Honoring the Memory of the Victims of Hurricane Katrina Proclamation

The White House lowers flags... possibly because they were lowering them for Rehnquist anyway.

This, like so much else, is absolutely the right thing to do, but they're at least three or four days behind the ball with it. I'm reading stories linked to by Americablog about how the White House was paralyzed by the legalese behind the chain of command, and that's something I hope Congress deals with in this session, because that, along with a national registry of survivors that's set up and consolidated and organized, and a standard procedure for mortgage relief, unemployment insurance payouts, and even medicare/food stamp/housing voucher distribution will help in the God forebid event of any future catastrophes.

Re: the school busses

Yes, they should have been used to get people outside the hurricane cone (ie Houston or somewhere in the vicinity) but they would not have been enough to get everyone out.

Many of you know that my brother in law is in the Navy and has been based in New Orleans for nearly a year - he left New Orleans at around four am last Sunday and as of ten am, was only halfway to Houston. The roads were that clogged, and people were driving, at most, at thirty miles per hour. And the concern here in Miami, and all hurrican zone locations, is that people would evacuate and be stuck on the highway in gale- or hurricane-force winds, and die there, from wind or flood, which is why evacuations need to be completed, usually, twelve hours ahead of the eye-wall coming ashore.

So the busses, assuming 70 people got aboard each, would have held perhaps two or three thousand people, at most. In other words, barely five per cent of those who could have gotten out.

And there would have been no time to turn them around and use them for another run. They would have been a one-time outlet.

Yes, they should have been used for the ill, the elderly, the pregnant, and one or two accompaniers for each. They would have saved lives.

But they would have been a band-aid on a slit artery. They would just not have been enough.

(no subject)

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

- Keith Olberman, September 5, 2005

Now, contrast that with this:

What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed with the hospitality.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (she chuckled)--this is working very well for them.

- Barbara Bush, September 5, 2005


And then remember where the buck stops:

[President Bush] directed the development of a new National Response Plan (NRP) to align Federal coordination structures, capabilities, and resources into a unified, all discipline, and all-hazards approach to domestic incident management. . . .The end result is vastly improved coordination among Federal, State, local, and tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing the speed, effectiveness, and efficiency of incident management.

National Response Plan for Dept. Homeland Security, created in December of 2004, effective as of April, 2005 (it's a PDF and if you don't have a PDF reader, or don't want to download the whole thing, an excerpt can be found here

Links of the day:
katrinaskeepers will be auctioning off items in the coming weeks to help evacuees; they're planing to have Baked Goods, Craft Items (knitting, doilies, coptic journals...), Art and Writing (Original Fictions and Public Domain Fan Fiction) up for auction

katrinarelief is a community effort focusing on exchanging news and information and helping with relief efforts on the Gulf coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; their User Info page is a great list of links & info.