Watched Lewis Black’s Red White and Screwed special on Comedy Central.
Failure was at state and local level. Unrealistic expectations placed on FEMA….criticism of their response time wrong because people don’t bother to read the doctrine that governs how and when FEMA can respond, and what their function is. State and local EO plans were not followed. Having a plan is pointless if you don’t use it.
Much as I DETEST Bush and a signicant number of his appointees, I have to admit; you can’t fault FEMAs response. They did WHAT THEIR MISSION CHARTER DIRECTED ahead of schedule. The problem was and is at the state and local level. Politicians. Emergency Management isn’t a sexy field to be in 99% of the time. It’s kind of like flood insurance. Its a cost you resent, and it’s a pain in the ass to deal with, and 99% of the time, it’s money paid out with no return.
BUT.
Ask those who have it, and who have had to make a claim ‘Is it better to not have it?’
EM is the same way. The Village Idiots Whom We Elected (TVIWWE) a) don’t want to take the time to read the damn plans BEFORE the emergency; b) don’t want to spend ANY money on EM; and c) When the balloon goes up, they don’t want to be bothered executing the plan, they want EXPOSURE TO THE LIGHTS AND CAMERAS and more importantly they want to be SEEN DOING SOMETHING, which usually seems to result in overriding the Emergency Manager in charge of execution and then ignoring the plan and misallocating resources resulting in a worse respone.
You may have picked up that I don’t like the Village Idiots, AKA politicians. I don’t, because they screw things up, making decisions based on politics instead of what ACTUALLY NEEDS TO BE DONE!
So, it pisses me off when I see one of the left (or right for that matter) torpedoing the wrong people just to get a laugh. Go after that NOLA Village idiot who didn’t think to tell the bus drivers that they were a VITAL part of the PLAN TO EVACUATE PEOPLE. So NOLA had buses to evacuate LOTS of people, BUT NO DRIVERS!
Village Idiots hard at work
