And it’s caught on tape. He was briefed the day before Katrina hit, heard Brown say this was “the big one”, that it was a bigger threat than Hurricane Andrew was, that there was great risk of loss of life, and that the topping of the levees was of great concern, and then would say with a straight face several days later that he didn’t think anyone anticipated the breech of the levees. He assured everyone that they were fully prepared to deal with the disaster.
Liar.
That’s our president: a useless, worthless lump who declaims platitudes in response to dire warnings, does nothing, and lies about it afterwards.
(via Neurotopia)
Powerline spouts the party line. It was overtopping, not breaching! It’s the usual fine-grained parsing to avoid the real issue: callous neglect and incompetence and CYA evasiveness by our duly elected Republican leadership. Soon they’ll be arguing that it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
Here here!
Now, if we could just get someone to claim he’d been unfaithful to his wife, perhaps we could get some impeachment action going…
Gotta stay the course. Didn’t see it comin’. You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie. Mission Accomplished!
Honestly, I don’t think he lied. He just wasn’t paying attention. :) He really didn’t think the levees would break because he didn’t hear them say it.
Apologists for Bush have long made the case that we underestimate the man and that his success is based on a hidden shrewdness rather than the actions of an amoral political machine. The president is, they say, not a bumbling idiot. He knows what he’s doing! The pre-Katrina video tape makes that argument untenable. Either Bush is an outright liar or he can’t remember from day to day what he’s been briefed on. Liar or idiot? Heck, it’s probably both!
That’s “misunderestimate”, Zeno.
Remember: approximately half the population voted for this man.
Even with the voting machine diddling, the results couldn’t have been massively altered by cheating. Perhaps enough to swing the election, but not enough to truly alter the statistics.
Half the population.
Do you still think this society can be saved?
Haven’t you guys figured it out by now? Lieing only matters when it’s about sex. If the president lies about insignificant trifles like hurricanes, floods, wars, illegal spying, corruption, political pandering, cronyism, incompetence, and silly stuff like thousands of dead irrelevant poor people, minorities, soldiers, and foreign civilians, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like Bush got a blowjob, is it? Now THAT would be BAD!
Do you still think this society can be saved?
Nope. Taiwan Ho!
Taiwan isn’t in such good shape either, what with the Trojan Pandas and all.
That’s only half of those who voted, Caledonian. I think the actual proportion of the population who voted for Bush was somewhere between a third and a quarter.
In a system like ours, the rest of the population doesn’t matter. Only the people who vote do.
[sarcasm]Why should he have paid attention? It was probably scientists who told him about the dangers. And of course, scientists are nothing but alarmist lefties who disregard the “facts” in favour of protecting their pet theories.[end sarcasm]
In a system like ours, the rest of the population doesn’t matter. Only the people who vote do.
I think it was Stalin who said it’s not the people who cast the vote, but the people who count it, that have the real power. That said, IIRC, the Diebold machines control… 30% of the electorate? That’s more than diddling. Besides, both sides were accused of selective absentee ballot shredding (I remember one office in Vegas in particular). To top it off, in so far as I can tell, Gerrymandering (rewriting constituency boundaries to effectively remove government seats from competition) is not illegal in the US. Even if the voting population is confoundedly ignorant, the democratic process in the US is a gradually worsening train wreck.
On a side note, Canada needs some major electoral reform as well. I’m still thinking how that should be done.
I’ve seen the video and I have to ask if the leeves being “topped” equals being “breeched”. It seems like the expert was saying that he was worried about water flowing *over* the leeves, rather than going far enough to state that breeching was possible (which he should’ve considering the state of some of the leeves).
[i]On a side note, Canada needs some major electoral reform as well. I’m still thinking how that should be done.[/i]
Keep the paper, it works. Voter registration is working too, so don’t mess with it.
Make the senate directly electable, and give the provinces equal representation. Let Parliament continue to be the primary legislative body and represenative of the population regardless of distribution (and that’s from an Albertan living in New Brunswick.), but allow regional represenation in the lesser body to give it’s limited power within the canadian government some meaningful purpose, rather than remaining as a plum for cronies.
Move towards vote count methods that encourage multiple parties, rather than simple plurality.
Of course, that’s just my opinion.
Ed Schultz had this on his radio show right when it came out. Kudos to Schultz for getting the early word out.
Caledonian: Half the population wouldn’t have voted for him for dogcatcher if the GOP didn’t have the US media companies in their hip pocket, where they’ve been ever since Ronald Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine for them in 1987, an act which led directly to well-financed con groups moving to get people like Rush Limbaugh on the national airwaves. (And really, the press has been pro-GOP well before that: Go check out the wonderful book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency.) Of course, with Gingrich changing the law so Murdoch could set up FAUX Snooze, things have got even worse in the last decade and a half, to the point where people like Ann Coulter can slander folks on the air and nothing comes of it.
As for Katrina:
As MEC points out in our blog today, FEMA had the resources all ready to go and on site. WHY DID THEY HOLD BACK? Were they waiting for Bush and/or Chertoff to OK it?
Also: The Bush people lie even when they don’t have to lie. It’s reflex action with them.
I’ve seen the video and I have to ask if the leeves being “topped” equals being “breeched”.
Literally, no – water flowing over the top of a levee during the height of a storm surge would not have been nearly as bad as the lake which flowed into New Orleans for hours. In fact I don’t think you would expect a concrete levee to be breachable by rising water – if that happens (and it did) then someone wasted money by making it too tall and/or ruined safety by making it too thin.
But practically, yes. Many of the New Orleans levees were backed by (or entirely made of) piled earth – and when water overtops those, it erodes away the dirt supporting them, and makes them much more likely to breach. Did Bush know that? I doubt it. The guy is a liar but I think this particular statement is just ignorance.
Apologists for Bush have long made the case that we underestimate the man and that his success is based on a hidden shrewdness rather than the actions of an amoral political machine. The president is, they say, not a bumbling idiot. He knows what he’s doing! The pre-Katrina video tape makes that argument untenable. Either Bush is an outright liar or he can’t remember from day to day what he’s been briefed on. Liar or idiot? Heck, it’s probably both!
It’s not untenable to the Bush shills. GOP central hasn’t got the talking points distributed just yet, but you can check out (for instance) the comment section on DefenseTech.com for some early defenses of the fraternity boy’s lassitude. “What was he supposed to do?” and “This isn’t a security issue” seem to be the favored straws to clutch, so far. Their doublethink glands seem to be as vigorous as ever.
The worthless son of a bitch needs to be impeached, and then he needs to be put in a cell.
IIRC, what broke at New Orleans were mostly concrete flood walls, and the cause was poor foundation design.
OTOH, as Roy Stagner mentioned, with an earth dam one of the worst things that can happen is for the water to start flowing over the top. That’s what took out the South Fork Dam, causing the Johnstown flood of 1889.
The part of the population that didn’t vote even though they could scares me even more than the part that voted for Bush, frankly. A country that prizes democracy so highly should at least understand the responsibilities such freedom entails.
Half the population did NOT vote for Bush check your facts here
http://www.uselectionatlas.org/USPRESIDENT/data.php?year=2004&datatype=national&def=vto&f=0
Less than 60% of registered voters even voted.
The real news here is that he lied when he did not have a reason to.(thnks Phoenix). It has been known for decades that the levees could and would be breached by a hurricane of this magnatude. The responders where held up by political procedures. I know I was there in a small capacity but saw it first hand. Check the difference between help to Mississippi, Florida and compare it to Louisiana. Politics in action. This is what happens and what we can expect more of with an uneducated or poorly educated populace. Most people can and will and in fact want to be able to help themselves. In this matter in many instances where people have not received any assisstance it is strictly political. The politicians creed is “Creating a Need and Filling it”. Maybe you’ve seen the news program of the travel trailers and mobile homes parked in Arkansas? If you have and wonder about those people who still do NOT have adeqaute housing. Wonder no more it is strictly political. The local politicians could immediatly have those homes pulled into their jurisdictions as was intended. But they are looking for a payout.
Go here
http://www.fema.gov/media/
and here
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,184954,00.html
and here
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100017754&docId=l:356680970&start=9
These links will give you a good idea of the real help given (I’m proud to have been a part of the FEMA service that helped where we could) and what is still being done. It will probably piss you off so take it in small doses.
Impeach Bush and in fact all o them need to go . I vote the incumbents out everytime now. And never vote for the second or third generation of politician.
i actually saw that video the day it happened, as i was monitoring the NOAA site and National Hurricane Center. the text alerts from the NHC were quite specific regarding the risks to New Orleans, including flooding and levee damage. NOAA had a Web site clip of Bush being briefed.
Yes. That’s the whole deal.
The NWS guy said that there was a possibility for the levees to be TOPPED. Guess what. The levees never were TOPPED. They were BREACHED, which may not have been anticipated by Bush.
It was anticipated, though, by Corps of Engineers people, but really they only forsaw the breaching to occur after TOPPING.
This AP video might look damning but it’s really not.
The “big” deal in the video is Bush promising with confidence to the local government that the feds could take care of it.
The Topped vs. Breached controversy is a loser.
I notice that none of Pharyngula’s resident Bush apologists have checked in here… I think they’re waiting til Rove et al send out the approved talking points to this. Give it maybe 12 hours.
Oh, whoops, I didnt see Jason’s comments. Is that what wingnuttia is going to be repeating ad nauseum for the next couple weeks, or is he just improvising?
“Oh, no, he didn’t say breached, he said topped. Totally different!”
Thank god the GOP has restored personal responsibility to America, eh?
It isn’t a loser, because he declared that nobody could have ever possibly in 100 million years no way no how no sir predicted anything like this happening. The truth is he was told before the event– which he lied about– almost exactly what would happen. Almost every facet of what he denied being briefed about, he was briefed about. He was told disaster plans were inadequate, in detail. Even Brownie was spot on regarding the mass chaos that might occur at the Superdome.
That allows for an even more frightening conclusion: 3/4 of the population failed to vote against him.
I’ve seen the Republican talking point on this already: “they anticipated topping the levees, but not breaching the levees.” As blatantly dishonest as it all is, it’s unfortunately just credible enough to keep the mainstream news headlines from reading “Bush Caught in Lie.”
Bush didn’t even ask questions. Wouldn’t a logical question to the statement of the levees possibly being “topped” be, “What are the chances of the levees being breached?”
Next press conference, a reporter ought to ask “Isn’t it true that you knowingly, carefully, and purposefully prepared for destruction of New Orleans?” to which Bush might hastily respond, “Did not! Did not!”
The breeched vs. topped business is about as irrelevant as it could possibly be, politically. The image that comes through is that Bush is a clueless liar, a conclusion that can’t be pushed aside because it’s pretty much true. (FWIW, I doubt Bush at the time had any clear notion of the difference between breeching and topping.)
To the great apolitical mass of semi-engaged voters, what they see is yet another disaster with Bush standing next to it holding his pud. Keep these up and eventually his approval ratings will hit the high 20’s.
I wish, jimBOB. The Republicans are splitting bacterial flagella on this, so the media is, too. And so is the public, ultimately. Our definition of “normal” has changed. It has become “normal” and routine to expose Bush’s dishonesty, yet nothing ever happens to the man, except for the occasional joke by David Letterman. Why? Because Americans cannot admit that most of them want to be lied to! Because it is now normal and routine for Americans to lie to themselves.
Americans want creationism taught next to evolution in schools because they’re lying to themselves about creationism being scientific. When they tell themselves that they were lied to about the Iraq War, they’re lying, because a majority was clamoring to go to war (but after the fact, everybody belongs to the French-Fry Resistance). Oh, let’s have another debate about the “orujun-o-life.” People side with the creationist not because he has evidence, but because he doesn’t. Katrina victims listen to crap sermons about hurricanes being God’s punishment from slimy preachers because “I admire his faith!” Ditto for their opinions of Bush–Americans secretly admire someone who bulldozes through reality. Bush has hit his approval-rating floor, I’m afraid.
while the flooding became everyone’s focus, there was plenty of warning from NWS that something catastrophic was going to happen. consider the following report from them on the 28th of August. it does not mention flooding at all:
if someone was paying attention, that IMO should have sufficed to mobilize massive amounts of federal assistance.
it’s called a continuing belief in American exceptionalism, despite evidence to the contrary. i suspect it’s so strong because it’s how we’ve managed to remain cohesive despite being of so many nationalities.
nevertheless, like any empire past its peak, or for that matter any stock market bubble, it is dangerous to be disconnected from reality, simply because reality will reassert itself and often abruptly.
Well, you see, reading that bulletin, the National Weather Service is obviously infested with liberals. And reportage like that just made Katrina much worse! If a good, objective conservative meteorologist had been able to ‘edit’ that report beforehand, Katrina probably wouldn’t have made landfall at all, and we’d all realize Bush handled the crisis perfectly!
Perhaps if Michael Crichten had told him…
You know, Bush claims to talk to god. You’d think god would clue such a good friend into things like this. ;)
Which is worse; ignorance or incompentence? Answer: ignorance is a subset of incompetence. The director of an emergency management agency should be a person who is somewhat fascinated by disasters. For example, I’m just some idiot living in the midWest, and even I know that when earthen dikes or dams are overtopped, you don’t want to be standing on the other side. This comes from a lifetime interest in reading historical documentaries of disasters.
If the disaster had involved Arabian horses, maybe Brownie would have been ready to step up and take charge. Or maybe not – he was fired from that job, wasn’t he?
Breached vs. topped does matter. There are so many examples of bush lying, why do people need to reach on this issue. He should be impeached for his treatment of Katrina, but not because he lied. Info may yet come out that he was specifically warned of breaching, and any sane, intelligent leader would have taken the warnings seriously, but he technically did not lie when he talked of breaching, at least based on what we know so far from the AP.
Hey, Michael Crichton didn’t tell him about it, so of course he didn’t remember.
I think that one was topped, and one was breached. The topped one failed quickly as erosion behind the concrete wall scoured the supporting soil away. The other failed horizontally because water infiltrated the levee and the sheet piles were not bedded deeply enough. The soggy soil lost the ability to hold together, and the mass shifted sideways, concrete wall, sheet pilings and all, about 30 yards IIRC. That sounds like a breach to me.
There was a very good post on thisisnotover(dot)com, right after the whole Katrina problem became known, about Bush’s response that I completely agreed with. Completely apart from who knew what and when, and what they did about it, what was stunningly absent from Bush was a sense of real outrage, of real concern. That’s what I find most damning. When he *finally* realized the enormity of the situation, he should have become the mad as hell taking charge president. Instead, we got calm, measured statements that everything was now under control, nothing to worry about, it’s sad that Trent Lott lost his house, maybe a little tear in the eye, but we’ll take care of it. I wanted to see him yelling that we’d send every available public servant from here to Alaska with their hands full of money and equipment to help, and that never happened. Apart from not doing anything about it, he didn’t even act as though he wanted to.
BushCo’s penchant for lying is supported by the Republican oligarchy in Congress. for example, i just learned that the Senate Judiciary Committee, breaking with longstanding practice, permitted Attorney General Gonzales to forgo swearing he was telling the truth in his recent testimony on the NSA’s domestic surveillence program, over the objections of Democrats on the Committee.
oh, yeah, he’s gonna perjure himself, so we don’t want to have him commit a crime here.
<sarcasm>”overtopped” vs “breached” is such a huge and important distinction. I’m sure that when ol’ W heard that the risk was merely overtopping, he was vastly relieved and figured that meant he was done, and could get back to his golf game and guitar playing. </sarcasm>
We shall punish you because you threw your mother from the train.
Wait, you only pushed her? Never mind.
Can people stop saying “here, here!” Jesus Christ, you ignorant fuckers, it’s “hear, hear”.
Bill Maher had something similar to say about Bush’s inaction during 9/11 – The president was told “Mr. President, we are under attack!”
And Bush justs sat there, for several minutes. Don’t you think that just simple human curiosity would make one get up and ask “How? By Whom?”
Nope, bush just sat there on 9/11, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
He assured everyone that they were fully prepared to deal with the disaster.
And they have. Exactly as much and in the way they had planned on. The disconnect you appear to be experiencing is that you ASSUMED that the preparation was proactive and that ‘dealing with the disaster’ meant that the government was planning on SAVING New Orleans. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Like the political ghouls they are they made sure that profiteers made a bundle off of no-bid contracts (ala Iraq) and that the dispossesed, the poor, the mostly black populace was driven out, displaced, or allowed to perish. God’s will yeah? The plan now is to sell off New Orleans to the supporters of the Republican party after declaring it unliveable. See Pepsi presents the Big Easy or New Orleans – the theme park. I doubt that they planned on the attention they have been subject to or the scrutiny of their misdeeds, but you can’t plan for everything.
I think that Katrina went exactly like they wanted it to, much like Iraq, much like elections 2000/2004. Wadda you gonna do aboud it?
Oh, boo hoo. Cry me a river, Phoenix Woman. It’s all due to the evil liberal media… er, that is, conservative media.
It’s true that a very large number of people didn’t vote… but you simply cannot use that to argue that there is a vast, silent majority that secretly supports you. The voting results essentially match polls taken beforehand — about half of the people supported George W. Bush.
The American people simply aren’t interested in reason and rationality. They aren’t interested in honest politics, or they’d can the whole system and everyone who works it, Republican or Democrat.
One thing to keep in mind when you see these idiotic hairsplitting defenses (“breaching vs. overtopping”) is that this is just the final line of defense they arrived at after retreating across most of the field of battle. The mere fact that there are republidroids repeating the talking point doesn’t mean their side is unscathed. Far from it. It just means this spin is the words they can mouth in order to pretend that the obvious (in this case, that Bush is a clueless idiot) ain’t so.
Bush’s approval is in the toilet, and his personal popularity is even worse. The GOP is still relatively united, because obedience is burned into their DNA. As a result, they can still push through their stuff, for now. Their problem is is the basis for their power, the Republican brand, is being shattered as a result of all this crap. Bush looks out of touch and unlikeable, and the rest of the them look like the corrupt, lying money-grubbers they are. The Clinton years are looking better and better.
The notion behind the whole Republican project has been to lay the basis for long-term political dominance. They won’t achieve this if they are too widely hated to get to 50.1%.
Caledonian, and it doesn’t help when folks who are supposed to be the good guys turn verengan Ha’DIbaH when it suits them. (the expression is Klingon.)
Could one of you screaming liberal lunatics explain to me what Kerry or Dean would have done differently with Katrina? Perhaps send in F-15s to stop the hurricane or tanks to bolster the levees. Be real, the results would have been the same regardless of who knew what and when. The bottom line is presidents come and go but big fat ineffective bureaucratic agencies like FEMA are forever. There is no turnover of the career flunkies and lackies in government with a new administration and no one person, whether its Brownie, McCain or Hillary, can make a big difference in how they perform. The bottom line is a Cat 5 hurricane hit a city that was built below sea level and regardless of whether the residents where black or white, absolutely nothing and noone was going to prevent this disaster from happening other than God, Moses or Noah (sarcasm)
For starters, they would have put someone else, hopefully someone competent, in charge of FEMA. That would have at least helped.
Of course, you probably don’t care about my speculations, as I’m not a screaming liberal lunatic.
One also assumes a President Gore wouldn’t have spent 4 years bleeding the Army Corps of Engineers of the money needed to upgrade the levees. But hey, I’m a ‘screaming liberal lunatic’, so feel free to believe the opposite of anything I say.
Caledonian, even if you’re not a liberal lunatic, I’d love to know exactly what significant difference it would have made in the final outcome if the most competent person in the known world led FEMA, other than perhaps shaving dozen or so hours off the Federak governments initial reponse. At the end of the week, the city would still have been destroyed and 100,000s of folks would still be displaced.
i don’t know what they would have done differently, but i know what could have been done. for the purposes of discussion, let’s say nothing could be done to prevent this. i don’t buy that, but i’ll address that part below. at the very least, upon being alerted of the impending devastation the President could have overridden his minions and ordered supplies, tent cities (as in Hurricane Andrew and when refugees are helped overseas), medical help to be sent to the vicinity of New Orleans. it would need military assistance because noone else has vehicles which can operate in the residue of a hurricane. BushCo didn’t have to wait for a request.
as far as prevention goes, there’s a whole panoply of possibilities there, but some, RLee, no doubt won’t sit well with you because you “don’t believe” in their premises.
facts are, this country needs to decide what is a bigger threat, enemies from elsewhere, real or imagined, or natural hazards. we cannot afford (financially) to prepare against both. whether anyone likes it or not, and whatever fraction of it is anthropogenic, the world is warming. natural warming is just as harmful as man-induced warming. there are consequences to this happening. if preparations aren’t made ahead of a disaster, the pickup and cleanup is far more expensive.
obviously, BushCo could not have prepared New Orleans for this particular disaster since they’ve been in office. however, BushCo’s insistence there is no problem, that the federal government doesn’t have a role, and upon muzzling voices of science which repeatedly claim based upon hundreds of different indicators that this is real and this is a problem certainly works against any concerted effort.
moreover, there are specific things BushCo could have gotten done ahead. he could have been sure, post-September 11th, that every major city had a workable evacuation plan and that it had been partly rehearsed. and those evacuation plans should have been federalized, not left to local states and towns which don’t have the Big Picture. and that’s it, isn’t it? folks like you, RLee, and Cheney and Bush and his gang can’t stand the idea that there is any legitimate role for a strong federal government, apart from using it as a way to bash opponents heads.
weather-related natural disasters are only one thing to worry about. we still have plenty of earthquake and volcano hazards which would have dire economic consequences as well. in past years both FEMA and the U.S. Geological Survey have done great jobs preparing for those risks.
you really need to stop thinking of Category 5 hurricanes as exceptional and rare. that there were two in one season one after another is completely outside of experience.
the hubris here is thinking that the United States has become supernatural, not needing to worry about the consequences of natural changes and developments, except possibly by praying to the Lord Almighty Hallelejah on Sunday mornings. natural threats, notably geophysical threats, have always been the greatest threat to human security and survival. no doubt they will continue to be so.
Caledonian, even if you’re not a liberal lunatic, I’d love to know exactly what significant difference it would have made in the final outcome if the most competent person in the known world led FEMA, other than perhaps shaving dozen or so hours off the Federal governments initial reponse
Incompetence doesn’t matter. Beautiful.
Hey, that’s a great GOP talking point for ’06 & ’08 — “The Republican Party: Sure we’re incompetent, but hey — we’re not liberals!”
George, I claim no party affiliation and proudly consider myself to be an independent thinker with an open mind laced with a health dose of skepticism. So please show me where federal government had “concrete” plans to rebuild the levees within the last four years only to be scrapped because of budget constraints
Hasn’t Bush been President for more than four years?
Perhaps if we hadn’t started our little adventure in Iraq, there would be sufficient funds for things like rebuilding levees, and paying off the national deficit, and so on…
Folks, I am in no way apologizing for Bush and Cheney. I just think its crazy that there are extremists on both sides that think the other side is responsible for all the nations/worlds disasters and failures. I have worked in the federal government during both democratic and republican administsrations and nothing of significance changed from Bush to Clinton to Bush, it was still a lethargic and stagnant beast. I also have extensive experience in the realm of Disaster Preparedness/First Response and yes the key is to exercise your plans as ezkept states. But I also no the logistical nightmare andunwillingess of staging such an exercise/simulation at the local, state, and federal level
well, we had better learn. New Orleans was nuthin’ compared to what could be.
RLee wrote:
Hey, you’re more qualified to run FEMA than the buddy Bush appointed who still knows more about how to make Arabian horses look more attractive than how to run a disaster response agency.
Thats the problem, there are a lot of folks like myself who have had the frustrating experience of leading Disaster Prep teams only to walk away from the business in disgust. What it says you can do on paper is rarely what will happen in the real world as we have seen countless times. Its human nature to blow off arduous preparation and just hope bad things won’t happen – you don’t have to be a republican or democrat to share that view – I seem to vaguely recall some fable about a grasshopper and an ant
The excuses for the ineptness of leadership in the Bush administration just don’t cut it.
RLee, we need more than preparation.
the wingnuts make fun of academics (“liberals” they call them: what a joke!) and ultimately of education and of the value of knowledge.
to all those who demean and berate academics for being “other worldly”, note all they urge is following a plan:
(1) decide what you want,
(2) think about what you’re going to do before you do it, and
(3) if you need to know things before you decide, seek them out.
along the way it might be helpful to respect those many who know far more than you, to value the efforts and achievements of those who have spent their lives finding things out, and to remember what’s worked before and what hasn’t.
and you might try to understand that gathering knowledge is not like assembling a court case or a business proposal, it’s a lot like stumbling around in the dark, however enlightened that stumbling may be. the greatest value comes from the dark corners, the dark horses. these are unpredictable but, oh, so real.
Whoa ekzept, I don’t know what I said to deserve a lesson on the merits of academics. I have in fact washed my hands of government service and now serve as a mere college biology professor. I’m signing off,enjoyed the banter and thanks for all the fish…
What could have been done?
Well I remember one story about a mayor who had gone through the pretend exercise a few years before Katrina. Part of the response was “GenPacks,” Portable Generators that could be deployed quickly. Things worked great in the pretend simulation with pretend generators.
After the *real* hurricane the Genpacks were no where to be found. NPR played the phone call secretely taped by that mayor where he begged for these generators, and the FEMA folks were clueless. The phone call was heartbreaking.
That, for one, could have been done.
actually, my comment was regarding the merits of having a strong federal role in these matters. you can’t plan things for the country without having centralized expertise and centralized authority. heck, local towns and counties have zoning laws. what kind of sense does it make to have such a high concentration of petrochemical industry on the hurricane prone Gulf Coast?
similarly you can’t coordinate disaster response nationally without an arbitrator and final authority. that’s the federal role.
sorry, to do this kind of stuff you need a strong federal government. i’d go further and say you need to cooperate internationally.
I couldn’t resist one last parting shot:
America’s Biggest Disaster Threat
Mar 2, 2006
Loni Blandford
WNCT – TV9
What is the number one disaster the American Red Cross deals with? Many are quick to respond and say hurricanes, but that is actually incorrect. The Red Cross says the biggest disaster threat is actually home fires…
So I sincerely ask all of you Bush bashers who disingenuosly blame him for this nations unpreparedness WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CHECKED YOUR SMOKE ALARMS AND REHEARSED A FIRE EVACUATION WITH YOUR FAMILY? – Be honest, for you on sake!
Blame Mother Nature: she’s the one who put massive deposits of oil there. Before we started pumping it out, dollops of crude used to wash up on the Galveston coastline constantly. Ugliest stretch of ocean you ever saw. Indians used to collect the stuff to make waterproof baskets. The refining is simply due to the proximity of the oil.
Now drilling for small amounts of oil in the middle of a wildlife preserve — that’s just crazy.
So I sincerely ask all of you Bush bashers who disingenuosly blame him for this nations unpreparedness WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CHECKED YOUR SMOKE ALARMS AND REHEARSED A FIRE EVACUATION WITH YOUR FAMILY? – Be honest, for you on sake! – RLee
Independant thought in action.
I will cop to being a Bush hater, have been since he benefitted from the SCOTUS theft of the 2000 U.S. elections, but I doubt many people here are as virulent in their excoriation of George “War criminal” Bush as I. Since the theft he has proven himself inept, beligerent, arrogant, and recklessly dangerous but what can you REALLY expect from an awol mama’s boy ex-cheerleader from Andover? Your pathetic attempt to conflate smoke detectors with an antiquated and substandard levee system would be laughable if not for the abysmally tragic consequences. Do you consider how moronic you sound BEFORE you regurgitate the RNC palp you seem to thrive on or are you simply one of the dittohead puppet lackeys suckling at Limbaughs jiggling drug saturated teat? Here is a very quick response to your “point”:
*Checking the batteries in your smoke detector = personal responsibility
*Repairing the levee system protecting several hundred thousand American citizens = Army Corps of Engineers responsibility
*Funding the repairs to the levee system protecting several hundred thousand American citizens = Federal Government responsibility
Unless of course you want to let me decide how to spend the tax payers money. Just as soon as I check my smoke detector, force Haliburton to pay back the American taxpayers their fraudulent overcharges, and find the missing nine billion dollars you fiscal conservatives “lost” during Iraqi reconstruction. I pity the President that has to clean up after this fucking circus clown.
that’s fine, as well as the natural gas drills, but refineries? pharmaceutical companies? chemical plants? yeah, i know, they are conveniently situated close to the oil plants and oil refineries. but at what risk?
IIRC, what broke at New Orleans were mostly concrete flood walls, and the cause was poor foundation design.
OTOH, as Roy Stagner mentioned, with an earth dam one of the worst things that can happen is for the water to start flowing over the top. That’s what took out the South Fork Dam, causing the Johnstown flood of 1889.
No. In the great flood of Poland of 1997, earth dams were not topped, they were soaked through and leaked water *at the bottom*. Eventually, an earth dam may simply dissolve if the high water stays long enough.
The advantage of earth dams is that they can be strengthened easily even by unskilled civilians, simply by laying sacks with sands on and next to them.
Sorry. Two first paragraphs are quotations, not just the first one.
*Checking the batteries in your smoke detector = personal responsibility
*Repairing the levee system protecting several hundred thousand American citizens = Army Corps of Engineers responsibility
*Funding the repairs to the levee system protecting several hundred thousand American citizens = Federal Government responsibility
Nothing to add, except that this cracked me up. Thanks.
Can people stop saying “here, here!” Jesus Christ, you ignorant fuckers, it’s “hear, hear”.
To quote the greatest movie ever made: “Lighten up, Francis.”
Let’s put a few things in context.
FEMA says, and has for the last two decades, for the state/local governments should expect a minimum of three days before any federal help should be expected to arrive.
Preplacement of supplies and personnel is a BAD idea. Nobody knows exactly where the hurricane will hit, and having the relief effort in the path means that not only are the supplies in danger, the personnel have to rescue themselves first. Looking at Hurricane Rita, preplacement near the expected landfall would have put them over 150 miles from the actual point of impact.
Transport to/from New Orleans was and is a nightmare. There are only two major access paths, one of which was destroyed and the other could have been.
Primary responsibility for disaster preparedness lies with the local and then state governments. The federal government only comes in later to pick up the pieces.
There were failures by all parties involved. The timelyness of aid by FEMA wasn’t one of them. FEMA did make plenty of errors in scale, scheduling, and elsewhere.
It is financially impossible to prepare for all emergencies. Hindsight is 20/20. The combination of the two result in ample criticism for response after the Northridge earthquake, the last two rounds of major Mississippi flooding, Hurricane Katrina, and any other major disaster in recent memory. Combine that with selective reporting – any event which is sufficiently prepared against is not reported or considered a major disaster – and the past record appears terrible.
For a bunch of skeptics, many of you seem to be gullible when in comes to politics. How many have accepted one account of what happened without independent confimation? Did you check primary sources? Did someone form a testable hypothesis, propose a change in the response BASED ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PEOPLE AT THE TIME, and postulate the results? When testing the hypotheses, did all of the results occur in a positive direction, indicating a bias in the selected responses?
Apply the same skeptical thinking, without preconceptions, and things look a bit different.
Karl, you make some good points, but you’re really dealing with only one of two overarching issues:
1) Did Bush lie when he claimed for days after the disaster that “no one anticipated” the breach of the levees? Pretty clearly he did. Whether or not it made a difference in the response in this particular case, transparent communication (or, to use an old-fashioned word, “honesty”) is still an important quality of effective leaders.
2) Did it make a difference? If we’re talking, did Bush’s failure to honestly face reality within a day or two before the disaster make a difference, arguably not. If we’re talking, did this administration’s, this agency’s, willful refusal to face up to the long-predicted probablility of levee failure make a practical difference in anticipating and coordinating a more effective response to the disaster, I suggest that when you plug that into your suggested algorithm, you still get a better outcome on the ground–though there were clearly failures of political will and vision at multiple levels of government.
But even if I’m wrong, point 1) still remains. This administration has a marked preference for punting first, particularly ignoring objective science, and then lying about it afterwards.
Karl wrote:
From the AP article “Video Shows Blanco’s Assurances on Levees”:
Oh, so that’s why Brown resigned. He wanted to go in immediately but FEMA says you need to wait three days.
>Oh, so that’s why Brown resigned. He wanted to go in immediately but FEMA says you need to wait three days.
That isn’t what I wrote. Read the post again.
FEMA says that local and state agencies should not expect FEMA to be there instantly after a disaster. Those agencies should prepare for a minimum of three days before federal response can arrive.
That isn’t that three days will be the response time, or that the response can not be there immediately, or that it will take 7 days to get to backcountry Alaska.
Here I am, george, not to apologize for Bush but to wonder why Democrats are not being held to the same standard.
Turns out there’s another tape, with Gov. Blanco (Democrat) telling Washington that the levees were NOT breached (and never breeched as posters here keep saying; levees don’t wear trousers).
The levees and floodwalls were designed and built, for the most part, by Democratic administrations. They were never meant to withstand a storm of Katrina’s size, and they didn’t.
It’s called risk management.
Nobody, anywhere, designs public utilities to withstand any conceivable disaster. Not even in DFL Minnesota.
Did Bush appoint an incompetent to head FEMA? Yes. Did Clinton appoint an incompetent to head FEMA? Yes.
Go back and look at what FEMA did in Florida in the 1990s. Not pretty reading.
BTW – I very deliberately did not address the issue of Bush’s statement. I have an opinion, and I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. I won’t comment further on the issue, as I don’t have most of the evidence, it is a divisive issue, and I don’t like pandering to ‘Gotcha’ journalism by adherents of either party.
The levees and floodwalls were designed and built, for the most part, by Democratic administrations. – Harry Eagar
Well that WOULD be something, I’d buy tickets to watch ANY administration actually get off their fat bureaucratic asses and pitch in and lend a hand to construct…anything! The only thing most administrations can manage to design and construct are elaborate lies to cover their criminal deeds, take this administration as a glowing example of that. Please spare us the partisan nonsense Harry, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers designed and built the levee system. You got a problem with the Army Harry?
Maybe what you meant to say is that the only people who cared enough to get a levee system built happened to be part of Democratic administrations. The Republican administrations couldn’t be bothered since there was no obvious way to benefit from graft and kickbacks and it would only protect mostly poor mostly black people who tend to vote Democrat in elections anyway… Now if it protected Hyannis or Martha’s Vinyard from hurricanes, that might warrant Republican attention.
Pharyngula —
You may think there’s little difference between “overtopping” and “breaching,” but the only reason you’re saying that is because this fact takes the entire wind out of your sails. When Bush (or the average person) hears “overtopping,” they think of some water flowing over the levees, and then the storm passes, and everything subsides. Whereas with a breach, the whole damn lake can then flow right into the city of New Orleans (which is below sea level).
And in fact, after the storm had passed, Bush was being told by the governor of Louisiana that there had been no breach of the levees.
So when Bush says, “We didn’t anticipate the breach,” that is NOT a lie merely because someone mentioned the word “overtopping.” “Breach” and “overtop” are two drastically different things. It may be the “party line,” but it’s also true.
Eric, are you implying that the Democratic party in Louisiana was not corrupt? The one that ran a candidate against David Duke with the slogan ‘Elect the crook’?
Or are you implying that the Republicans are such innocents that they were unable to figure out how to make any graft off levees? When the Democrats did such a good job of it?
I don’t know what Bush may have meant, but I know what I thought at the time he meant. I was in Houston, trying to set up my mother-in-law’s house for Katrina; we didn’t know where it was going to hit.
When the storm passed over and by New Orleans without flooding it as it went, everybody let out a big sigh and thought, ‘Missed that one, by god!’
What I thought he meant was that nobody anticipated that after the storm was well inland, and the levees seemed to have held, that they would then fail.
If that really is what he was trying, in his usual stumbletongued way, to say, then he was not alone. That was the feeling of folks along the Gulf Coast, including the news reporters on the scene.
As JE says, the tapes (not tape) make it look more as if Bush were being lied to than lying.