From Reuters: President George W. Bush took responsibility on Tuesday for failures in the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government, and to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do it’s job right, I take responsibility, Bush said.
As a writer, if I were to attempt to craft a novel with these monsters as a premise, an editor might very well suggest that it just wasn’t plausible. Yet this morning, we as Ohioans, as Americans, as Humans have to face the reality that we have failed to meet the most basic demand of any civilization: protecting our children.
From Andrew Sullivan: His own command-structure of craven loyalty and cronies insulated him from the facts…. His staff was terrified of having to tell him to cut his vacation short…. When you get a senior Bush aide describing the White House bunker as “strangely surreal and almost detached,” you know we have a problem. Now if only we had an Iraqi version of Nagin: someone who can tell this president a truth he doesn’t want to hear.
From Ship Of Fools: The Laugh Judgment, our competition to find the funniest and most offensive religious jokes, in response to the British government’s proposed anti-religious hatred legislation, is finally over. Our funniest religious joke… sectarianism gone mad, while our most offensive… tragedy on a clifftop. Warning: if you are easily offended, don’t click.
The No. 1 search hit on Techorati as I write this is: impeach bush. There are 7,292 posts on the subject. A quick Google finds 55,900 hits. But this is the scary part. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-Georgia) used the word Impeach on the floor of the house, and someone saw fit to edit it out of the official record. Orwellian? Uh huh.
On this date in 1981, Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica was finally hung in Spain. Picasso had refused to allow it to be shown in the country as long as General Franco was in power. Of his art, he said, No, painting is not made to decorate apartments, it’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
My Soundtrack: Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me by Low on WOXY.
My dad sent this to me this and the moment I opened the page my Lemmings Meter started ticking. It could be real, but anybody can set up a Yahoo store. The best way to make a donation to the Red Cross is to go to the organization’s home page. I’m dropping a dime to Yahoo to see if they’re being made the patsy in a phishing scam.
From the AP/IPSOS: Overall, do you [A] approve, disapprove or [B] have mixed feelings about the way George W. Bush is handling his job as President? (If A, ask:) Is that strongly (A) or somewhat (A)? (If B, ask:) If you had to choose, do you lean more toward approve or disapprove? Only 39 percent approve. Nixon hit 39 percent during the summer of ’73.
Bill Callahan has been working to set up Internet communications for refugees from Hurricane Katrina. I received the following call for assistance last evening. I’m going to attempt to orgnaize my Sunday school students to do some real world learning on Sunday. This is a chance for bloggers to make a difference. See you there.
From: Bill Callahan, Director, Cleveland Digital Vision
This is going out to everyone who’s already “in the loop” to help with the computer center for Katrina victims at the Convention Center, as well as a lot of people who may be hearing about it for the first time.
Digital Vision and Computers Assisting People, in partnership with the City and several private companies, have set up a 36-station computer center at the Cleveland Convention Center to help Katrina refugees use the Web to search for friends and relatives, apply for assistance, use email, etc. We need a a few experienced CTC staffers to help oversee the center, and a lot of volunteers to assist evacuees directly.
A large group of evacuees is expected to arrive from Louisiana some time tomorrow (Saturday). We want to have the computer center open for these folks to use all day Sunday. If you can help with this effort, I need to hear from you ASAP.
A schedule for the weekend is attached as a Word file. Please write back if you can help by:
a) serving as a center coordinator or volunteer coordinator for a shift on Sunday (this means coming in for the orientation at noon Saturday), or
b) serving as a volunteer for a shift (we need ten to thirteen people on each shift).
Please specify the shift you can help fill.
Here”s the plan for the computer center in the Convention Center for the next two days.
Saturday, we need to get shift leaders together for orientation and planning. If you are part of this group, please be at the CC at noon to get checked in. We”ll meet from 12:30 to 2.
We have no idea when evacuees will arrive, but starting a reasonable time after their arrival (coordinated with Red Cross) a few of us should open the center to allow adults and teens who already have email accounts to use them. This option should be open until 8:30 or 9.
Sunday, we should have the center open and fully staffed all day. This means we need at least two leaders (a coordinator and a volunteer leader) and 10 to 13 volunteers for each of three shifts.
The shifts will last four and a half hours including an hour for check in and training: starting at 9 am, 12:30 pm and 4:30 pm. This will allow the center to be open from 10 to 8:30 with a half-hour break at 5 (see following page.)
Thank you!
Bill
After a mind numbing week of bad news piled on bad news, we finally got a bit of good news today. While the figures are still preliminary, it looks like the death toll from Hurricane Katrina will not be measured in the tens of thousands. While this will not comfort those who lost loved ones, we, as a nation, must take solace from the news.
I agreed with one of my readers yesterday when they said that no elected official’s hands are clean in Hurricane Katrina’s wake. The reckoning for this will be monumental and, I predict, change our lives more than the attacks of four years ago. I’ll let Rod Deher speak for himself in these two pieces from today’s National Review Online.
My Soundtrack: Stratford-On-Guy by Liz Phair on WOXY.
I think I would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t seen the above photo. And the image of all those school buses up to their hubs in flood water is a justified focus of rage of those who ask the legitimate question: why weren’t they used to ferry people out of the path of the storm. By my count, there are 300 buses in the photo.
I’ll be generous and assume that’s half of them.
Let’s say that on Saturday, 27 August, when Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco declared a state of emergency, the following happens. I don”t know the precise time of the order, but I”ll be kind and say it was issued sometime before dawn on the 27th. Let”s say 0300.
At 0300 then, phone calls go out to the 600 bus drivers, who were put on standby alert the day before. They are ordered to report to the lot no later than 0500. Now these men and women will have heroically kissed their families goodbye, trusting that their spouses and children will pack up the family car and drive north to safety. They are met in the lot by 600 police officers and sheriff’s deputies who will literally ride shotgun on each bus.
At 0600, the drivers roll out to a predetermined pick up spot and open their doors. They are on a tight schedule. In order to have any chance of moving enough people out of New Orleans, they must load their passengers and roll quickly. Assume it takes them 30 minutes to load and that they close the doors and pull out by 0800 Saturday morning.
A full-sized school bus can carry approximately 60 adults. I’ll be again generous and assume that an additional 20 children could be carried on their parent’s laps. Of course there’s no room for more than minor luggage — perhaps something half the size of what airlines allow as carryons — and no pets
So, for the first run out of town, our 600 bus drivers and 600 law enforcement personnel have 48,000 passengers. That’s a very respectable number. The busses drive north, assisted by a disaster-plan-mandated bus lane that additional police are maintaining so that the busses, which have to make a return trip, don’t get trapped in traffic.
Where do the buses go? Houston was one obvious choice. Distance? Approximately 350 miles from New Orleans. At say an average speed of 50 miles an hour (remember those special bus lanes?) that’s a seven hour drive. Figure two highly efficient refueling stations: one at the midpoint and one at the end point.
If 150 buses, carrying 12,000 evacuees (approximately the number the Astrodome was able to handle) make that trip, I don”t think that a drive time of seven hours plus another two hours for refueling and bathroom visits is unreasonable. Total drive time, nine hours one way, 17 hours roundtrip. Where do the other three, 150-bus convoys go? Good question. A glance at the map suggest that Memphis, Little Rock and Birmingham could be candidates with about the same drive time.
The cities have pre-positioned cots, water, food and medical supplies for their 12,000 guests who are processed by efficient city and state personnel.
The 600 buses that left New Orleans at 0800 with 48,000 passengers Saturday morning, roll back into the Big Easy at 0100 Sunday. The buses are met by another 600 drivers and their accompanying law enforcement personnel. The buses refuel and now, under pressure from the approaching storm, are at the Phase II collection points by 0300.
Another 48,000 passengers are loaded and by 0500 the buses roll again. Another nine-hour drive later, the buses unload their passengers. It”s now 1400 on Sunday. In two hours, the National Weather Service will issue a special hurricane warning. There are still people in New Orleans that must be gotten out. The bus drivers refuel and head back for one more trip, arriving in an already rain drenched city at 2100 Sunday night.
The bus drivers switch off one last time with the original drivers and law enforcement personnel. Water is beginning to wash over the levees. The buses are back at their pickup points by 2300 Sunday and the last of the citizens to be evacuated thankfully climb on board. The doors close one last time and with police escorts clearing the way, the last of approximately 100,000 citizens without cars or other transportation escape their doomed city.
In less than 48 hours, the heroic bus drivers evacuated as many as 144,000 people, from a metropolitan population of approximately 1.3 million. Depending upon plans, somewhere between four and 12 cities will be caring for at least 12,000 and perhaps as many as 36,000 refugees each.
That”s the fantasy.
Anyone who has ever taken part in disaster planning or in any military action knows that no major city in the world is capable of pulling something like this off. Should the buses have been used? Hell yes. Would they have made a difference? To the people who got on them, they would.
Would they have provided The Answer? Not a chance.
There is only one organization in the world with the budget, personnel and mandate to come even close to something like this: The Federal Emergency Management Agency. And we now know how ready it was.
My Soundtrack: Miss Misery by Elliot Smith on WOXY.
From Jon Stewart: Now, for you people who are saying, Well, stop pointing fingers at the president… left-wing… the media’s being too hard: No. SHUT…UP! No! This is inarguably — inarguably — a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government. Remember when Bill Clinton went out with Monica Lewinsky? That was…
Normally LexisNexis is a very pricey, subscription news service pulling stories from more than 4,000 sources. For the immediate future, however, LexisNexis is making its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath free to non-subscribers. For anyone trying to wrap their minds around Katriina, this is a huge boon.
… we shouldn’t be too full of ourselves. This series of images was taken by the Messenger spacecraft over the course of 24 hours in early August as it headed towards Mercury. I think that one of the most humbling and awe inspiring moments in humanity’s history came when the Apollo 8 astronauts saw the first Earthrise.
Andrew Sullivan has linked to two Hurricane Katrina timelines: Right Wing Nut House and Think Progress. Both agree that the clock started ticking for President Bush on Saturday, 27 August. He didn’t end his vacation until Wednesday, 31 August. Bull Moose makes the case that We have a man-child as President of the United States.
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