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Saturday, September 03, 2005
Chaos
This shouldn't happen in America:
As thousands of people sat on the streets of New Orleans, having spent their fourth day waiting to be rescued, the city fell deeper into chaos, with gangs roaming the city and corpses rotting in the sun.
...At the increasingly unsanitary convention centre, the crowds swelled to about 25,000 as people sought food, water and attention, while dead bodies lay in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets both inside and outside the centre. At the city's Charity hospital, the dead were stacked up on the stairways. New Orleans airport was transformed into a huge field hospital, with fleets of military and coastguard helicopters ferrying the sick for treatment.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has been accused of being so concerned about the possibility of a terrorist attack that it failed to prepare properly for a much more inevitable natural disaster.
No, I accuse FEMA of being utterly incompetent. My greatest fear is that they aren't prepared for any disaster of any kind. Or was FEMA worrying that al Qaida was waiting for a hurricane to strike?
There seems also to have been a failure in forward planning. Walter Baumy, a chief engineer with the US army corps of engineers, said the corps was confronted with riverbeds clogged with loose barges and debris and that it could not find contractors able to manoeuvre heavy equipment into the flood zone.
I guess I'm ignorant about this. I just figured the Army Corps of Engineers had its own heavy equipment. Or is that in Iraq, too?
Is "unacceptable" still operable?
Federal officials have defended their response. Michael Chertoff, head of the homeland security department, which has responsibility for Fema, said: "We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, to this terrible tragedy.
"For those who wonder why it is that it is difficult to get these supplies and these medical teams into place, the answer is they are battling an ongoing dynamic problem with the water."
Yeah, who would've anticipated all that water in responding to a flood?
