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MSNBC was showing video about 30 minutes ago of a massive amphibious military convoy reaching the Superdome. Military choppers were swarming all around it. They were massive wheeled vehicles with what looked like huge 4x4 tires, moving thru probably 3 or 4 feet of water. They were towing flatbeds loaded with pallets full of stuff.
Just an fyi, Matt over at LapeerLiving is an insurance adjuster and is setting up camp now over in Mississipi to begin accepting claims for residences and vehicles. Check out his report here:
http://lapeerliving.blogspot.com...y-update-
4.html
3311 buses at 45 heads per bus would get all 140,000 people out.
Wonder how many buses are there already.
MSNBC was showing video about 30 minutes ago of a massive amphibious military convoy reaching the Superdome.
Gosh. This must be the disaster response which President Bush and FEMA are incompetent for not sending.
Oh, wait, they should have sent it earlier, when the flood waters were still rising, the materiel hadn't yet made it through Louisiana's ruined transportation network, and there was no way to protect the rescuers from the looters. Right. I forgot.
Get the commercials OFF this blog,
I can't believe that anyone would
try to make money off this crisis!!!!
ChrisG
Brendan announced yesterday that all the ad revenue was donated to charity. He can't publicly state that on the site because it might violate Google's TOS.
Relax
Admiral.. right on. I still think people don't get that a puss couldnt have moved through 15-25feet of water
Where are the donations from oil companies?
Incompetent fools.
They are so stoopid.
We are so smart.
They like watching people die (especially black folks).
We like keeping them alive.
Look ma, I'm typing on my 'puter. Those rescuers are so stupid and lazy.
They should see me type with my mad typing skilz.
My fingernails are so clean.
I will have a good time tonight. Tomorrow those victims may be dead,
because of their stoopid incompetent rescuers.
I refuse to take the blame.
Where are the donations from Barbara Streisand and Green Day?
sorry did not know about the donnated
revenues
:)
Ignorant Fools.
Hey, I know people can't be moved immediately. My criticisms were in not having more supplies or military presence there in the short term. Air drops work nicely. Even if they don't its preferable than waiting for the convoy.
That said, I am relived that they are there (and got to the convention center specifically). When they finally get everyone evacuated, the stress of the situation will ease tremendously. I'm further heartened with the size of the response that came in. Exactly what was needed.
I won't bemoan them further for not getting there earlier. Results matter, not incriminations. I leave that for the unhinged left right now.
And I really hope they just go ahead and adopt a shoot first policy towards the roaming gangs of armed thugs who have been tearing NO apart.
Green Day hates americans.. so i wont expect any donations anytime soon.. hell Castro will pause for a moment of silence before Green Day will donate.. whoops Castro allready did have a moment of silence for the americans..
chevron donated 5 million bones and other oil companies have donated in the millions.
Shoot first and ask questions later. Hmm... it actually doesnt sound like a bad idea as far as the roving gangs. Let a bit of that happen and the lawlessness will rapidly settle down.
The govt is working as fast as they can to respond. How in the world does anyone think that hundreds of millions of pounds of medical supplies, mortuary supplies, food, k-rations, medicine by the pallet, etc. can just show up over freakin' night? NOW that the material and manpower is there... well, NOW is the time to SEE if action will speak louder than MERE WORDS... I BELIEVE IT WILL.
I am annoyed that more support wasn't provided before the convoys, but that is that. Moot point. And I'm not in NO, so those trapped there I will give WIDE latitude.
But this fool uses his up:
“Hell no, I’m not glad to see them. They should have been here days ago. I ain’t glad to see ’em, I’ll be glad when 100 buses show up,” said Michael Levy, whose words were echoed by those around him yelling, “Hell, yeah! Hell, yeah!”
“We’ve been sleeping on the ... ground like rats,” Levy said. “I say burn this whole ... city down.”
Nevermind that buses are coming in too. Like right behind the supplies, literally.
In the end we have a federalist form of government. The Feds will step in when asked.
Bottom line is Louisiana's government failed their residents. Any complaints about the federal government are just politicians trying to get the blame off their backs. A proper evacuation was not planned for this situation even though everyone said it was going to happen.
people under that kind of stress will say any number of things. if you think we're having a hard time understanding why it took so long, imagine what they are thinking....
The comments on this blog have migrated from the idiotic to the absurd. Congratulations, you're an embarrassment to intelligent discourse.
Bring back Loy, only he can stop this madness. Tell him to bring his hockey stick, er, staff. Go back to the Shadow! You - shall - not - pass!
I would like to rant ... but won't. This isn't the time.
I had to get away from the news and watched Troy (wow that sucked pretty much) last night. But there was a scene where Achilles is storming the beach of Troy with 50 soliders against thousands, while hundreds of ships are just getting there. At one point Ajax yells "row, row, there are Greeks dieing."
Well there are American dieing. Tens of thousands of people have lost their house, job, everything. And want to talk politics.
Not the time. There will time for that after people are safe.
A commenter named Robert Modean had this to say at Donald Sensing's blog, which I found very helpful:
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:24 pm
Disaster preparedness is the responsibility of State and Local authorities – in this case LEMA (The Louisiana Emergency Management Agency).
There is a state-wide director for disaster relief in every state – that person is called the Governor. There is a local director for disaster relief in every municipality – that person is called the Mayor.
FEMA is a coordinating body that assists State and Local authorities in getting the resources they need. Because they are the “go to” people most folks are under the impression that they are in charge, and in fact if the State and Local authorities abdicate control over a disaster area they will take over. Typically after the initial response to a disaster the local guys do just that, leave FEMA in control. That’s because they have the experience and personnel to manage disasters of this scale.
Disclosure: I’m a volunteer coordinator for MEMA (The Missouri Emergency Management Agency), I’ve been through three major floods and a few big storms that generated enough tornado damage to get the affected counties disaster relief – believe me when I tell you what we are seeing from FEMA now is lightyears ahead of what I’ve seen from them in the past.
Typically it took two to three days just to get the disaster declaration, then another two to three to get FEMA deployed – of course by then the local guys had been on the ground working around the clock for five or six days and we were more than happy to dump everything in FEMA’s lap.
That’s the way the system is designed. Bush saw that and tried to skip a few steps to speed things up, he pre-declared the areas disaster areas. So what we are seeing in NO is the result of a convergence of factors:
First, the storm damage was bad, but the flooding has made relief efforts ten times harder than anything they could have imagined.
Second, Mayor Nagin’s performance has been pathetic. This is the worst case of poor planning and criminal incompetence I’ve ever seen.
Like I said, Bush declared the gulf coast area a Federal Disaster area on Saturday – two days before Katrina hit. That freed up FEMA resources for local and state coordinators and allowed for the pre-positioning of supplies so they could be rapidly deployed to the affected areas.
Mayor Nagin waited until the last minute to call for an evacuation of the city, but the poorest people could not evacuate – why weren’t school busses used to get them out of town?
Mayor Nagin made the last minute decision to declare the Superdome and COnvention centers as refuge relocation points – why weren’t they stocked with water, food, bedding, generators, and fuel? Why weren’t hospitals offered additional resources by the Mayors office?
Mayor Nagin made the decision to allow looting and told the police to focus on Search and Rescue – but looting hinders S&R efforts (as we’ve seen) and no one I know could believe that decision – it’s emergency management 101, preserving order preserves life. There’s plenty of blame to go around – Blanco deserves her share too – but the real culprit in the aftermath here is Nagin.
Bring back Loy, only he can stop this madness. Tell him to bring his hockey stick, er, staff. Go back to the Shadow! You - shall - not - pass!
LOL! But if you wanted to go "Lord of the Rings" on us, you should have said "stay this madness" instead of "stop this madness." :)
It was surreal, watching this convoy arrive at the exact same time that the Congressional Black Caucus was berating President Bush. Talk about your bad timing! One congressman said "God won't be happy" with the response, and one congresswoman from Michigan bloviated that she was "ashamed to be an American." What I said to her televised image isn't printable her, and probably anatomically impossible in any case.
You one upped me with Gandalf. Bastard.
other commenters on the school buses...
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the physical suffering in New Orleans is of those who remained in the city notwithstanding what I understand to have been a mandatory evacuation order. Now, some stayed on purpose - that's one thing. But I'm willing to bet that the majority of those who stayed stayed because they had no way to get out of New Orleans - they didn't have a car or couldn't afford to drive it anywhere far enough out of town. (Also, although this isn't entirely predictable from a planning standpoint, poor people don't have money at the end of the month.)
So why didn't New Orleans (or any city) have a plan to use whatever transportation facilities (like, uh, buses) it had available to transport those who couldn't get out of town but who wanted to? That's something that can't be discounted as "armchair quarterbacking" or under the "we had no idea it would be this bad" excuse. If you are going to tell people to evacuate a place, you need to help those who can't evacuate get the hell out - and unlike the post-hurricane issues, the required resources are almost entirely predictable ahead of time - every city knows how many cars it has, how many residents are on welfare, etc.
Imagine how different the picture would be today if the only ones still in N.O. were those who had chosen to ride out the storm.
and...
I count 205 busses. When I was a kid, I remember that school busses could carry 66 people. If that is still the case, 13,530 people could be carried to safety in ONE trip using only the busses shown in that picture.
One trip.
Joe
Thank God! However, it may be too late. People are throwing around estimates of 10,000 dead and possibly higher. They may be pulling corpses out of buildings for months.
If the death toll is true this would be on par with a typhoon in Bangladesh. Whether Bush could have done more or not is now irrelevant. It will be his legacy regardless.
RE: Jesse Jackson
Just read this from here (http://www.lakatrina.com/)
Last night, Rev. Jesse Jackson took 10 buses and rescued 250 Xavier University students. On the way back, people on the interstate thought the buses were for them and formed human chains around them to try to stop them. They assured the people they would be back for them today and plan to go back in a few minutes.
Max - A) Its no too damn late. Not soon enough? Maybe, but too late would be if everyone died. Saying its too late means the people's lives who were saved by the convoy's arrival means little.
B) This will NOT be Bush's legacy. Sorry, but if anything Iraq and/or 9/11 will be, for good and/or for ill. This lame response was not his fault or doing. Following Kyoto wouldn't have prevented it (Kyoto compliance would have lowered temperatures by a fraction of a degree). Increased funding for levees wouldn't have prevented it (Army Corps of Engineers have specifically said the 17th St levee was a concrete barrier which had been recently upgraded and compeleted as part of an ongoing project.
In short, the real fault of the issue is with the local, and some state, government. No evacuation routes or plans. No transportation for the poor, infirm, or elderly. No evacuation plans from the Superdome. Only 24 hrs given for mandatory evacuation.
The only thing I would fault the feds with is FEMA not taking the situation serious enough and not taking extreme measures on Thursday and when needed, if only to prevent the situation from deteriorating further until the convoys arrives. And this is minor compared to the stunning lack of foresight by the local gov.
Sorry, Schmoe. This will be Bush's legacy. Like it or not. This is Bush's Jimmy Carter moment. If you don't like Bush, he is incompetent. If you do like Bush, he is a victim of circumstances. Either way, he will ultimately take the blame.
Do you REALLY think anyone will remember who was the Mayor of New Orleans or the Governor of Louisiana in 20 years? You know what they will remember (and be reminded of EVERY hurricane season by weather casters?) Katrina...the deaths associated with Katrina...and, by association, the President at the time.
EVERY PRESIDENT from now on will be judged by his or her reaction to a major hurricane. Don't be Dubya will be on every Presidential advisors' lips. Be Clinton. Or Giuliani. But DON'T be DUBYA.
The last time we had a major disaster like this was in the early 1900s, before there was a FEMA, a Federal role in disaster response, television media and the Internet. These things are all here now, hanging like an albatross around Bush's legacy.
I gotta agree with this last comment, though I feel like Nagin has sort of redeemed himself a bit by freaking out and begging for aid. I'm sure I'll get flamed.
I was talking about Schmoe's comment (that I agreed with)
Why didn't Nagin use those flooded buses pictured on Drudge to evacuate people. The Mayor really flubbed it up.
Leslie. Still drinking the Koolaid, eh?
Sorry to hear it. If you are a Bush apologist at this point you are either employed by the RNC or are in need of a serious mental evaluation.
Whatever the results in the short run
with New Orleans, I hope that FEMA and
other planners are taking notes for the future. There are certain inexonerable laws of dynamics and mass movmement. If you don't have a surplus of capacity, you don't have enough. If you don't have enough, whatever you have is going to get overburdened and swamped. The momentum of a failure builds very very quickly and has dire consequences when human lives are involved, most can survive for 3 plus days without water, and some five days with out food, but after that, expect severe mortality.
No matter what the place, location, regional landscape or weather, if we are going to be able to cope with major events such as this, either natural or caused by human acts of war or accident, we will have to have realistic disaster mobilization plans and plans of what to do with the people afterwards. These hundreds of thousands of people will need a chance to have a meaningful life, so I would suggest something like the Peace Corps, maybe called the Urban Corps, which can employ people in helping restore and rebuild, as the CCC did in the 1930's. Get out the history books FEMA and Fed guys, and get working on something fast. If these people have something useful and worthwhile to do with the next six months to two years, it will be far better than civil unrest which may well arise from all these umemployed and homeless folks scattered across the South.
Take heed or face the consequences,
there is still time to really prepare for a good future.
Hmmmm ...
Albus Loy ?
(Loy the White ?)
Nahhhhh ...
Mad Max.
You're right. All I can remember from Hurricane Andrew was who was President. (Wait, no I didn't, had to look up what year that was).
You are a total moron. Keep on blabbing, I can use the entertainment as a distraction from my sorrow at the loss of life.
And as someone posted earlier, you do need to get a life.
What i want to know is why so many cars were flooded on the streets of new orleans?? Shouldn't people have driven them, say out of the city to safer ground???
It was surreal, watching this convoy arrive at the exact same time that the Congressional Black Caucus was berating President Bush.
Surreal? I bet Karl Rove thought it was AWESOME. :)
You one upped me with Gandalf. Bastard.
Don't get into a Tolkien pissing contest with me, Leahy. You're doomed. I'll bust out references to the Valar and Melkor and Beren and Luthien and Ungoliant. Trust me on this. :)
Schmoe, I think it is downright foolish to believe that this will not be a substantial part of Bush's legacy, for good or ill. Well, I suppose it can't really be "good," but perhaps I should say "for adequate or ill." This is an event of historic proportions; how could it NOT be part of Bush's legacy? Moreover, I have a feeling that, if the general perception that the response has been inadequate grows (which, remember, is a separate question from whether the response has actually been inadequate; perception is reality in politics), the anger over that will merge with the growing dissatisfaction over the war in Iraq (which I support, BTW, so don't accuse me of being a crazy liberal just because I'm saying this), and Bush's last 3 years in office could easily become an absolute fiasco. Because, of course, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will continue -- and will remain a major news story and a major federal expense and ongoin issue -- for the rest of Bush's presidency and on into the next one.
P.S. Andy, whether you realized it or not, it is widely accepted in political circles that the perceived-as-inadequate response to your namesake hurricane in 1992 had a very serious negative impact on President Bush in that November's election.
However, your analogy is faulty anyway, because KATRINA IS NOT ANDREW. Katrina is like nothing any of us have ever lived through. Again, the only comparable events are Galveston '00 and San Francisco '06. And then it's not even comparable to those, because that was before the age of mass media, so there was really no such thing as a "national tragedy" back then. We couldn't all be simultaneously traumatized by the horrors that we happening in a single city, like we can now. So this is, by leaps and bounds, the single most traumatic natural disaster in American history. It will therefore inevitably affect the president's legacy much more than any natural disaster in living memory. (Who was president in 1900 and 1906, you ask? Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head, either. But, as I said, that was before the mass media, so there was no such thing as a true "national tragedy." This is a totally unprecedented situation in that regard.)
Brendan.. I think JFK's assasination or Pearl Harbor could top this if you think of them as national tragedies? But I agree this is by a long shot the single largest national disaster in American history even if the death toll ends up being less than others in the past.
Tolkien pissing contest? I wouldn't dare. I take great pride in the fact that I read those books in middle school, enjoyed them, then never thought about them again until the movie came out.
It's very hard for me to engage in that type of obsessive hobbying, as I've got my harem to attend to. I suppose you could call that a hobby, but I prefer to think of it as a sex addiction.
McKinley! For christ's sake, he got whacked! That doesn't happen often. Teddy Roosevelt replaced him, you bleeping idiots! Speak softly, carry a big stick? Bueller? Cripes.
The youth of today.
Andy-
10,000 people didn't die because of Andrew.
Max:
You nearly brained a helpless handicapped guy inside a hemispheric steel cage. Who are you to judge?
As a foreigner its totaly uninteresting if the republicans or the democrats got the bigger balls or overperforming with incompetence.
The only important things are:
-what can be done to improve the situation
-what can we all learn about this crisis to perform better next time
Of course we can continue with funny political discussion here.
Coah Leahy-
Which one is the handicapped guy in the wheelchair. Andy or Schmoe?
Sascha-
As much as I would like to think President Bush and Michael Brown are reading this blog to get ideas about how to fix the situation, the chances are Bush is listening to Rove about which photo-op he should do next. I guess we'll have to stick with the political discussion for the time being, though I am glad people are actually getting help now.
Sascha,
while I agree that the most important thing for some is to deal with the current crisis, learning from this crisis is exactly why we are having these political discussions.
It is important to realize where mistakes were made and by whom, especially if they were preventable mistakes as was the case here.
Andy
Ask former President Bush about legacies. Even though his handling of the first Iraq war was superb, people remembered the economic downturn of the later half of his Presidency when it came to election time. Fair or not people remember what happens more recently.
Bush W. handled 9/11 for the most part, extremely well. The Iraq War has been a mess and the people are starting to wake up to this, and the public perception of the gov't handling of Katrina is also very negative. Depending on how Bush handles things in the long run, it might help, but I have a feeling the chaos that ensued in the short run will be what sticks in peoples minds the most.
Max, neither, its Leahy who is the brain dead one.
Mad Max, David,
partly I disagree with both of you, because at some place it might be useful to collect the informations what happens to all those evacs (in the long term).
Additionally we could enter a non political discussion, because , to me, it seems that most mistakes belongs to persons faults, misorganisation, useless plans, missing leadership, unclear allocation of responsibilities. And not at all whether it belongs to reps or democrats.
You now what I mean ?
says the guy who's blood has long rushed out of his head to feed the massive bush-rocket under his skirt.
Sascha, i have laid the blame at the feet of both Dems and Repubs as the case may be, so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
Leahy, what are you, 12?
Sascha, i have laid the blame at the feet of both Dems and Repubs as the case may be, so I'm not sure what you are getting at.
Leahy, what are you, 12?
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