Apparently the FEMA director Michael Brown thinks the victims are partly to blame.
OK, OK: Yes, if you didn’t get the hell out of New Orleans if you could, then maybe you bear some responsibility. Folks who wanted to “ride out the storm” or thought it “couldn’t happen here” were asking to be proved stupid.
However, given the various discussions about those who may have not had the ability to leave, or had strong disincentives to do so — like simply being too poor — I think his comments are somewhat heartless. As any fool who realizes he made an oops, Brown qualified his statements:
“I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans.” he said.“And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.”
I think Brendan would strongly disagree: the evacuation order came late; no efforts to provide for evacuees who lacked transportation for the mandatory evacuation were made; and the city failed to prepare for the inevitable despite the direst of warnings. After given a bit of a workover by CNN reporters, Brown admitted that “Now is not the time to be blaming,” despite the fact that he had done precisely that.
Brian (Briandot)
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Categories: Hurricane Katrina
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September 2nd, 2005 at 12:43:49 am
Could someone explain why guests (other than media and recovery staff) were in downtown hotels for the storm?
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:47:46 am
The vast majority had to stay because flights out were full and all the rental cars were rented. But, that being said, there are always a few idiot tourists who think it’s a great adventure to ride out a storm.
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:53:33 am
This Brown is an interesting fellow. I know very little about emergency management and its challenges, but I was confused by this Brown quote from another CNN article:
“We’re finding more and more people coming out of the woodwork,” Brown said. “They’re appearing in places we didn’t know they existed.”
Huh?
This thought pops to mind: “Which places had you ruled out having people, Director?”
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:57:38 am
Speaking of tourists, I find it interesting that certain hotel companies have been able to evacuate their guests by helicopter (e.g. Hilton) while others have not (e.g. Marriott/Ritz).
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:01:16 am
To my other post on this subject, what about the white people in Biloxi and Gulfport who haven’t had food and water for four days? Does Mr. Brown blame them also? Or are Blue States (Louisiana) guilty of being stupid while Red States (Mississippi)are innocent victims of this terrible tragedy.
This is the time for blame. Mr. Brown should resign IMMEDIATELY and let Rudy take over.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:03:12 am
The best part about your tourist post is that the hotels also turned away non-guests, even though they had room in the buses that they sent out. I hope we can get a definitive list of the hotels who did this and turn them over to the NAACP and Jesse Jackson for a nice boycott.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:10:11 am
my brother ended his driving around the south vacation with a planned weekend stay in his NO condo, then flying home here to CA on sunday. He flew into NO Saturday???? At one point Sat (after arriving) into flying home that night. They called the airlines and there were still flights out, utilately 2 hours later no flights. they so lucked out by findig litterally the last rental sometime on sunday. 14 hrs to houston.
the point is, a little odd that that tourist were flying in at a point the mayor was asking for evacuation?
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:13:34 am
Imagining the inevitable, incomprehensible “Presidential Medal of Freedom” ceremony for FEMA Director Michael Brown (say, about 12 months out), the most impossible implication of this catastrophe floats to my mind.
Yeah of all the crazy things resulting from the last week, here is the craziest:
President Hillary Clinton
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:13:40 am
I have to wonder- look at the magnitude of the task of moving 10,000 to 20,000 people from the Superdome- and that only roughly a 5th of the estimated 100,000 people that didn’t evacuate… I don’t see how it would have been possible to evacuate all of them in the (questionably) small amount of time in which the storm was a known threat.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:21:51 am
Ben,
The reason moving the remaining people is so bad right now are that:
1. The entire city is flooded
2. Many of the bridges out of the city are impassable
3. There’s damage in 3 of the 4 directions right now, so moving west is the only option
BEFORE the storm, it would have made sense to evacuate people north to Jackson, Memphis, Tupelo, Meridian, or other cities thought to be safely out of Katrina’s path.
Now they’re basically driving 8-10 hours to Texas and burning out each city’s resources one at a time when, before, they could have divided these people into several directions and possibly found shelter for them.
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:22:57 am
by the by, those who were complaining of the blue state red state treatment of Brown…take heed on your own blue state efforts..check out this lefty blogger telling his comrades not to donate relief to hurricane ravaged red states! So much for bleeding hearts
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001782.htm
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:31:36 am
Hey, peapies-
There’s a difference between a stupid, harmless blogger playing politics and the appointed HEAD OF F’ING FEMA playing politics in the middle of a f’ing disaster HE has failed to plan for or respond to!
September 2nd, 2005 at 1:40:37 am
Is not declaration of mandatory evacuation meaningless in the case of most old, infirmed, or the indigent without resources to leave? When evacuation is ordered, wouldnÃt it make sense to get the buses moving immediately, without waiting for disaster to strike?
This was the major mistake that authorities made. One of the first pictures Anderson Cooper of CNN showed was of hundreds of school buses sitting in a lot flooded up to their windows. Using them for evacuation would have saved lives and the buses. However, most of the people we are seeing on TV now would not have left anyhow, even if the buses had been mobilized. What part of “mandatory evacuation” did they not understand?–that they were in a fish bowl that was about to be filled up? Were there just too many false alarms in the past?
What we are seeing now are dead people griping……and looting. These folks are lucky to be alive. If Katrina had not turned north, New Orleans would have been destroyed just like the Mississippi Gulf Coast was by the same tidal surge. With that 20-30 foot surge coming into the Lake, it would have come over the levee so fast that those that are now being rescued from their roofs would have drowned before they could get to the roof and the city would all be completely under water. The super doom roof would have been blown off and the bottom flooded.
Surely there are 100’s of people that die every day in NO, especially the ones in hospitals and nursing homes that were there because they were in bad shape in the first place. Of course, this type of strain would add to their plight. The fact that the MSM would try to play this up is disgraceful.
FEMA, the Red Cross, and others have definitely been slow to respond. This could be because there is only one way to get into the city from the west and because they have been concentrating on search and rescue operations. Law and Order was bound to break down due to the history of crime in the city.
September 2nd, 2005 at 2:06:40 am
I don’t know that FEMA has been slow to respond. It’s the state of Louisiana’s responsibility to coordinate evacuation routes….especially given that they KNEW a strike by a class 4 or 5 hurricane would be catastrophic. Why is everyone blaming the feds when the state sat on it’s hands pretending nothing was wrong?
September 2nd, 2005 at 2:28:29 am
FEMA jerk just said that they DIDN’T KNOW there were people at the convention center until today!!!!
Paula Zahn’s response:
“Sir, SIR - you can’t honestly tell me that you didn’t KNOW anyone was down there until today…”
September 2nd, 2005 at 3:04:23 am
Ted Koppell on Nightline tonight, interviewing Michael Brown from FEMA:
…jumping in here…
TK: You guys do war games…you’ve planned for disasters…you could have 101st airborne - groups who stand at the ready — but you have the national guard…you could have made preparations…you knew it was a force 5 storm…why didn’t you?
Answer: Disaster continued beyond intial disaster (flood after hurricane disrupted rescue operations). We were not prepared/were suprised by the additional people headed to the SuperDome. Expected the population at the SuperDome but thousands more began to show up — was under the impression that if you weren’t at the SuperDome you evacuated NO. We show up and find people under bridges, collected all around town…expected to have to rescue everyone at Dome…
TK: People are dead, died because they didn’t there’s no help…how is it a surprise…NO is poor, people don’t have means to leave…how could it possibly be a surprise…there are people in hospitals…if you didn’t have buses or national guard trucks to to get them out..where did you think they went?
FEMA: I don’t want to second guess what the city did and why they didn’t evalucuate their citizens…
TK: I’m not asking about the CITY. Why weren’t there Greyhound buses from every state, national guard trucks…busing the poor out BEFORE the storm…HELL (add by me for emphasis) why haven’t you done
that TODAY?
FEMA: We’re doing that now. We’re here to support the governor.
TK: Tells FEMA people are in heed of help, that they are not being fed.
FEMA: Our supply chain is working.
TK: But people were told to go to the convention center…nothing was there.
FEMA: It wasn’t our job to tell people to go there. We just have to fix what’s going on now.
TK: Polite thanks for taking the lumps. You’re the only one from the fed coming out to take the lumps.
My take is that FEMA is going to take alot of heat, but it’s clear that New Orleans and the state of LA were not prepared to help their own citizens, nor prepared to tell the feds how best to help out. Feds are taking over and its going to be a few days before we see the organization we’d expected by now.
September 2nd, 2005 at 6:49:22 am
I have seen somewhere that transit buses were available to serve folks with no other way to get out during the mandatory evacuation. And way up here on the mid-Atlantic coast, I remember seeing officials from the Gulf area asking for evacuation as early as Saturday.
From up here it appears that there was enough warning for a lot of people to leave and a lot more (the ones who couldn’t leave for whatever reason) to make it to designated shelters such as the SuperDome in NO. On other parts of the coast it appears to have been different — poorer folks telling friend they had to stay put because it was the end of the month and they didn’t have money to buy gas, and perhaps no other way out.
Many of the people who are now “coming out of the woodwork” appear to be part of a demographic that doesn’t trust government very much to start with and so the evacuation orders just didn’t mean anything to them. I’m working on an emergency preparedness public education and outreach program up here, and have noted that we need to research the kinds of messages and the delivery mechanisms that will reach this part of the population in a meaningful way.
September 2nd, 2005 at 8:00:39 am
Mad Max,
Can we stop the race baiting histrionics? Please. Everyone who was physically/medically able to leave and didn’t was foolish. I don’t care if you were poor, it’s your life, take some responsibility for it. That being said, the fact that the govt. can’t provide basic security for these storm evacuees is despicable. Nobody gets a free pass in this situation, all share partially in the blame.
September 2nd, 2005 at 9:06:46 am
Ted Koppel’s questions were ridiculous, he should be asking them to the mayor of New Orleans not the director of FEMA. Why weren’t they bussing people out sooner? Because no one told them to, its not like FEMA can just do whatever the hell it wants. Those things are the responsibility of the mayor and governor. FEMA is there for response and they can’t be expected to know everything, only what information is given to them.
September 2nd, 2005 at 9:06:46 am
Ted Koppel’s questions were ridiculous, he should be asking them to the mayor of New Orleans not the director of FEMA. Why weren’t they bussing people out sooner? Because no one told them to, its not like FEMA can just do whatever the hell it wants. Those things are the responsibility of the mayor and governor. FEMA is there for response and they can’t be expected to know everything, only what information is given to them.