Green Trust
Yeah Steve, it was major shame those buses weren't used to transport folks out of danger's way. 127 buses should have easily been able to 9,144 assuming each could hold 72 folks. The problem, however, may have not been so much the Mayor's lack of leadership, but that it may have been impossible to gather 127 bus drivers. After all, there is plenty of news about the 200 - 300 police officers who just disappeared and may still be layin' low.
I, for one, can imagine the conflict between whether to show up for work or to do my best to get my family and most prized possessions into my car/truck and getting out of dodge before all hell broke loose.
Give thanks it didn't happen to you or me,
Dharam Singh
Millis, MA
If they had asked for drivers, the volunteers would have shown up. The school bus drivers would have made a few trips before katrina came. If it had been me, I would have had the wife take the kids to high ground, and I would have stayed to drive.
That may have happened, we can't know, yet. All levels of government share responsibilty on this one, whether they admit responsibility or not.
In New Orleans the same sweet Laissa-Faire that makes living in New Orleans so enjoyable may be at the root of the civic complacency that turned a blind eye to corruption and gave no thought to tomorrow. Louisiana isn't called the "Dream state' for nothing. Katrina found them dreaming. They might have saved the city for all the years they knew it was coming but instead their politicians, like their citizens, lived in the moment. A beautiful fragrant, delicious, sexy moment.
- poet and New Orleans resident Andre Codrescu paraphrased
A Dream, Interrupted
Dharam Singh
Millis, MA
http://tinyurl.com/9e47o
Charmaine Neville, New Orleans evacuee – This is a video account of what she personally witnessed in New Orleans. Please take time to view and share.
This woman actually "procured" a school bus herself to help people out of there.
Also, why were people firing "at" helicopters?
http://tinyurl.com/a9gr8
Criminals were looting at firing at authority figures. This included rescue copters. There's no accounting for mobs .....
The media is counting you and me on swallowing their version rather than looking at the real story.
Another first hand account
http://tinyurl.com/9x8z3
Yes, I'm sure those looters taking TV's and stereo's really needed them for survival ......
Scrounging for food and water in abandoned stores I can understand. That's called survival.
Big oil's bigtime looting
By Derrick Z. Jackson | September 2, 2005
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
PRESIDENT BUSH yesterday told ABC-TV, ''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud."
Zero tolerance is meaningless when the White House lets the biggest looters of Hurricane Katrina walk off with billions of dollars.
We are not referring to the people you currently see in endless footage, crashing through storefronts and wading through chest-high water with clothes, food, and pharmaceuticals. Some folks are disgusting in their thuggishness, but a great many others are simply desperate, having now gone three days without food or water. The latter are living out one of the most famous hypothetical problems in moral reasoning -- should a husband steal a cancer drug he cannot afford for his dying wife?
No such sympathy is to be extended to big oil. The nation has on its hands a disaster so profound that we have not even begun to seriously count the bodies in the floodwaters. It brings us as close as we may get in our lifetime to places like Bangladesh.
New Orleans is under martial law and will not return to normal for years. Members of the Red Cross, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, police agencies, and firefighters are sacrificing time and risking lives to save lives. Texas is opening up its school systems for homeless Louisiana children. Generous food wholesalers are giving away their stocks to passersby. The Astrodome is taking in the refugees of the Superdome.
In the midst of this charity, big oil looted the nation. The pumps instantly shot past $3 a gallon, with $4 a gallon well in sight.
In a thinly disguised attempt to act as if it cared about the people wading in the water, Chevron has pledged $5 million to relief efforts. ExxonMobil and Shell have pledged $2 million apiece. British Petroleum and Citgo have pledged $1 million each.
This is nothing next to their wealth. Of the world's seven most profitable corporations, four are ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Chevron. ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable company, making $25.3 billion last year. It and the other three corporations had combined profits last year of $72.8 billion. ExxonMobil is also the world's most valuable company, with a market value, according to Forbes magazine, of $405 billion. The combined market value of ExxonMobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron is nearly $1 trillion.
And that was last year. A month ago, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips announced record second-quarter profits of $7.6 billion, $3.7 billion, and $3.1 billion, respectively. Royal Dutch Shell's quarterly profits of $5.2 billion were up by 34 percent over the same period last year. Other well-known companies like Sunoco also had record second-quarter earnings.
If ExxonMobil were to maintain its current pace of profits, it would cross the $30 billion barrier for 2005. The company's chief financial officer, Henry Hubble, bragged in classic corporatese, ''Our disciplined project management and operating practices deliver the benefits of strong industry conditions to our shareholders."
Those disciplined operating practices are hardly confined to the oil fields. Everyone knows that Bush does not really mean what he says about price-gouging at the pump, since he just gave energy companies the bulk of $14.5 billion in tax breaks in the new energy bill. Surprise, surprise. In Bush's two elections, oil and gas companies gave Republicans 79 percent of their $61.5 million in campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
If Bush really meant what he said, he would call for a freeze or cap on gasoline prices, especially in the regions affected most dramatically by Katrina. He would challenge big oil to come up with a much more meaningful contribution to relief efforts.
Insurance companies are expecting up to $25 billion in claims from Katrina. For ExxonMobil, which is headed to $30 billion in profits, to jack up prices at the pump and then only throw $2 million at relief efforts is unconscionable.
Stay fixated, if you wish, on the thieves and desperate families who are so much easier to catch on camera than comptrollers electronically stealing your cash. It is not pleasant to see anyone loot a store. But ExxonMobil and big oil are looting the nation, and no one declaring martial law on them.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
The last time I checked, Tornados, Earthquakes, massive Forest Fires, 911 type events and Hurricanes were something that fell under Federal, not local. The city and state is never prepared to handle the full brunt of these types of situations.
What can you be thinking?
Blanco says feds pledged buses
By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON
Capitol news bureau
Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina raged ashore, Gov. Kathleen Blanco still wants one question answered.
Where were the buses?
Hours after the hurricane hit Aug. 29, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a plan to send 500 commercial buses into New Orleans to rescue thousands of people left stranded on highways, overpasses and in shelters, hospitals and homes.
On the day of the storm, or perhaps the day after, FEMA turned down the state's suggestion to use school buses because they are not air conditioned, Blanco said Friday in an interview.
Even after levees broke and residents were crowding the Louisiana Superdome, then-FEMA Director Mike Brown was bent on using his own buses to evacuate New Orleans, Blanco said.
During the delay, misery and mayhem mounted in the Dome, thousands gathered in desperation at the nearby convention center, and Americans watched in shock as dead and dying New Orleans residents were broadcast on national television.
The state had sent 68 school buses into the city on Monday.
Blanco took over more buses from Louisiana school systems and sent them in on Wednesday, two days after the storm. She tapped the National Guard to drive them. Each time the buses emptied an area, more people would appear, she said.
The buses took 15,728 people to safety, a Blanco aide said. But the state's fleet of school buses wasn't enough. On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.
"I said, 'Even if we had 500 buses, they've underestimated the magnitude of this situation, and I think I need 5,000 buses, not 500,'" Blanco recounted.
"'But, Andy, those 500 are not here,'" the governor said.
Card promised to get Blanco more buses.
Later Wednesday night, Blanco walked into the State Police Communications Center and asked if anyone knew anything about the buses.
An officer told her the buses were just entering the state.
"I said, 'Do you mean as in North Louisiana, which is another six hours from New Orleans?,'" Blanco recalled in the interview. "He said, 'Yes, m'am.'"
It was at that point, Blanco said, that she realized she had made a critical error.
"I assumed that FEMA had staged their buses in near proximity," she said. "I expected them to be out of the storm's way but accessible in one day's time."
It was late Wednesday. The buses wouldn't get to New Orleans until Thursday. By then, many of the sickest and the weakest were dead or dying.
The buses weren't the only resource to arrive late, Blanco said.
It took days to get a communications system and outside troops. In the first days after the hurricane hit, Louisiana National Guard communicated by sending text messages on cell phones.
The death and destruction multiplied as looters armed themselves and residents languished waiting for rescue.
Brown was the first bureaucratic casualty in the massive governmental breakdown in responding to Katrina.
He resigned last week amid criticism that he responded sluggishly to the hurricane. Brown lashed out a few days later, telling The New York Times that Blanco and her staff were "incapable of organizing a coherent state effort."
Brown said that, on the day before the storm hit, he asked Blanco and Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau, head of the state's National Guard, what resources they needed.
"The response was like, 'Let us find out,' and then I never received specific requests for specific things that needed doing," Brown told The New York Times last week.
Blanco said it shouldn't have been up to her to provide a list.
"Specific things, my God," she said. "(If) they didn't know that we were in the middle of search and rescue and needed to evacuate people, then they were not on the ground with us. We needed buses and helicopters."
Besides, Blanco said, she thought Brown was in control of the situation.
"I had security in the knowledge that there were 500 buses," she said. "Mike had emphasized the buses to me personally. That was not my first concern until I realized that they were not there."
Meanwhile, the state continued to send school buses into the affected areas.
One of Blanco's aides, Leonard Kleinpeter, said FEMA told him at one point that the state could stop sending school buses because the agency was going to bring in helicopters and use them instead of the commercial buses that still weren't there.
Blanco told Kleinpeter to ignore those instructions.
"She said, 'I'll be damned. You keep loading the wagons on the school buses,'" Kleinpeter said.
Kleinpeter said he now wonders if FEMA temporarily halted its buses because the agency thought helicopters would work better.
By Tuesday, the day after the hurricane, Brown was ready to cede control of state and federal relief efforts to the White House.
Two days later, President George W. Bush met with Blanco on Air Force One and asked her for control of the troops that were finally pouring into the state. Blanco asked if Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour would be under the same regime. The answer was "No."
Blanco told Bush she'd get back to him in 24 hours. The president didn't wait. That night, the White House faxed a memorandum of understanding for her to sign to cede control of the troops. Her answer was "No."
"If I thought that it was going to bring one more resource to bear, if I thought that he was denying me resource because of it, and I don't think he was, then it might have been something that I would have considered," she said.
"By that time, we were already getting the resources and commitments," the governor said.
It wasn't the response that the White House wanted. People close to the Bush administration started criticizing Blanco, saying she bungled the state response.
When Bush returned to the state a few days later, he didn't tell Blanco he was coming. The night before that second visit, Blanco learned about the visit from a news reporter and wrangled an invitation to accompany Bush on his tour.
There was a noticeable tension between the president and the governor throughout the trip.
"What was going on is the national media people started picking on the president. So the White House began to defend the president. So they turned some guns on me," Blanco said.
"It was a colossal waste of our time and energy to get into the blame game," she said.
Blanco said things are now fine between her and Bush.
Bush has since acknowledged that his administration failed to respond adequately to the hurricane. The president has ordered a review of the sluggish response.
"Four years after the frightening experience of Sept. 11, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency," he told the nation in an address from Jackson Square Thursday night.
"When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I as president am responsible for the problem, and for the solution," Bush said.
Blanco is less emphatic in taking blame for the breakdown.
She said she takes responsibility "for assuming that help was on the way" when it wasn't.
Blanco said she's also learned a lesson.
"In the end, in a really dangerous, life-threatening situation, there is no army that's going to be there to save you," she said. "It's going to be person-to-person, helping each other. Some people are putting their lives on the line to help other people whose lives are at risk. And that's the bottom line."
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http://www.2theadvocate.com/
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