The Hurricane Katrina Mess

• Why wasn't a plan in place to deal with Katrina?

  The Democrats kept screaming that no plan was in place to deal with the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

  Let's look at the facts:

  • There never were any hurricane disasters that big since disaster relief planning was started. Katrina was among the largest (in total area) hurricanes ever.
  • The disaster covered 12 thousand square miles, the largest disaster area ever in the US.
  • There was a plan in place, but the hurricane also destroyed the resources and evacuation equipment the plan was supposed to use.
  • The supplies New Orleans expected to use to help the people in the Superdome were destroyed when the levees broke.
  • Many more roads and bridges were under water or destroyed than the plan expected.
  • The federal funds earmarked for developing an evacuation plan were spent by the City of New Orleans on a study of enlarging the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge.
  • Katrina's eye fed off of the bayous and swamps, surviving halfway into Mississippi before the hurricane died. This caused much more damage.
  • The roads were destroyed for 50 miles inland, making it impossible for rescue teams to even get to New Orleans on land until roads were reopened.
  • Katrina destroyed fuel supplies, making it impossible to get helicopters close enough to aid in the rescue work until an airport in the New Orleans area became functional.
  • Boats already in the area were destroyed for 50 miles around. There was too much debris to get boats from other areas into the area quickly.
  • Just when recovery was about to really begin, Hurricane Rita came in and undid most of the work which already had been done.
  • The supplies government expected to use for relief were thought to be in safe areas. Those supplies were destroyed too.
  • Communications were down in the southern halves of Louisiana and Mississippi for several days.
  • Even when roads were reopened, rescue workers had no place to stay in the damaged area. They had to be returned to bases of operations more than 100 miles away.
  • People didn't blindly obey the government like the plan expected.
  • If you could plan everything, there would be no disasters. Too many people worship government and think of it as an omnipotent power.
• Where did government go wrong before the emergency?

  Government did the following wrong before the emergency:

  • The city should never have been built below sea level.
  • New Orleans mayor Nagin did not order the evacuation until it was too late. He was doing what the casino hotels wanted. The hotels threatened to sue if he ordered the evacuation.
  • The New Orleans levees were designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane. Hurricane Katrina was category 5.
  • The levees were not designed to resist being overtopped with water. Once water started flowing over the tops of the levees, it ate away the levee foundations on the other side.
  • Because the New Orleans levees were not on navigable federal waterways, they were not the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers. The government of the City of New Orleans was supposed to maintain them. They did not do so.
  • The box beam design of the bridges that were destroyed caused the roadway sections to FLOAT up off their piers. Nobody ever dreamed the water could get that high, so the sections were held in place by gravity. The ones on the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge were not badly damaged, and were lifted back into place with cranes. The ones on US 90 crashed into each other and were destroyed. The US 90 bridges had to be rebuilt.
  • 12 thousand National Guardsmen were deployed to the expected landfall area. Ordinarily that many would have been enough. It wasn't nearly enough in this case.
  • People didn't blindly obey the government like the plan expected.
  • School buses were available, but were not used for evacuation. Why? A school administrator who evacuated early took the keys to all of the buses with him to keep the buses from being stolen or looted. The buses were last seen half drowned in floodwater. If they had been used for evacuation, they would not have been damaged.
• Where did government go wrong during the emergency?

  Government did the following wrong during the emergency:

  • FEMA put an ad on TV saying,

    "If you are stranded by the hurricane and need to be evacuated, LOG ON OUR WEBSITE."

    Smaaart!

    • For this plan to work, a stranded person needed (but usually didn't have) all of the following:
      1. A working television station in the area (this was before the stupid digital changeover reduced TV range)
      2. Electrical power
      3. A working TV set
      4. The TV is on and tuned to the correct channel
      5. A working computer
      6. Working communications to the Internet Service Provider (ISP)
      7. A working ISP
      8. A working connection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet
    • The website was coded with what was then the latest Internet Explorer proprietary bells and whistles, so:
      1. It worked correctly only if you use Internet Explorer 6.
      2. Netscape, Opera, and Firefox didn't work with it on PC computers.
      3. Mac, LINUX, and UNIX computers couldn't access it.
      4. Government helped strengthen Microsoft's monopoly instead of helping the victims.
  • The New Orleans mayor tried to repopulate the city too soon. There was no clean water supply, and most places had no power or sewer service. The levees broke later the day he allowed people back in, when everyone thought it was over.
  • The first government teams arriving in Louisiana took no communications equipment except their cell phones. Cell phones don't work without working cell phone towers.
  • The Louisiana National Guard lost most of its equipment when the levees broke. Their primary deployment point was very near where the first levee broke. Most of the supplies they brought, and all of their Humvees, other land vehicles, and emergency generators, were suddenly under water. They had only 12 boats left, and one of those was a personal fishing boat belonging to the unit commander.
  • The first thing Katrina did was take out the roads, power, and communication. All of the power and phone lines were underground in New Orleans. Without power, the cell phone towers that were still standing didn't work. The salt water shorted out the telephone circuits. The only communication devices the National Guard had which worked were some satellite phones. The civil authorities were cut off from the National Guard, and from each other.
  • After 3 days without power, most of the batteries failed in the electronic equipment the National Guard was using. They had planned to use the generators to recharge them. So they resorted to using runners and boats to communicate.
  • Except for trained policemen and firemen, all OSHA regulations were in full force for all FEMA relief workers. No wonder so little got done. They were required to do full industrial safety and decontamination procedures when working around floodwaters contaminated with oil, chemicals, or sewage.
  • FEMA officials required doctors to register with FEMA in Birmingham before working in relief and evacuation centers. The paperwork was more important to the government than the victims.
  • Unregistered doctors were required to leave the New Orleans evacuation center at the airport to go to Birmingham, even though there were no registered doctors there at the time.
  • The official who required doctors to register was afraid of being sued by families of victims for "wrongful death" if he let unregistered doctors work. He should have been sued for the wrongful deaths from the lack of doctors.
  • City officials opened gymnasiums and auditoriums in Kenner LA to rescue workers. But no homeless people were allowed in. City officials were afraid the refugees would trash their buildings like they did the Superdome.
  • Storm victims in Kenner LA were living in their watersoaked housing complex. The power was off and mold was growing. The dilemma was that dampness causing the mold would have been alleviated if air conditioning could have been used, but the same dampness in the walls made it unsafe to turn on power to the buildings. Nobody thought of powering fans or air conditioners with portable generators.
  • Instead of using their boats and helicopters to help stranded people, NOAA was too busy trying to recover 8 trained dolphins. The dolphins escaped from a Gulfport aquarium into the Gulf of Mexico due to the storm surge. We had some badly misplaced priorities here!
  • People contributed money to Noah's Wish, an organization formed to rescue lost pets in New Orleans, instead of working to save human victims. Again, misplaced priorities.
  • Many "unsavable" victims who FEMA triage doctors left to die needed nothing but clean drinking water to recover.
  • Louisiana's governor couldn't contact federal disaster agencies for several days because communications were out.
  • Fallen trees blocked every road. Independent rescuers in Mississippi had to cut up fallen trees with axes and chainsaws for six hours just to reach the devastated area. It would have taken much longer if a volunteer hadn't showed up driving a frontloader.
  • Even when roads were reopened, rescue workers had no place to stay in the damaged area. They had to be returned to bases of operations more than 100 miles away. So the time they had available to work each day was limited.
  • A church group opened a relief center in Slidell LA in a damaged church building, where private relief workers stayed. But government workers were not allowed to stay there because government said the building was too badly damaged to be safe. But what had been done to the church was removal of the watersoaked bottom story wall coverings.
  • The possibility of toxic materials in the floodwaters meant that all rescuers had to wear toxic spill protection. Only a limited number of hazmat suits were available, so only a few workers could work at any one time.
  • Many bridges were out, including the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge and three bridges on US 90. No roads leading to New Orleans were passable until the 4th day after Katrina hit.
  • So many people got on the I-10 bridge in downtown New Orleans that helicopters couldn't land there until enough people were removed.
  • Because there were too many people on the I-10 bridge, the crews on the helicopters were dropping cases of bottle water to the bridge. Most of the plastic bottles broke.
  • Only one airport in the area was still usable: The Naval Air Station at Belle Chasse. They had to bring in two portable air traffic control systems to handle all of the rescue and relief traffic.
  • Most of the National Guard soldiers got only one meal a day, because they donated the others to the victims.
  • Eventually, 50 thousand National Guardsmen were called up to deal with the disaster after its extent was known. But most of them had evacuated to locations unknown, and could not be found until they heard about their call-up on TV.
  • Without power, the pumps which kept New Orleans dry stopped working. With the levees broken, the pumps couldn't keep the water out anyway. But then the pump houses filled with water, disabling the pumps for long periods.
  • 19 thousand people broke into the Convention Center (a mile from the Superdome) and rode out the storm there. The problem was that none of the authorities knew they were there, until a newscast about it was seen by the National Guard on a portable television that was brought to their headquarters.
  • A town on the other side of the Mississippi River refused to let refugees crossing a bridge to enter the town. They guarded and barricaded the bridge to stop them from entering, even though many of the refugees were New Orleans employees who had stayed to help with the emergency.
• Where did government go wrong after the emergency?

  Government did the following wrong after the emergency:

  • The US president can't send relief aid to a state until the governor requests it. LA governor Kathleen Blanco hadn't requested aid before communications were lost. Then communications were out for many days.
  • The Red Cross had supplies near the Superdome, but the state ordered them to not take supplies to the Superdome because "it would attract more refugees."
  • Some US senators screamed that the budget couldn't be cut anywhere to get money to fund Katrina relief efforts. But, compared to the needs in the disaster area, all spending on art, music, sports, theater, parks, or recreation is trivially unnecessary. Those senators were thinking of only themselves and their prospects for being re-elected.
  • Politicians screamed that the rebuilding wasn't done soon enough. Most of them demanded more money to get it done. But the money already appropriated wasn't spent yet, because there weren't enough workers there to do the work and there weren't enough places for workers to live in the area.
  • FEMA evicted the inhabitants of their trailers, even though there was no place for them to live yet.
  • FEMA kept 8000 new trailers in Hope AR for 18 months. Federal Law required that they must be given to other government agencies, but no other government agencies asked for them.
  • Hospitals in New Orleans were overcrowded, but the city had ordered specially-equipped medical trailers a week after the disaster. It took 8 months for them to arrive, and they were never used.
  • Because Democrats hate profit, they created laws to make sure that private individuals can never profit from government social programs. Those laws prevented the aid from being given to victims, because doing so would be a profit for private individuals.
  • The FEMA trailers used for temporary housing had the formaldehyde-urea insulation which was the subject of investigations.
  • Government wrongly kept people away from their homes for long periods, causing nearly double the damage that not doing this would have caused. If government had let people in for the purpose of ventilating their homes and removing watersoaked interior wall coverings, over half of the homes which became uninhabitable could have been saved. But because of this delay, structural members had time to rot, making these houses total losses.
  • Government advertised for truckers with their own semi-trailers to be paid to carry relief supplies from Marengo IN to New Orleans LA. The following fiasco happened:
    1. 256 truckers showed up with their trucks.
    2. All of them went through 3 days of filling out paperwork.
    3. Only after all of the paperwork and background checks were done did they begin loading any trucks.
    4. They had only 3 men and one forklift to load the trucks with.
    5. It took 8 days to load 64 trucks with the supplies they had.
    6. They had only enough supplies to fill 64 trucks.
    7. The other 192 drivers were not paid for the 11 days they were there.
• Where did other people do wrong?

  Here is other people did wrong:

  • People didn't blindly obey the government like the plan expected.
  • Many of the poor refused to leave their homes until it was too late.
  • Many of the poor who refused to leave feared that their homes would be bulldozed as "unsalvageable" if they weren't there to guard them.
  • Looters and armed men hampered rescue and relief efforts.
  • Scares were circulating that land belonging to poor people would be taken by eminent domain and given to development projects.
  • The National Guard said the media embellished the violence at the Superdome and the Convention Center.
  • A truck driver complained about "rich people" he saw taking some of the donated food. He said they should have sold their Cadillacs and SUVs to buy food. But he didn't realize that:
    1. Some of them were volunteers (with some of the few working vehicles left in the area) picking up supplies to deliver to others without transportation.
    2. The Cadillacs and SUVs could have been all they had left.
    3. No businesses were open in the area, due to the lack of power, lack of water, and lack of operating banks. Thus, there is a general lack of money in the area.
    4. Where could they have sold cars? There were no businesses operating in the area.
    5. If they sold the car, how could they get around? They couldn't have traded for cheaper cars.
    6. Buy food? Where??? Nothing was open. There was no power. The food stocks were contaminated.
  • Nobody seems to realize that a lot of wealth was forever destroyed:
    1. Many business records were destroyed forever.
    2. Many banks, even if they survived with little damage and loss of records, had no money left. The money deposited in the banks was mostly invested in mortgages on buildings which no longer existed.
    3. Most of the jobs in the area were permanently destroyed.
    4. Most of the communications in the area were out. There were no working cell phone towers, no working telephones, and no working radio or TV stations.
    5. In many cases, all of the information telling what land is owned by who was also destroyed, including survey marks, deeds, mortgage records, and government records.
  • Homeowners in the 9th Ward demanded "equal" treatment to that given to two other neighborhoods which had only wind damage, not flooding. They demanded that their power and other utilities be turned on at the same speed that the other neighborhoods got their services restored. They didn't see that a lot more work has to be done in their neighborhoods before it would even be possible to restore utilities, for the following reasons:
    1. Before power, water, or sewer service could be restored to a given block which was flooded, EVERY house or other property in the block had to be checked for safety for the given utility. If ANY house on that block had unsafe connections, had broken wires or plumbing, had damaged service entrances, or had fallen down, the entire block was unsafe for restoration of the affected utilities.
    2. Telephone and cable TV service depend on power being available to the area to run the amplifiers needed. Likewise, cellular towers need power to work.
    3. Utility people had no right to enter private properties of residents who were absent in order to ascertain that the service entrance and interior equipment were safe. So those who returned were waiting on those who hadn't yet returned.
    4. Much of the distribution equipment was underground, and so it was also underwater. It was contaminated by the floodwaters. Making it safe again was a huge job. Zoning laws requiring underground electrical services "for aesthetic reasons" were also at fault here. Every one of those underground feeders and service entrances had to be dried out and/or replaced.
    5. Power had to be brought to substations and the substations had to be in working order before power could be delivered to neighborhoods served by those substations.
  • People demanded an impossible swiftness of government aid, given the nature of government itself and the lack of available funding. Many people believed the false notion that government can create wealth.
  • The government proposed buying out people who lived in the worst flooded areas, rather than restoring their homes, because those same homes would likely be destroyed again. The people owning that property loudly protested this, saying that government must put everything back the way it was.
  • Nobody in the flooded areas of New Orleans can get flood insurance, due to the high risk of another flood. The entire town of English Indiana was moved for this reason.
• Why did people do the wrongs they did?

  They feared what the law would do:

  • New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he didn't order a mandatory evacuation because he was afraid he would be sued by the hotels.
  • The FEMA official who required doctors to register in Birmingham was afraid of being sued by families of victims for "wrongful death" if he let unregistered doctors work.
  • Scares were circulating that the land owned by blacks would be taken by eminent domain and given to some development project if they "abandoned" it by evacuating.
  • The Red Cross had supplies near the Superdome, but the state ordered them to not take supplies to the Superdome because it would attract more refugees.
  • City officials opened gymnasiums and auditoriums in Kenner LA to rescue workers. But no homeless people were allowed in because they feared damage and looting.
  • Except for trained policemen and firemen, all OSHA regulations were in full force for all FEMA relief workers.
  • The President can't legally send any aid until the governor of the state requests it.

  The lawyers had them quaking in their soggy boots.

• Why can't government do what is needed to prevent and relieve disasters?

  People expect government to have superhuman powers. It doesn't have such powers. Note the following:

  • No government plan existed to deal with the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906.
  • No government plan existed to deal with the fire in Chicago that burned down half the City.
  • In most cases, there was no advance knowledge that a disaster is about to occur.
  • In the case of Katrina, nobody imagined the size of the disaster.
  • Katrina was so big that government could not have possibly aided everyone affected.
  • As long as politicians don't want people to profit from government spending, nobody will receive any government aid.
• Why did it take so long to reopen the Port of New Orleans after the disaster?

  Lake Pontchartrain was fuil of debris, including many sunken ships and the floating sections of the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge. These had to be removed first.

• Why did government allow oil companies to have record profits after the disaster?

  People have the wrong idea of what constitutes "profit":

  • Fact: Most people, and especially most news reporters, have no idea what "business profit" really is. It's not just the money which goes to the executives and the stockholders.
  • Under federal definitions, profit includes all money the company spends to build, expand, repair, and renovate facilities. This definition was probably made that way by liberals, so they could TAX the money spent on building, expanding, repairing, and renovating facilities.
  • So ALL of the money being spent by the oil companies to repair or replace the oil platforms, pipelines, docks, and refineries which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is paid for out of that "record profit".
  • Federal accounting rules require this money to be called "profit." So the sneaky rules liberals made came back and bit them. But they won't admit it, because they want to spend that tax money and win elections.
  • Government created this ironic dilemma:
    • If oil companies had record profit, they repaired destroyed facilities, and gas prices came down.
    • If oil companies were denied high profits, gas prices would have been higher because those facilities remained idle.
  • As usual, liberals went off half-brained and blamed the wrong thing. They screamed "price gouging!" at the attempts to reduce prices.
• Was the evacuation system used in Hurricane Katrina racially biased?

  People complained that most people who did not evacuate were black. They made accusations that the evacuation system was somehow racially biased. But note the following

  1. Most of the people who refused to leave their property were black. That was a matter of choice.
  2. Someone started a rumor that, if people left their property, it would be confiscated by "white man" and not returned to them.
  3. More likely it will be bulldozed as being contaminated. But they would still hold title to the land they owned.
  4. All of the paperwork the Democrats created to make sure nobody profited from a disaster caused people to not get any aid.
  5. NBC was looking for people to blame for the disaster, rather than blaming the hurricanes themselves.
• Why do people believe the following things?

  The following items must be the products of overactive imaginations. They need a healthy dose of reality check:

  1. There was a conspiracy to "get blacks" in the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
  2. The government somehow steered Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans.
  3. The federal government intentionally delayed aid to Hurricane Katrina victims.
  4. The President is aware of and is in control of every minute detail of running the country.
  5. Government has the power to prevent or immediately remedy any disaster.
• Why did government efforts fail so miserably?

  Government workers were shackled by all of the various government working rules.

  • Government demanded that all of the relief workers be vetted and documented.
  • The paperwork was more important than the actual work.
  • Officials were thinking "Me first!"
  • Officials were afraid of getting sued.
  • Officials were afraid that refugees would damage government property.
  • Officials wanted to make sure that no private individuals made any profit from the disaster.
• Was God mad at America?

  Then New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said "God is mad at America for the war in Iraq" He needed a reality check. If God had really been mad at America, it was for the following:

  1. All of the sin going on in the French Quarter of New Orleans
  2. Permitting elective abortions
  3. Permitting homosexuality and (some states) homosexual marriages
  4. Permitting assisted suicide (some states)
  5. Permitting free sex
  6. Siding with everything GLBT
  7. Taking Him out of the schools
  8. Giving other religions more rights than Christianity has
  9. Trying to force people to disobey their religious beliefs
  10. Teaching evolution as the origin of life
  11. Worshiping government
  12. Worshiping created things (such as the environment)
  13. Worshiping humanity
• Why were private efforts so successful while government efforts failed so miserably?

  Government workers were shackled by all of the various government working rules.

  • No government plan existed to deal with the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906.
  • No government plan existed to deal with the fire in Chicago that burned down half the City.
  • In most cases, there was no advance knowledge that a disaster was about to occur.
  • In the case of Katrina, nobody imagined the size of the disaster in advance.
  • Katrina was so big that government could not have possibly aided everyone affected.
  • As long as politicians don't want people to profit from government spending, nobody will receive any government aid.
  • The private efforts had God working for them. When they needed something God provided it through other people.
  • The private workers were not saddled by the bureaucracy and red tape the government workers had to go through.
  • Communications were out. But the private workers were using CB and ham radio equipment and short-range no-license walkie-talkies they brought with them.
  • Fallen trees blocked every road. Independent rescuers in Mississippi had to cut up fallen trees with axes and chainsaws for six hours just to reach the devastated area. It would have taken much longer if a volunteer hadn't showed up driving a frontloader.
  • Even when roads were reopened, government rescue workers had no place to stay in the damaged area. They had to be returned to bases of operations more than 100 miles away, so the time they had available to work each day was limited.
  • A church group opened a relief center in Slidell LA in a damaged church building, where private relief workers stayed. Government workers were not allowed to stay there because government said the building was too badly damaged to be safe. But what had been done to the church was removal of the watersoaked bottom story wall coverings.
  • The possibility of toxic materials in the floodwaters meant that all government rescuers had to wear toxic spill protection. The private workers were in not in the polluted areas until after the pollution was mostly washed away.