Too Many Unasnswered Questions
Without a doubt, this has been a hellish nightmare of a week. I am still staggered by the fact that I am actually hearing the word American being used as an adjective to refugees. If anything, the news out of New Orleans today is even worse than the news yesterday, which was even worse than the day before.
Yes, nature unleashed its fury on the gulf this past week, but surely what we are seeing in New Orleans and all along the coast need not have been so awful as it is. Many questions are beginning to be raised by even the staunchest of the current administration's supporters, questions which are for the most part being ignored by the official spokespeople for that administration.
An editorial in the Star Tribune asks many of the questions we all are:
How, for example, do you evacuate smoothly 80 percent of a major metropolitan center by car -- and provide no formal assistance or avenue of escape for the 20 percent who haven't the means to do it on their own?
How do you justify cutting $250 million in scheduled spending for crucial pump and levee work in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), authorized by Congress in 1995? Editor and Publisher magazine reports that even "as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside," after 2003 "the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle." Why? Editor and Publisher says both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans Times-Picayune blame "spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts."
How, after 9/11, do you explain the lack of proper equipment in New Orleans to deal with a breaching of the levees? They are to New Orleans what the World Trade Center was to New York. Yet police officials were forced to appeal for private boats to aid in rescuing the stranded. No rescue boats -- in Louisiana. What is that about?
How do you explain the almost total lack of coordination among federal, state and local officials both in Louisiana and Mississippi? No one appeared in charge. "Too many cooks in the kitchen," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin complained bitterly.
How do you explain a plan that put 25,000 people in a stifling, dank Superdome with little water and inoperable toilets? How do you further explain gathering many of them outside for bus trips to the Astrodome in Houston and then leaving them without adequate food and water?
But in a broader sense, what does New Orleans say about preparedness for a terrorist attack in, for example, Seattle, Los Angeles or San Francisco? How, four years after 9/11, is it possible that federal, state and local governments could be so woefully unprepared to deal in a coordinated fashion with a catastrophe that, while natural in origin, mimicked many of the effects of another massive assault by terrorists? Are Americans safer? [Emphasis added]
Yes, nature unleashed its fury on the gulf this past week, but surely what we are seeing in New Orleans and all along the coast need not have been so awful as it is. Many questions are beginning to be raised by even the staunchest of the current administration's supporters, questions which are for the most part being ignored by the official spokespeople for that administration.
An editorial in the Star Tribune asks many of the questions we all are:
How, for example, do you evacuate smoothly 80 percent of a major metropolitan center by car -- and provide no formal assistance or avenue of escape for the 20 percent who haven't the means to do it on their own?
How do you justify cutting $250 million in scheduled spending for crucial pump and levee work in the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA), authorized by Congress in 1995? Editor and Publisher magazine reports that even "as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside," after 2003 "the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle." Why? Editor and Publisher says both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the New Orleans Times-Picayune blame "spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts."
How, after 9/11, do you explain the lack of proper equipment in New Orleans to deal with a breaching of the levees? They are to New Orleans what the World Trade Center was to New York. Yet police officials were forced to appeal for private boats to aid in rescuing the stranded. No rescue boats -- in Louisiana. What is that about?
How do you explain the almost total lack of coordination among federal, state and local officials both in Louisiana and Mississippi? No one appeared in charge. "Too many cooks in the kitchen," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin complained bitterly.
How do you explain a plan that put 25,000 people in a stifling, dank Superdome with little water and inoperable toilets? How do you further explain gathering many of them outside for bus trips to the Astrodome in Houston and then leaving them without adequate food and water?
But in a broader sense, what does New Orleans say about preparedness for a terrorist attack in, for example, Seattle, Los Angeles or San Francisco? How, four years after 9/11, is it possible that federal, state and local governments could be so woefully unprepared to deal in a coordinated fashion with a catastrophe that, while natural in origin, mimicked many of the effects of another massive assault by terrorists? Are Americans safer? [Emphasis added]
posted by Diane at 3:58 PM
1 Comments:
You rapped up my frustrations in the first 58 words...
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