toll was increased immensely by official obstruction of relief efforts. What would it have taken for medevac helicopters to have carried cases of Aquafina and munchies on their trips in? Nothing but a bit of thought. Yet Blanco is reported to have called for aid to be kept from the Superdome while people there were literally dying of thirst and Greta sheriffs were shooting at anyone trying to leave the city on foot. FEMA officials told the Coast Guard not to supply fuel to New Orleans city officials. Ray Nagin (who let his own buses sit in an area being flooded by a busted flood wall on a canal) yells for buses and doesn't get them, while "relief" officials commandeer buses rented by private citizens to get themselves out. Three trucks sent by Wal-Mart carrying water were turned back by officials, again as people were dying of thirst.
There is a pile of blame here, and heads ought to roll at every level of government. Nagin ought to admit that he could have done more to get people out. Greta county should fire its police chief and prosecute both him and every officer who fired on citizens in need of relief; special opprobrium and civil-rights prosecution should be aimed at those officers who hounded groups of refugees and took the food and water they'd managed to find.
Bush ought to fire Brown outright, and then get on the tube to say that this sort of incompetence is unacceptable in government anywhere and that he was wrong to place personal loyalty and connections above competence and experience when selecting people for important jobs. Then he ought to carry this through everywhere else, asking for resignations and taking short lists of people from everywhere except his old-boy club.
Will this happen? I doubt it. But it's my fervent hope that voter reaction next year makes it obvious that such blundering is a one-way ticket to political oblivion, if not impeachment and prosecution. We cannot afford this kind of crap, and if we fail to put our collective foot down and ruthlessly punish the people who let it happen and will not admit that anything went wrong, we will only get more of it.
Yes, Floyd, Opal, and Fran were not as big as Andrew or Katrina. But the Northridge earthquake was certainly in the same vein.
Certainly, OKC was no WTC, but again, it's the same kind of event.
Finally, Clinton used the natural disaster declaration over 300 times during his presidency, so the Governors of the states were in good position to judge the effectiveness of FEMA. My understanding is that all of them noticed the marked improvement and effectiveness of FEMA under Witt and Clinton. Even GWB as Gov of Texas complimented Clinton and Witt.
If you read the Washington Monthly link above, you see a FEMA that was much more prepared and reacted much more effectively in the OKC case.
Galt asked for some evidence on why we think that Clinton or Gore's FEMA would have worked better. I'm just doing my best to oblige.
KWH
Turns out that Fox News has about the same sentiments that I had above (as well as at The Ergosphere five days before they did).
The account cited above is being repeated today on the NPR program "This American Life", in the first person, by some of the people named.
Several other first-person accounts have been offered, all telling similar stories.
Engineer Poet: maybe you didn't catch what I said. I said "there are many who believe that to be an urban-legend story (already)--presumably to add fuel to the fire. I'm far from one to defend the incompetent, corrupt local authorities, but I don't buy that story at all."
"Many people." I wouldn't classify it as urban legend, but I still think it's crap, because they seemed to have no problem collecting $20K to try to evacuate AFTER the storm. I find it incredible that their money couldn't buy them a way out before the storm, and you're not going to convince me otherwise.
I also said I don't cut the local authorities any slack--I think Nagin and Blanco are nothing if not criminally negligent, but not so much because of those who chose to ride it out, but because of those who TRULY couldn't find a way out. Here's another link for you.
All I'm saying it's interesting how resourceful people like those in the EMT article are when they're desperate, as opposed to how resourceful they could have been prior to the storm landfall if they hadn't been too lazy or stupid (or not wanting to leave the fun in the French Quarter?) to leave.
Nagin didn't issue the mandatory evacuation until Sunday morning, BTW, which created a WHOLE lot of problems in itself.
Oh, there's plenty of blame to go around. (Good link, good reporting.) I'm of the opinion that heads should roll at all levels of government, and the good ol' boys who can't come up with a disaster plan and do civil-defense tests ought to be allowed to find other employment. If they can't find anyone willing to let them judge horses, they can always dig ditches or run garbage trucks.
As I recall, Democrats led the charge to create the dept of homeland security, Bush came to that party a weeks later. So if somebody wants to claim that FEMA being in DHS caused the problem, wouldn't that reflect more on Democrats than Bush??
Not according to Bush haters, I'd wager.
If it was such a bad Democratic idea, why did it pass two Republican-majority houses of the legislature and get signed by a Republican president?
One of my biggest complaints about one-party rule is that the Republicans have no more fiscal responsibility than the Democrats had, and they're putting it all on credit to boot. Whatever the initiative was, they found a way to profit from it. Then when the lawmaking is over and it comes time for implementation, we have Bush appointing incompetent cronies to important posts in the newly-created structures (which really call for people with substantial experience).
They really had no excuse. Had they blocked the formation of a DHS and justified it by listing the problems it would create and the expense it would require, I (and millions of other fiscal conservatives) would have cheered. This would have gotten the support of everyone who voted for Perot. But they didn't, and the rest is history.
I've seen it said elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here: Katrina showed just how much better the American people are than their rulers.
Even GWB as Gov of Texas complimented Clinton and Witt.
Yes, it's instructive to note that a decent-sized hurricane (Bret, a Category 3) hit Texas in 1998 (while both Clinton and Witt were in office), and in a zone much less damaged and flooded than New Orleans, it still took FEMA three or more days to show up. Last year in Florida, FEMA wasn't a first responder, either. The fire department, the police department and the local power utilities (as well as other aid organizations coordinated with the state) showed up first; FEMA showed up days or even weeks later, depending on urgency and accessability.
Once again, FEMA is not a first-responder. Designing it to be a first-responder is something to consider, but just know that it's currently not designed that way.
Dividing people into middle-class and poor makes some sense when speaking of incomes. But to assume that income determines values is illogical at best. True there are some people who are incapable of taking care of themselves. But what percentage of the poor might that be? 5%? 10%?
Hardwork and determination in the face of adversity are not "middle class values," although many in the middle class have those values. My father was poor, as was his father before him. Still, each worked, abstained from promiscuous sex, and took care of their families as best they could. So, guess—am I black or white?
Slartibartfast write:
Yes, it's instructive to note that a decent-sized hurricane (Bret, a Category 3) hit Texas in 1998 (while both Clinton and Witt were in office), and in a zone much less damaged and flooded than New Orleans, it still took FEMA three or more days to show up.
Citation please.
KWH
There's always FEMA. Looks like at least two weeks, but FEMA didn't actually do anything but hand out money. Which, to be fair, is pretty much all they ever did back then. And if you look at Hurricane Floyd, which was a much more destructive storm, it still took a week and a half. Look around and you'll see that the Charley response was only a few days, but Charley was an anomaly: tiny but very intense. Ivan, which ripped a wide swath of destruction through upper Florida and lower Alabama, took about three days to get FEMA situated onsite, and a couple of days to begin getting medical care to the injured. Still, I think Ivan is relatively small potatoes compared with Katrina.
The government is not fighting gangs, it is subsidising them. It is called Republican Socialism: price supports for criminals.
Do they still teach alcohol prohibition in American schools?
'If you read the Washington Monthly link above, you see a FEMA that was much more prepared and reacted much more effectively in the OKC case. '
As I remember OKC was the explosion of 1 office building in one city not a cat 5 hurricane devastating 4 states. Other than that it's a pretty valid comparison.
1 complaint about any evacuation plans that have the word 'pets' in them. If one human life is lost because a fireman was rescuing Mittens out of a tree then whoever formulated and signed off on the plan should be fired. I am a pet lover and might go to extraordinary lengths to same my own dogs but I really don't think they should be a search and rescue priority.
I offer my sincere apologies for "wide swath of destruction" and any other hackneyed phrases I may have emitted recently. I've been reading the papers too much.
"The poor were angry about the divide between them and the middle class, particularly since the middle class is mostly white, and the underclass is mostly poor."
I think you MEANT "the underclass is mostly BLACK".
FYI.
One cog that we might consider replacing before it is too late is the President himself.
I would like to put the proposition to you, "Bush Should Resign" for the good of the country.
There is a pattern--a systemic failure that was uncovered by Katrina. Should we stay the course with Bush? To what ends?
I would appreciate your thoughts at the link.
I would like to put the proposition to you, "Bush Should Resign" for the good of the country
Have you got reason to believe that things would have been different if Dick Cheney had been in charge? Please explain.
Cheney couldn't take the job if he resigned too (or was impeached).
The problems with that scenario are several:
- It would take a huge rebellion of Republicans to pass articles of impeachment, without which Bush would certainly stay put.
- Succession passes to the Speaker of the House (?); you can imagine the frenzy there.
- Transfer of the presidency without a popular election is extremely troublesome for civil society.
I'd prefer that Bush fire most of his cabinet and have little to do with the selection of their replacements, and Congress develop some backbone in their oversight role.
Given history, I would not expect any of that to go very well.
Dan,
Yes, Bush has a method of decision making and delegation that is unique to the problems that we have seen. The cronyism that extended to Tenet without adequate oversight is the same cronyism that we saw with Brown's selection.
At the same time, Bush does not self-correct. Nor is he proactive and forceful in the face of a situation that demands action--especially where cronies are involved.
The same problems with the intelligence over Iraq are repeated with Katrina. They will be the reasons for Iran getting the bomb if and when that happens.
I think Cheney is more clear minded and willing to do the hard things that need to be done, even if tne immediate result is painful.
He impresses me as one who does not suffer fools well. On the other hand, Bush does.
The cronyism that extended to Tenet without adequate oversight
"Cronyism"? Tenet was a Clinton appointee. Bush just reconfirmed him in the post.
Michelle writes:
>>>"NYC is almost unique in the country among big cities in that it's incredibly expensive to insure and garage a car, and also more or less unnecessary to have one, at least to get around Manhattan. Still, I don't see how you leap from one in four NYC residents owning a car to one in four having private vehicular transport. For one thing, at least some substantial fraction of the NYC population is below driving age. For another, one car per household (rather than one per adult) is not at all uncommon in a packed and public-transit-heavy city. I'd say that the fraction of NYC households without a car is likely a lot smaller than three out of four."
So you're basically supporting my argument. Poor people in New Orleans are not wealthy enough to own cars, and neither are poor and middle class New Yorkers. I want to the see the condemnation of middle class New Yorkers, including NYPD, who make less than $35,000 a year starting salary, but by edict, are required to live within the five boroughs of NYC.
(pssst...I'll give you a hint--this isn't the type of weblog where you'll see working class white people criticized heavily.)
Michelle writes:
>>>"So far as I can see, NYC has about as good a plan as is reasonably possible there. It does not, I notice, involve tens of thousands of people holed up in a couple of vast buildings, nor specifically prohibiting deliveries of food and water and other supplies to such shelters on the grounds that doing so would attract other people there."
Given a population of 8,000,000, do the math. If 3/4ths of 8,000,000 can't leave the city--6,000,000--300 shelters would, divided up evenly, have to provide for 200,000 people each, almost 7 times the amount of people at the Superdome. In fact, in order to have a non-pressing crush at these shelters, you would have to have only a very small portion of the NYC population requiring shelter in the first place.
Markm writes:
>>>"So? NYC is neither below sea level nor situated between the ocean and a swamp. I doubt you'd have to evacuate ANYONE beyond city limits to get everyone into shelter above a 20-foot storm surge. For some other emergencies you might need to evacuate people a few miles beyond the city limits, where they could be temporarily housed in the gyms of hundreds of suburban schools (to cite just the most obvious place)."
I won't quibble with you on the facts that NYC is made up of three islands and a penninsula, and the continuous rise in ocean levels (Thermal expansion has already raised the oceans 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters)), that will eventually make all coastal cities on the planet akin to New Orleans.
>>>"So far, the rise in sea level is because warmer water takes up more room than colder water, which makes sea levels go up, a process known as thermal expansion.
"The real question is what's going to happen to Greenland and Antarctica," Stouffer said. "That's where the bulk of all the fresh water is tied up."
A recent Nature study suggested that Greenland's ice sheet will begin to melt if the temperature there rises by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit). That is something many scientists think is likely to happen in another hundred years.
The complete melting of Greenland would raise sea levels by 7 meters (23 feet). But even a partial melting would cause a one-meter (three-foot) rise. Such a rise would have a devastating impact on low-lying island countries, such as the Indian Ocean's Maldives, which would be entirely submerged...
A one-meter sea level rise would wreak particular havoc on the Gulf Coast and eastern seaboard of the United States...
"No one will be free from this," said Overpeck, whose maps show that every U.S. East Coast city from Boston to Miami would be swamped..."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0420_040420_earthday.html
Part of the big three FEMA nightmare scenarios, aside from a San Francisco earthquake and a New Orleans hurricane, is a terrorist attack on New York City. A biological attack would call for mass evacuation if executed with skill. A radiological attack would amount to the same thing, and despite protestations of the nuclear energy lobby, the Indian Point Nuclear facility sits just 35 miles up river from NYC.
>>>"For a successful attack at one of the two operating Indian Point reactors, we find that
The number of near-term deaths within 50 miles, due to lethal radiation exposures received within seven days after the attack, is approximately 3,500 for 95th percentile weather conditions, and approximately 44,000 for the worst case evaluated. Although we assumed that the ten-mile emergency planning zone was entirely evacuated in these cases, this effort was inadequate because (according to Entergy’s own estimate) it would take nearly nine and one half hours to fully evacuate the ten-mile zone, whereas in our model the first radiological release occurs about two hours after the attack.
Near-term deaths can occur among individuals living as far as 18 miles from Indian Point for the 95th percentile case, and as far as 60 miles away in the worst case evaluated. Timely sheltering could be effective in reducing the number of near-term deaths among people residing outside of the ten-mile emergency planning zone, but currently no formal emergency plan is required for these individuals.
The number of long-term cancer deaths within 50 miles, due to non-acutely lethal radiation exposures within seven days after the attack, is almost 100,000 for 95th percentile weather conditions and more than 500,000 for the worst weather case evaluated. The peak value corresponds to an attack timed to coincide with weather conditions that maximize radioactive fallout over New York City.
Based on the 95th percentile case, Food and Drug Administration guidance would recommend that many New York City residents under 40, and children in particular, take potassium iodide (KI) to block absorption for radioactive iodine in the thyroid. However, there is no requirement that KI be stockpiled for use in New York City.
The economic damages within 100 miles would exceed $1.1 trillion for the 95th percentile case, and could be as great as $2.1 trillion for the worst case evaluated, based on Environmental Protection Agency guidance for population relocation and cleanup. Millions of people would require permanent relocation."
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_terrorism/impacts-of-a-terrorist-attack-at-indian-point-nuclear-power-plant.html
The shocking thing is that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta "cased" this reactor during practice runs down the Hudson.
http://www.energybulletin.net/1243.html
--Cobra
Dan,
You don't need to be from texas to be a Bush crony. Read up on how Bush took office--Tenet made affirmative steps to put himself on "Team Bush".
And he was protected as a result.
Cobra: I would almost rather that Atta & Co. had gone after nukes than the twin towers. A reactor containment building is an extremely hard target, and is also small and difficult to hit. A jet fighter propelled into a concrete test block built to containment specs barely marked it. An impact that was either short, long or glancing would probably cause little damage.
Can you imagine how humiliated ObL would have been if his grand plan had failed so conspicuously, and how much stock he would have lost in the Arab world? The Taliban might have collapsed on their own after such an event.
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