Redstate

and so are you, vadum, for trying to spin such an important issue for political purposes.  Previously, I have warned that both sides of our electoral battlefield would try to appropriate this disaster as a political weapon. Sadly, I am being proved right daily.

To call Mayor Nagin "an incompetent buffoon" is not argument, it is invective. You claim that Nagin "refused to use school buses available to him to evacuate residents," and you link to a poorly reasoned Newsmax story to prove your point. I have already debunked this claim elsewhere, but just for the record, let's look at the text of Mayor Nagin's remarks as provided by Newsmax:

"I need 500 buses, man," he told WWL. "One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here."

Nagin described his response:

"I'm like - you've got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."

Newsmax spins these remarks as Nagin's unwillingness to employ the public school buses he had at his disposal. To put it gently, that interpretation is crap. It was not the quality of buses Nagin was talking about at all, it was the speed at which the bus DRIVERS could be dispatched to New Orleans.

I happen to think that his request for Greyhound buses was unrealistic, since such a request would have involved appropriating most of the Greyhound fleet, which was spread out throughout the country at the time. But to say that Nagin's request was impractical is one thing. To say that he shirked his responsibility as Mayor to provide for the safe evacuation of his people is sick rhetoric. At the time when Nagin made the remarks quoted by Newsmax, that famous fleet of schoolbuses we've seen so many pictures of, was already waterlogged. Also for the record, I'm certain Mayor Nagin would have employed those buses if bus drivers had been available. But in the crush of people trying to get out of New Orleans on Sunday before the storm hit, do you really think he was able to find all of his bus drivers? Moreover, many people who were given the opportunity to leave New Orleans on city buses refused to go, and many still refuse to leave even now.

Of all the accusations I've heard against Mayor Nagin, the only one that sticks is that he could have ordered the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans earlier than he did. On the other hand, the mandatory evacuation he did order was the first time any such measure had ever been taken in the entire history of the city.  And it is no simple thing to move 500,000 people.  Let's say the Hurricane had suddenly changed course. Nagin's critics would then be saying he disturbed the tranquility and economy of New Orleans for no good reason.

One last point: you are mostly correct about the New Orleans PD. Before their city was obliterated the NOPD were the most corrupt, abusive, and incompetent police force in the country.  It is no surprise they fell apart. But the NOPD has been that way for decades, and in his three years as Mayor Nagin tried desperately to reform them. They are not, strictly speaking, Nagin's police force. They are a problem handed down to successive NO Mayors for years.

...I am not attempting to "spin" anything. I have written that the response to Katrina is a failure of all three levels of government.

However, dealing with a disaster is the primary responsibility of first-responders at the local level. Mayor Nagin could have taken steps to mitigate the impact of the disaster and he failed to do so.

Your interpretation of the Nagin interview is selective and self-serving.

took steps to mitigate this disaster, as did President Bush, and Governor Blanco.  The fact that what they did was not enough should be cause for serious reflection about how to reform our disaster response policies in the future.  It should not be an excuse for personal invective.

And on that topic, the only one doing any name-calling is you (re: "incompetent buffoon").  I did call you pathetic, which is not a name but an adjective, and an accurate one at that. And my interpretation of the Nagin interview was merely a plain reading of the text.  No one reading the Newsmax article without a jaundiced eye could fail to see how badly they were distorting his words.

BTW, like many in South Louisiana today, I regard Nagin as a tragic figure. He is a conscientious public servant who did as much as was in his power to curve crime and corruption in his city. He imprisoned his own cousin on corruption charges, and he was constantly at odds with the local government he was trying to reform, including the NOPD. And then ... he saw it all washed away.  It takes real chutzpa to spit on a man like that when he's down.

 

That was a well written and thoughtful post.

I think your point about drivers is well taken.  Without a doubt there will be some criticism at all levels.  I think what mucks up these discussions is the intense pressure to protect one party or the other.

From my point of view, I don't vote for the governor or the mayor.  However, I would like their roles to be further flushed out.  Just as you do.

I do vote for the President as the CEO of the country.  Any errors by the locals won't mitigate in my mind that FEMA had the ball.  I think they fumbled it.  

I still don't know what role the President played.  I will be watching and hope that is also flushed out.

Obvious to me, an independent commision will be the best way to do this.  I hope we get bi-partisan support for that effort.

imho,

Stanford

Although your reflexive adjective-hurling and your dogged, emotional defense of Nagin ("It takes real chutzpa to spit on a man like that when he's down.") makes me want to question your motives, I will resist the temptation to do so and simply respond to your arguments.

But first let me point out that I do not care about any personal tragedies that may have befallen the mayor. I do not care about his intentions, however noble or high-minded. I care only about his actions.

The fact remains that before the levee broke, he had school buses. He had them but he did not use them. He did not even try to use them.

I also agree with Bob Williams' criticism of Nagin and Blanco that appears in the WSJ a few days ago, link here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007219

Certainly the federal government and FEMA in particular have a lot to answer for and I question whether Bush will have the balls to fire those who deserve it, but disaster-response is, at least initially, a local responsibility.

As Williams argues:

"The actions and inactions of Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin are a national disgrace due to their failure to implement the previously established evacuation plans of the state and city. Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin cannot claim that they were surprised by the extent of the damage and the need to evacuate so many people. Detailed written plans were already in place to evacuate more than a million people. The plans projected that 300,000 people would need transportation in the event of a hurricane like Katrina. If the plans had been implemented, thousands of lives would likely have been saved."

Moreover, confiscating lawfully owned firearms from law-abiding citizens rendering them defenseless against looters and thugs -especially in the post-hurricane hellhole that New Orleans has become-- is unconscionable and despotic. Nagin should be ashamed of himself.

BTW, other readers, the transcript of the much-cited radio interview Nagin did may be found at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/02/nagin.transcript/index.html

I refuse to believe that the reason the Mayor didn't use the schoolbuses was because there was nobody who could drive them.  C'mon, I've driven a 25-foot 6-speed manual transmission moving truck before; a schoolbus can't be much harder to drive than that.  It smells like an excuse to me.

I think the bus driver thing is a bit of a cop-out. Obviously the ideal situation would be for the buses to be driven by their normal staff, school system employees. These people are not normally considered 'first responders' so I wouldn't be surprised if they, understandably,  either evacuated or 'hunkered down' with their families. And there was a story over the weekend that on top of all of this the New Orleans school system was already in trouble independent of the storm --- they had no idea how many employees they actually had!

But quite aside from all of this, the situation was an emergency. I find it hard to believe that out of 100,000 or so people they couldn't find a few hundred capable of driving a bus. Random probability says there were probably that many people who know how to drive a truck among the evacuees. And if your life depends on it you can something learn very quickly.

No, the system fell apart from bad management long before the storm. The buses are only the tip of the iceberg. They had a comprehensive plan and didn't excute much if any of it. I love New Orleans but laissez le bonne temps roulez is not a disaster plan.

Go google

Re: "The fact remains that before the levees broke he had school buses."

No kidding? And before the levees broke he didn't exactly know the levees were going to break, now did he? That's practically the same chronological fallacy people use against President Bush when they say he was late leaving Texas.  The levees broke on Tuesday, the day AFTER the storm hit, and Bush left on Tuesday. Before Tuesday neither Nagin nor Bush knew what was going to happen to the levees, and as a matter of fact, around here the word was out on late Monday that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet" and would not have to be evacuated. It was only on Tuesday that we heard differently.

Oh, and by the way, if I sound "dogged" and "emotional" to you, it's because I'm sick of hearing people use dead bodies as rhetorical props, especially since I've actually seen a few of those bodies. For the record, my original post was only intended as a defense of Nagin, not Blanco, who I have criticized elsewhere.

He had those same buses available 3 days before when he was dithering about evacuating the city while a category 5 hurricane was being forecast to hit the city square on.  That's when they should have been being used.  New Orleans still got very lucky that Katrina didn't hit the city with full force, or else the disaster would have been several times worse-- imagine if the Mississippi levees had broken or been destroyed; the water levels would have been 12 feet higher, 99% of the city would have been submerged instead of 80%, and probably nearly everyone that gathered in the Superdome for refuge would have perished.

Yeah, he had buses, but.. send them where?

Evacuation requires two things: an origin and a terminus.  Nagin only has jurisdiction on the origin - that is the built-in limitation of local government.  Without a concrete end point - and the state of Louisiana alone is not equipped to deal with that many evacuees - there was nowhere to send those buses.  This is the long-standing fault of the local, state, and federal government's inability to cooperate to develop a plan.

You may think that's no big deal, but imagine if he had loaded those buses, and said simply "drive."  Then what?  Sleep on the side of the highway, with no food or water?  

People would be calling Nagin an incompetent mayor... oh, wait.

The Superdome was a safer bet, all around.  Not the best place, but in lieu of a more well-organized plan, it was a lose-lose situation.

They would have been better off by the side of the highway than they would have been in the Superdome.  No food or water?  As opposed to the vast quantities of both they had at the Superdome?  And the sanitary conditions would certainly have not been any worse than they were in the Superdome, where people were stepping in excrement because none of the toilets worked.

At least the Red Cross would have been able to get to them there.  It wouldn't have been a great solution, but I'll bet no one would have committed suicide.

not allowing relief supplies into the Superdome because they wanted the people out I don't think the  "terminus" problem is much more than a pretty feeble strawman unless you're aruging those buses would be some latter-day Flying Dutchmen driving forever because no one told them to stop somewhere.

that doesn't address the argument I'm making.  Nagin does not have the jurisdiction to organize any kind of relief efforts outside the city - so he had to choose between

- putting people on buses, crossing his fingers, and hoping someone else would deal with them

or

- keeping people in the Superdome, where relief efforts could be centered in one place.

It's not an easy decision, and maybe there were better solutions - but this is hardly incompetency.    

is no substitute for an argument.  An evacuation of an entire metro area cannot be accomplished by the local government alone, especially when a chunk of that population has no means.  

That's where both state and federal government are supposed to come in.  But it's easier to get others involved after the fact (no WAY Houston was going to give up its Astrodome if it didn't have to!).  Hindsight is ...

this may surprise you (or not), but Nagin is going to be considered a local hero - or at the very least, a tragic figure - after this washes over, both by liberals and conservatives in the metro area.  People on both sides love him, and people will defend him.

• The decline into lawlessness was a result of a difficult, but correct decision on the part of Nagin to keep his resources aimed at search-and-rescue missions.  Given a less desperate situation, he may have channeled people into keeping order, but when you have thousands trapped on roofs, you have to make those choices.  The result was lamentable, but can hardly be chalked up to any incompetence on his part.  And those rescued from rooftops are happier for it.
• the buses argument is incorrect, for a number of reasons: first, you (or rather, the link you posted) frame his comments as if he wanted "fancier, more comfortable" buses.  Listen to the interview again.  He is clearly reacting to what he considers too few resources: he says to comandeer the whole Greyhound fleet because he needs them all.  It has nothing to do with "comfort," which is painfully obvious in the interview, but taken totally out of context. Second, see my comments already on this discussion board about the inability of Nagin to send buses without shelters ready and waiting.  He had no choice, and no ability to send anyone anywhere, until after the hurricane, and shelters were opened.  Pinning first response duty on him is fine, but his jurisdiction does not go beyond the city.  He could not create places for those evacuees to be sent, and had no choice but to keep them there if they could not evacuate on their own.

What this amounts to is less any particular level of incompetency from Nagin, or Bush (I won't speak of Blanco - she's going to have a lot of explaining to do; Louisiana dropped the ball as much as FEMA) as an inability for all these levels of government to cooperate when they desperately needed to.  As I posted in a different board: heads will roll to appease the angry masses, but with more time and distance, this will be blamed on ineffeciencies and miscommunications in our bureaucracy.

And, I can pretty much guarantee that Leverkuhn is right when he says that the eventual historical portrait of Nagin is going to be highly sympathetic.

you are the one who hasn't made an argument beyond leaving people without food, water, sanitation, or police protection in the Superdome.

The evacuation plan for New Orleans calls for those unable to self-evacuate to be evacuated by the city government. Presumably they thought through the "origin and terminus" conundrum at some point.

Your assertion that because you don't know where the drivers would or could have stopped they wouldn't or couldn't have stopped is ridiculous.

my assertion that scenario A (people will have shelter, although unsure about how long supplies will last) is better than scenario B (people will have no shelter, no supplies) is ridiculous?

And you're right, the origin/terminus issue should have come up before: in cooperation with local, state, and federal government.  No one branch is capable of developing that kind of plan, period.

municipalities do that kind of planning... all alone all the time. In fact, the New Orleans plan was developed by Innovative Emergency Management under a contract.

...or maybe N.O. just ignored the reccomendations they paid for?

A municipality can, say, send 10,000 people to the Houston astrodome?

I've read Louisiana's emergency planning procedures.  The fact is, there was no conception of what to do with an actual forced evacuation - nor is there in any major city, as far as I know.  Should Louisiana have been more prepared?  Most definitely.  They knew it was coming, eventually.  Is this a sign of Nagin's incompetency?  Not in the least.  He made the choices he had to make, some have turned out for the better, some for the worse.  

Where did you get it?

1. No one is discussing NO sending people to the Astrodome. We are talking about evacuating them from the city. Of course the state would have some say in where they went, but the city had the repsonsibility to evacuate them.
   
2. No one is discussing a forced evacuation, just the evacuation of the people who made their way to the city shelters.

If the failure of the city to follow the city's own emergency management and evacuation plan isn't joint and several incompetence then no one has the right to claim that anyone or anything anywhere is incompetent.

municipalities do that kind of planning... all alone all the time

The contract in question was from DHS/FEMA, no?

As we look for people to blame, let's not forget these nice folks.

From the $ amount quoted I'm guessing that it was part of the the post 9-11 terrorism response planning money and I suspect it was directly appropriated to Louisiana.

But even were it from DHS/FEMA that doesn't change the point. The contractors that develop these plans do so under the direction of the city emergency management agency (NO has a standalone emergency management agency as do most cities). So while the contractor provides labor and expertise the plan is developed by the city.

Nagin had an obligation to make sure that when he sent folks to the Superdome that there was food, water, sanitation, and security.  This wasn't his first hurricane, this wasn't the first time he'd experienced a breakdown in public order. They had Ivan, they knew they were inadequate, and still they failed to do an adequate job.

It is not leadership to say 'go here and I'll be the one to cry loudly for help'

He was told that he had to have a plan for at least 3 days of survival, no matter what.  Every mayor is told that, every governor, every citizen.  FEMA, DHS, will try as hard as possible to get where they are needed (not always effectively, not always efficiently, and they need to improve) but they cannot be the first responders.  It just won't ever work.

Why do we have state and local governments if not to do the basic functions?  At this point it sounds like some would rather have military districts instead of reprsentative democracy so that we can, justifiably, blame the Feds if anything ever goes wrong.

Personally I like voting for my leaders and holding them to account.

say that they shouldn't be blamed? But, of course, we don't really know what Gretna's emergency management plan calls for either.

His responsibilities were limited to holing up in a hotel room and ranting on the radio.

but I'd not read of it before your post and I appreciated it.

It calls into question whether municipalities in Louisiana and elsewhere coordinate their emergency management plans.

During the first Gulf War we found that the aircraft tasked in operations plans to airlift troops and equipment had also been tasked to do other things at the same time.

That is what eventually happened.  Houston opened the shelter, New Orleans had somewhere to send people.  But this was only possible after the fact.  There is no mechanism in place for accepting evacuees before a storm hits, and that mechanism cannot be the responsibility of a local government with no jurisdiction to operate.

So yes, we are discussing sending people to the Astrodome, because evacuees don't stop needing support once they leave the city.  

You have this nice little setup where the city puts people on buses and has fulfilled its legal duties.  Hardly.  My contention, from the very beginning, is that this speaks of an inability of local, state, and federal governments to problem-solve.  Ah, but you just see straw men.  Smooth, well-oiled world you must live in.

I just live in reality where people actually do things.

The two strawmen you constructed but have so quickly abandoned:

1- That people evacuated from the Superdome had no place to go. Ridiculous on its face as we know there was a plan to provide buses for the evacuation of those without the means to self-evacuation.

2- Switching the subject from evacuation, ordered by Nagin on Saturday, effective Sunday, to forced evacuation which Blanco said he is not authorized to order.

You also inhabit a world, it would seem, where if you don't know it, it doesn't exist. From you writing I'd be willing to hazard a guess that you couldn't pick an emergency management plan out of a line up.

I haven't switched the subject to forced evacuation at all - where are you getting this from?  The comments about the Astrodome?  It's called "having a place to send evacuees," which is the flaw in Louisiana's emergency evacuation plan - if you bother reading it.  To evacuate a city the size of New Orleans requires a lot more than hoping for a Red Cross shelter or two somewhere on the highway.  You're dodging this point completely.

I bring up the Astrodome because that is precisely the type of large-scale shelter that is needed for an evacuation to take place.  Note: not forced evacuation.  Organizing something like this is beyond the jurisdiction of the local government, no matter what you may think.

By the way, a priceless attempt at ad hominem gone wrong:  

From you [sic!] writing I'd be willing to hazard a guess that you couldn't pick an emergency management plan out of a line up.

I'd resisted the urge to correct your spelling in the past, on the grounds that it lowers the level of discussion.  But if you insist...

zip.

You have made a series of profoundly stupid assertions that you cannot possibly back up (no "terminus" for buses, what a idiotic statement) and then you dodge them.

The destination for the people in NO was not the Astrodome, it was somewhere that had food, water, sanitation, medical care, etc. That location, in this one case, happened to be in Houston.

And I will match my typo against your ignorance anyday.

I missed the signposts on I-10 that read "food, water, sanitation, medical care for at least 10,000 people - this way."  

I had no idea it was idiotic to suggest that, if you pack people on buses, you should have somewhere to send them.  

Terminus, by the way (since you put it in quotes, implying that the word is either incorrect or poorly chosen, and then follow with "what a [sic] idiotic statement") means "An end point on a transportation line or the town in which it is located."

Just so we're on the same page, and all.

I missed the signposts on I-10 that read "food, water, sanitation, medical care for at least 10,000 people - this way."  

... the folks in New Orleans would have been better off if they had been taken by bus to a cotton field in East Texas and let off by the side of the road.

and by "the basics" I mean Archimedean hydrostatics.

Re: "New Orleans still got very lucky that Katrina didn't hit the city with full force ... the water levels would have been 12 feet higher, 99% of the city would have been submerged instead of 80%.

For the record, what you suggest is impossible.  The water level in New Orleans continued to rise until the water level in the city was the same as neighboring Lake Pontchartrain.

...but Lake Ponchatrain is subject to storm surge, raising the effective sea level during the storm... (that's not what happened, but for accuracy's sake I comment)

I'm not using dead bodies as props, as you put it. I'm calling the situation as I see it.

the storm surge helped to overpower the levees.  But after the storm the sea level receded (as you would expect), thus the amount of water let in by the sea was enough to bring water levels in the New Orleans "bowl" up to the level of surrounding waters.

:)