HURRICANE
KATRINA: Indexed Quotations etc. | September 5, 2005
Scope
| FEMA | Security
| Flood Prevention |
Political/Economic Fallout
FEMA:
INCOMPETENCE
&
LACK
OF
CREDIBILITY
Researched
by
Douglas Drenkow, "Progressive
Thinking" "Only three of
the New Orleans zoo's 1,400 animals died in the wrath of Hurricane
Katrina. The famous Audubon Zoo has the good fortune of being
located on some of the city's highest ground, but it also had an
efficient disaster plan for the animals." -- Los
Angeles Times
"Considering
the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a
city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively
well." -- FEMA
Director Michael Brown (Thursday, the worst day)
"...as
scenes of horror that seemed to be coming from some Third World
country flashed before us, official Washington was like a dog
watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not
seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality...This
was just survival of the richest." -- Bob
Shieffer
"America is
once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting,
raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered
infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels,
and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's
happening in America." -- Maureen
Dowd
"They're
treating us like crap. They have us living like not even
pigs." -- Tina
Wilson, survivor of the Superdome
"It's worse
than being in prison in there. They don't have nothing for
me." -- Cleo
Wilson, 86, heart-patient, survivor of the Superdome
"'They're treating people like prisoners in there,' said
Shelton Alexander as he left the Dome for the thigh-high waters of
Poydras Street. 'It's so hot in there, and people are s--ting on
the floors.'" -- The
Times-Picayune
###
"People became
increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of rescue and evacuation
efforts a full three days after Katrina tore up the US Gulf Coast...
"'We want
help,'' people chanted at the city convention centre, where
thousands of evacuees were told to seek shelter only to find
woefully inadequate supplies of food or water."
-- Reuters,
as reported in "The Age" (Melbourne, Australia)
###
"Four days
after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the northern Gulf
Coast, tired and angry people stranded at the convention center in
New Orleans welcomed a supply convoy carrying food, water, and
medicine with cheers and tears of joy...
"The president
said he is 'satisfied' with the federal government's response to
the Katrina disaster, although there is not 'enough security in
New Orleans, yet.'"
-- CNN
(Friday, Sept. 2, 2005)
###
"Who are we if
we can't take care of our own?" -- Maureen
Dowd
"We are not
sewage." -- Doug
Drenkow
"At the
increasingly unsanitary convention center, crowds swelled to about
25,000 and desperate refugees clamored for food, water and
attention while dead bodies, slumped in wheelchairs or wrapped in
sheets, lay in their midst." -- New
York Times
"It was chaos
[in the convention center]. There was nobody there, nobody in
charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you
should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people.
We saw... people who are dying in front of you." -- CNN
Producer Kim Segal
"Some people there [in the
convention center] have not eaten or drunk water for three or four
days, which is inexcusable. We need additional troops, food, water;
and we need personnel, law enforcement. This has turned into a
situation where the city is being run by thugs." -- Joseph
W. Matthews, the director of the city's Office of Emergency
Preparedness
"...[the recovery operation
has been] carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn
days...the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us any resources
for security. We are like little birds with our mouths open and
you don't have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm.
It's criminal within the confines of the United States that within
one hour of the hurricane they weren't force-feeding us. It's like
FEMA has never been to a hurricane." -- Col.
Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans
"We're just a
bunch of rats." -- Earle
Young, 31, a cook who stood waiting in a throng of perhaps
10,000 outside the Superdome
"...the
evacuations of the hospitals...are going very well." -- Michael
Brown, Head of FEMA
...while at the same
time...
"It's gruesome.
I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a
hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the
basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene
down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no
place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the
most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a
journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water.
There's over 200 patients still here remaining." -- CNN's
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
...and also...
"We still have
200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they
just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous
for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had
fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool
and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know,
many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty
rough." -- Dr.
Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital
"The Next Few
Days Are Critical" -- American Red Cross television
commercial
"The results
are not acceptable." -- President
George W. Bush
"It looks
dysfunctional to me right now." -- Rep.
Diane Watson (D-Calif.)
"I think it
puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern
Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't
respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf
for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a
nuclear or biological attack?" -- Newt
Gingrich
"They don't
have a clue what's going on down here." -- New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
"This plan was
no plan." -- A
New Orleans cop
"...they're
thinking small, man...people are dying and they're dying by the
hundreds...There is nothing happening. And they're feeding the
public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying
down here...Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix
the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."
-- New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
"This is a
national emergency. This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been
here three days, yet there is no command and control." -- Terry
Ebbert, head of homeland security in New Orleans, mirroring
sentiments expressed on the "CBS Evening News" by a FEMA
official in Biloxi, Mississippi
"The
president's declaration that 'I don't think anyone anticipated the
breach of the levees' has instantly achieved the notoriety of
Condoleezza Rice's 'I don't think anybody could have predicted
that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center.'" -- Frank
Rich
"...a replay of
the sinking of the Titanic. New Orleans's first-class passengers
made it safely into lifeboats; for those in steerage, it was a
horrifying spectacle of every man, woman and child for
himself." -- Frank
Rich
"...Michael
Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, was so oblivious to
those on the lower decks that on Thursday he applauded the federal
response to the still rampaging nightmare as 'really exceptional.'
He told NPR that he had 'not heard a report of thousands of people
in the convention center who don't have food and water' -- even
though every television viewer in the country had been hearing of
those 25,000 stranded refugees for at least a day." -- Frank
Rich
"The
unmistakable conclusion one would draw from this was this was a
massive administration failure." -- Donald
P. Green, professor of political science at Yale University
"So America,
once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can't-do government
that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes
those excuses, Americans are dying." -- Paul
Krugman
"In 2004, Mr.
Brown led FEMA's thousands of dedicated disaster workers during
the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA
delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever
before." -- Official
White House Biography of Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary of
Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response
"Michael Brown,
the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA -- a job he trained for by
running something called the International Arabian Horse
Association -- admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there
were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of
Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center." -- Maureen
Dowd
"...things are
going relatively well." -- Michael
Brown, Head of FEMA, Thursday night, the same day as...
"This is a
desperate SOS." -- New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
"The
federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was
fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows. And
before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy
director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant
experience that would have qualified him for the position. The
Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the
time was heading up FEMA." -- Boston
Herald
"In January of
2001, George W. Bush appointed Texas crony Joe Allbaugh to head
FEMA, despite the fact that Allbaugh had exactly zero experience
in disaster management. By April of 2001, the Bush administration
announced that much of FEMA's work would be privatized and
downsized. Allbaugh that month described FEMA as, 'an oversized
entitlement program.'" -- William
Rivers Pitt
"The raw
cronyism of that appointment showed the contempt the
administration felt for the agency; one can only imagine the
effects on staff morale. That contempt...reflects a general
hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And
Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the
consequences of that hostility." -- Paul
Krugman
###
"...in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, FEMA lost its Cabinet-level
status as it was folded into the giant new Department of Homeland
Security. And in recent years it has suffered budget cuts, the
elimination or reduction of key programs and an exodus of
experienced staffers.
"The agency's core budget, which includes disaster
preparedness and mitigation, has been cut each year since it was
absorbed by the Homeland Security Department in 2003. Depending on
what the final numbers end up being for next fiscal year, the cuts
will have been between about 2% and 18%.
"The agency's staff has been reduced by 500 positions to
4,735. Among the results, FEMA has had to cut one of its three
emergency management teams, which are charged with overseeing
relief efforts in a disaster...
"Three out of every four dollars the agency provides in local
preparedness and first-responder grants go to terrorism-related
activities, even though a recent Government Accountability Office
report quotes local officials as saying what they really need is
money to prepare for natural disasters and accidents.
"'They've taken emergency management away from the emergency
managers,' complained Morrie Goodman, who was FEMA's chief
spokesman during the Clinton administration. 'These operations are
being run by people who are amateurs at what they are
doing.'"
-- Los
Angeles Times
###
"You knew that
the levies were vulnerable, you knew New Orleans had a population
of at least 100,000 with no way to travel or evacuate, you knew
that those were the people most vulnerable to a flood. Why didn't
you send busses and flatbed trucks to get those people out of
there before the storm hit? Why didn't you do it after the storm
hit? Why have you STILL not done anything to get them out even as
you see what is happening?" -- Ted
Koppel interviewing Michael Brown, Director of FEMA, who
replied...
"Well Ted, I
don't know why the City and the State didn't have a plan
for evacuation..."
"No sir! I
asked why YOU didn't do it. You are the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, YOU knew the danger, YOU had the
responsibility, why DIDN'T you send the busses and the flatbed
trucks?! Why have you still not done it to this moment?!"
"Ted,
we did all those things."
###
"I
am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare
for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded. I hear from
emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders
nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has
now disappeared." -- James
Lee Witt (who won bipartisan praise for his leadership of the
agency during the Clinton years) during a Congressional hearing in
2004
"FEMA
-- downsized, redirected, budget-slashed, and incompetently led --
has thus far failed utterly to cope with the scope of the
catastrophe." -- William
Rivers Pitt
"Brownie,
you're doing a heck of a job." -- President
George W. Bush to FEMA Director Michael Brown
"We're in our
fifth day and adequate help to quell the situation has not arrived
yet." -- Edwin
P. Compass III, New Orleans police superintendent
"Katrina was
churning in the Gulf of Mexico and on a path to make landfall
anywhere from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana as early as
Monday, possibly as a Category 4 storm." -- CBS
News (Friday, Aug. 26, 2005)
"Katrina was a
Category 3 storm Saturday with 115 mph sustained wind and higher
gusts, and it had appeared to be turning toward the Lousiana-Mississippi
coastline. Forecasters said it will likely gain strength over the
warm water of the Gulf of Mexico." -- CBS
News (Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005)
"...'funding
dried up' for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane...exercise, cutting
off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors...little
attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's 'low-mobility'
population -- the elderly, the infirm, and the poor without cars
or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people. At
disaster planning meetings...'the answer was often silence.'"
-- New
York Times
"They [the
National Guard] are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We
hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where?
We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have
seen no one." -- Phyllis
Petrich, tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton (Thursday)
"It is not a
function of more people, but how many people can you move on the
road system that exists now in Louisiana and in Mississippi. How
many people can you put through that funnel that a storm has taken
four lane highways and turned them into goat trails?" -- Lt.
Gen. H. Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard Bureau
"Did they not
have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude?" -- John
Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org
"FEMA has known this for 20
years. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent,
in studies, training and contingency plans, scenarios, all of that."
-- Martha
Madden, Louisiana secretary of environmental quality from
1987-1988
"Americans who
had been humbled by failures in Iraq saw that the authorities
could not quickly cope with a natural disaster at home." -- New
York Times Editorial
"Thousands
drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and
industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later
perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be
rescued." -- National
Geographic Magazine October, 2004, in an eerily prescient
hypothetical worst-case scenario
"This may well
be one of the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons on
record." -- NOAA
director David Johnson, earlier this year
"Katrina is the
11th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began
June 1. That's seven more than typically has [sic] formed by now
in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico..." -- CBS
News (Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005)
"Meteorologists
think a decade-long trend of active Atlantic hurricane seasons
will continue this summer...During the 2004 season four hurricanes
battered Florida in the space of about six weeks, and another
hurricane lashed North Carolina's Outer Banks. The 45 billion
dollars (U.S.) in damages done by these storms makes the 2004
season the most expensive on record. And that figure doesn't
include millions of dollars in lost income for businesses forced
to close because of the hurricanes." -- National
Geographic News (June 1, 2005)
"The strongest
hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more
intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is
warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Although we cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricane
will occur in the
future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near the
end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have
significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate
conditions." -- The
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of NOAA
###
"When Wal-Mart
sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned
them away...Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from
delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut
the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to
restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr.
[Aaron] Broussard [president of Jefferson Parish] said." -- New
York Times
"We wanted
soldiers, helicopters, food and water. They wanted to negotiate an
organizational chart." -- Denise
Bottcher, press secretary for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of
Louisiana
"Ms. Bottcher
was one of several officials yesterday who said she believed FEMA
had interfered with the delivery of aid, including offers from the
mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, and the governor of New
Mexico, Bill Richardson." -- New
York Times
###
"Yesterday, I was
hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the
regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new
understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the
abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management
Agency. 24 hours later, the President has yet to answer my call
for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA,
now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by
the task at hand.
"I understand that
the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to
help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to
accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant
numbers of victims -- far more efficiently than buses -- FEMA
again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications
equipment, and other desperately needed items continue to flow in,
only to be ignored by the agency.
"But perhaps the
greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee.
Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw
what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a
handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this
critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it
became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared
stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the
desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a
single, lonely piece of equipment." -- US
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), one of The Group of 14
senators key to "the nuclear option" in the upcoming Supreme Court nominations
###
An
Open Letter to the President, from The Times-Picayune
"Dear Mr.
President:
"We heard you
loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the
Gulf Coast and said, 'What is not working, we're going to make
it right.'
"Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise
before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
"Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main
reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River
and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.
"How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are
interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships,
barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.
"Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's
bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their
hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the
city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical
supplies.
"Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work
for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the
Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a
caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring
food, water and supplies to a dying city.
"Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown
New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid
Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a 'Today' show story
Friday morning.
"Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people
whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who
should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about
how our city was impossible to reach.
"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after
our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry.
Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not.
That's to the government's shame.
"Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed
those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm
inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the
death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not
been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The
toll may even have been exponentially higher.
"It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people
inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have
been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they
evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago,
when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as
a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials
think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside
with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling
amounts of food, water and other essentials?
"State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the
city didn't have but two urgent needs: 'Buses! And gas!' Every
official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be
fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
"In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said
his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm
victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning
and said, 'We've provided food to the people at the Convention
Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals,
every single day.'
"Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
"Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told
him, 'You're doing a heck of a job.'
"That's unbelievable.
"There were thousands of people at the Convention Center
because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many
people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles
could have gotten there, too.
"We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than
those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard.
We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or
Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.
"No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have
been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that
New Orleans couldn't be reached.
"Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to
make our beloved communities work right once again.
"When you do, we will be the first to applaud."
###
"In a
reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough
political style, the administration is also working to shift the
blame away from the White House and toward officials of New
Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.
"'The way that emergency
operations act under the law is the responsibility and the
power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state
and local officials,'" Mr. Chertoff said in his television
interview. 'The federal government comes in and supports those
officials.'"
-- New
York Times
###
"'They can't do
that,' former agency chief of staff Jane Bullock said of Bush
administration efforts to shift responsibility away from
Washington. 'The moment the president declared a federal disaster,
it became a federal responsibility….The federal government took
ownership over the response,' she said. Bush declared a disaster
in Louisiana and Mississippi when the storm hit a week ago."
-- Los
Angeles Times
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