Comments on: They Saw It Coming: They Looked Away

By: Bob

Bob — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 16:56:25 +0000

Chicago mayor Richard Daly offered FEMA quite a bit of aid and all they would accept was one tank truck…What jerks! That happened last Sunday and to this day they still haven’t taken his offer!

By: spyder

spyder — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 20:18:36 +0000

Chris Collins point regarding Asia cannot be underestimated. Huge catastrophic typhoons continue to slam into those nations, yet their loss of life and infrastructure is significantly less. The reason has to do with their systems of preparedness and rehearsal. They practice evacuations, they know where to focus resources prior to the storms landfalls. That FEMA can’t even spend a wee bit of time observing and learning from the Japanese, Chinese(Taiwan and Mainland), Phillipines, etc, is even more indicative of their failure to be a functioning disaster preparedness agency. It is now highly unlikely that their plans and potential implementation of them in the case of terrorist attacks are to any degree worthwhile or useful.

By: Arun

Arun — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:17:59 +0000

Via Josh Marshall, how a stake was driven through the heart of FEMA:

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2004-09-22/cover.html

It is from 2004 and is therefore not hindsight.

Waugh, the Georgia State University expert, says that the recent hurricanes could serve as a wake-up call to highlight FEMA’s drift in priorities. “If you talk to FEMA people and emergency management people around the country, people have almost been hoping for a major natural disaster like a hurricane, just to remind DHS and the administration that there are other big things–even bigger things than al Qaeda.

“This is an exposed nerve in the emergency management community, in the sense that resources have been shifted away from hurricanes, tornados and other kinds of disasters–the kind of disasters that are more likely to occur than terrorism.”

By: More Disastrous Disaster Planning | Cosmic Variance

More Disastrous Disaster Planning | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:13:08 +0000

[...] There’s a lot more along the lines of the earlier post on Sidney Bleumenthal’s article. There was a Salon article by Michael Scherer on the issue, entitled Anatomy of an unnatural disaster, and here’s an extract: – Eric Tolbert, a former top disaster response official in the Bush administration, knew a calamity like Hurricane Katrina would be coming, sooner or later. And he also knew that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where he worked until February, was not ready to properly respond. There were too few full-time employees, not enough contracts in place to provide assistance, and a lack of money to do proper pre-planning. The added burden of the war on terror, he says, diverted funds away from FEMA’s core mission. [...]

By: Chris Collins

Chris Collins — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 11:12:56 +0000

This headline could be read more than one way: Apart from the lack of long-term planning for such a disaster, the fact is, the area wasn’t hit by a tsunami. It was hit by a storm that anyone could see on the weather map, days in advance. That people couldn’t’ or for whatever reason wouldn’t, evacuate suggests a failiure of society at the level of government and of communities. If it were Australia or Japan, I think there would have been a lot fewer casualties. I live in the U.K. and we don’t often see places like Louisiana on television programs; this is probably the first time I, along with much of the rest of the world, will have seen areas like those flooded, and it really does look like a second-world country, with at best a second-class government.