Excellent opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today:
It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow.
“Mr. Bush’s performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency,” wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom.
But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.
Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:
“The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”
For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.
Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.
So they libel as a “national disgrace” the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history.
I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:
More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.
The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.
Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.
Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:
“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘Star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.”
The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.
“You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.
“No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above.”
“You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere,” van Steenwyk said.
Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can’t be on the scene immediately.
Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.
And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.
Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.
The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me.
A better question — which few journalists ask — is why weren’t the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?
Any Commission put together to get to the bottom of Katrina will also come to the same conclusion….bah, what am I saying, just look at the 9/11 Commission and their obvious whitewash.
We can always hope they will put together a Commission of people who want to find out the truth rather then posture for their political party.
I know I know, crazy talk.
How about this factoid via The Astute Blogger:
The current death toll from Katrina in New Orleans – and the rest of Louisiana and Mississipp and Alabama – is less than 400. This number is SURE to go up, but it is VERY UNLIKELY that it will reach 10,000 or anything near that dire and irresponsible prediction.
BY COMPARISON: the 2003 heat-wave in Europe killed 35-40,000, (14,847 in France alone; 20,000 in Italy). [More HERE.]
And Hurricane Katrina was a HUGE natural cataclysm which wreaked huge damage to 90,000 square miles! In fact, in terms of the force and breadth of the physical destruction it wreaked, Katrina was the worst natural disater to hit a developed nation in all of human history.
I think this proves that the HYSTERICAL charges by the Left and the MSM they dominate (that the Bush Administration dropped the ball) are entirely unfounded.
In fact, if you subtract the horrifying images of the Superdome and Convention Center from the “newsreels” (and your memories) there was next-to-nothing wrong with the federal response (or the federal, state and local responses in Mississippi and Alabama, whose coasts were savaged more completely by Katrina than was the city of New Orleans). And when considers the FACT that the Superdome and Convention Center debacles were strictly the result of local and state government incompetence, it means that there was absolutely NOTHING wrong with the federal response. PERIOD.Eventually, this truth will come out. The truth always does.
I agree with him, eventually the truth will come out. But as we’re finding out with the Able Danger revelations, it could take years.
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More Katrina, Update XI
More Katrina, Update X
More Katrina, Update IX
A Few Points About Katrina
The Give Me More Generation
More Katrina, Update VIII
More Katrina, Update VII
More Katrina, Update VI
More Katrina, Update V
More Katrina, Update IV
More Katrina, Update III
More Katrina, Update II
More Katrina, Update
More Katrina
Who’s Responsible In New Orleans?
Katrina
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