mentalblog.com comments:
Well, one of his claims has been confirmed - sort of. He said that WalMart had sent a shipment of water to Jefferson Parish, and that FEMA had turned it back. Well, as it happens, "turned it back" was not accurate, since it implies that they sent the water back to WalMart. What really happened is that FEMA diverted the water to somewhere they thought needed it more. This is confirmed by WalMart.
From FEMA's point of view, what they did may have made sense; they may have known what the need for water was in Jefferson, and what it was elsewhere, and decided that it should go elsewhere. But from Broussard's point of view, he was expecting the water to arrive, and suddenly FEMA is sending it away, and saying he doesn't need it. I don't blame him for complaining. And I'm not sure that FEMA, or anyone else, should be taking resources from one person and giving them to another.
In any case, that's one of his claims confirmed. He had a similar story about a fuel shipment that the Coast Guard told him to come pick up, and when his people got there, they found that FEMA had given it to someone else. While I have not seen any confirmation of this story, it makes sense, and may very well be true.
His third claim was that FEMA had cut his communication lines. I have seen no confirmation of this claim, and I can't think of any reason why FEMA would want to do that. Since we now know that his memory of events is seriously unreliable, I see no reason to believe this story. Maybe his phone broke down, and he thought FEMA had cut it.
Thank you Milhouse for your thoughtful additional correction.
The most important point remains, nevertheless, that Aaron Broussard's mendacious story got tons of media play because he maintained that a colleague's mother had died in a nursing home after telephoning her son for days and days while help still hadn't arrived. And when the dust settled, it was shown that she had died (with all of the other residents of the nursing home -- whose operators had decided deliberately to ignore the order to evacuate) at the time of the first flooding, and that the rest of the story was a figment of Aaron Broussard's imagination.
Her death simply can not be laid to FEMA.
The other items you mention are typical of what von Clausewitz described as "friction" in war -- the inevitable consequence of the confusion of horrific, rapidly changing events and the mistakes that are made in the heat of battle when confronting them.
Perhaps the confusion and horror of the hurricane and flood provide one reason why trained military men and women -- trained to operate cooly and rationally in just such confused and even bewildering conditions -- seem to have performed so well.
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