"Rod & Betty Jo" wrote in Actually he didn't really
run horse shows but rather was commissioner of
judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association at
apparently a $125,000 a year salary.....Since he was deputy chief of FEMA
in 2001 and became chief in 2003 and has overseen 164 declared national
emergencies including 4 hurricanes last year, claiming he had no
experience is downright silly.
I wonder if there is any relationship between them being "one of the
poorest cities" and the utter ineptitude they showed both before and
following the hurricane?
Well, let's see: 80% of a metropolitan area of close to 1,000,000 people was
evacuated. (The National Geographic article of one year ago about New
Orleans in a major hurricane predicted that no more than 60% could possibly
successfully evacuate).
With a police force when facing their greatest challenge largely
AWOL, hospitals, nursing homes etc. not evacuated, emergency communication
largely non existent......looting and attacks against rescuers instead of
locals rushing out to help.
If you search through any news archives of any hurricane, you will see that
looting is rampant, and the National Guard is always called in immediately
to deal with it. (Including all the hurricanes in Florida). It only became a
news item here because troop help was so slow to arrive.
.....even worse after just a week the mayor feels
his AWOL people need a Vegas vacation........if that is symptomatic of a
ill system I don't know what is....we do know that if the WTC was in New
Orleans there would not have been 400 police and firemen dead from rushing
into the towering infernal......But why blame those directly involved with
a failed disaster response when we can blame those whom are over a
thousand miles away?......Rod

The people in Louisiana and New Orleans successfully managed the intial
disaster response -which was the part that was their responsibility. In a
disaster of national magnitude (meaning one that covers more than one state,
which this one did) it is immediately the federal governments responsibility
to attend to every need as quickly as possible after the disaster. That is
in the FEMA handbook and the Department of Homeland Security handbook. When
you have the heads of those two agencies not even knowing that the levees in
New Orleans had failed more than 24 hours after that happened, you know
you're in deep shit.