First off, I do not mean to denigrate those in New Orleans who did their jobs in the midst of total anarchy. The doctors, nurses, police, and others who stayed on the job are the heroes of Katrina. Especially the police who tried to control the anarchy when many of their fellow officers either left or joined in the looting.
But as to the rest...
Ok, New Orleans clearly could not handle a disaster of this magnitude by itself. But while Mayor Nagin was quick to call for Federal help, that was all he did. Why not tell people to hot wire any school bus they could find, drive it to the superdome or convention center, and then drive people out? And this is just one example. Yet he did nothing but ask for help. (I did appreciate his suggestion that there be no more press conferences until help started arriving.)
And Louisiana could clearly not handle it by itself. But again, why didn't the governor grab all semi-trailers in the state, load them up at every food warehouse, and truck food and water in to New Orleans? And again, so much more than this could have been done. The fact that Louisiana has a very corrupt and inefficient government is no excuse. It may be an explanation, but it is no excuse.
And then we come to the feds. The federally government was totally out of touch. At least in Louisiana. while they were doing nothing, were aware of the scale of the damage. At the federal level they spent the first couple of days congratulating each other on how well it was being handled while doing nothing. Just some examples:
- FEMA found out about the 15,000 - 20,000 people at the convention center by watching CNN. I can understand CNN discovering a stranded family FEMA doesn't know about - but 15,000 people?
- An Air Force unit called and called for over 24 hours before they finally got permission to send in helicopters to assist in rescues.
- The Secretary of Homeland Security said that this was totally unforeseen - when the federal government had run a large simulation of exactly this type of hurricane hitting New Orleans. Basically everything happened as predicted in the simulation.
The U.S. responded quicker to the tsunami than to Katrina. Yet the tsunami was half way around the world and there was no advance warning. (The reaction to the tsunami shows what the military can do when given permission to help.)
What we had was a total freeze at all levels of government. And the only explanation I can see for this is rank incompetence. You hear numerous politicians saying we need to wait to determine what went wrong and then "take appropriate action."
I totally disagree. We need to fire the obviously incompetent today. Not tomorrow, not next month - today. Because we need competent leadership immediately to start rebuilding. If we keep someone like Michael Brown in charge of FEMA now, while FEMA remains critical to the recovery efforts, we insure that reconstruction will be as slow and badly implemented as possible.
And it's not just Michael Brown. It's every person who should have done something, anything, and instead sat on their ass or just asked others for help. But Michael Brown is a great place to start.
Update:
There were buses - tons of buses. Take a look at http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/18976/
