More Katrina, Update XIII

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This is just too funny. The Senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu, was interviewed by Chris Wallace yesterday and boy did she dig herself into a grave:

Senator Landrieu, speaking on the Senate floor on Thursday, you were even tougher. Let’s look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LANDRIEU: And I intend to find out why the federal ? particularly the response of FEMA ? was so incompetent and insulting to the people of our states.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Senator Landrieu, I want to ask you ? and I’ll ask you both, but let me start with you ? about the local response.

Was it incompetent and insulting for Mayor Ray Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation, but then to leave buses ? and we have a picture of them ? hundreds of buses idle, so that they could be flooded, instead of using them to get people out.

LANDRIEU: Well, Chris, I was there, as you know, through the whole ordeal with state and local officials, and was right there with Louisiana Democrats and Republicans, city council members, police chiefs, mayors, the governors, and could watch what Haley Barbour was doing and Governor Riley in Alabama.

I am not going to level criticism at the local level. These people did…

WALLACE: But I’d like you to answer, if you could, this one specific question.

LANDRIEU: Well, I will. I will answer it. I am not going to level criticism at local and state officials. Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane. And it’s because this administration and administrations before them do not understand the difficulties that mayors ? whether they are in Orlando, Miami, or New Orleans ? face.

(CROSSTALK)

LANDRIEU: In other words, this administration did not believe in mass transit. They won’t even get people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out…

So she say’s that most public workers are lazy sacks of crap and no Mayor could be expected to get these people working. She then goes on to blame Bush because he doesn’t believe in mass transit!

So we have hundreds of buses and plenty of warning before the hurricane hit but because of Bush they couldn’t get anyone to drive them. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

How about a little more:

WALLACE: Well, look in the picture here. There were hundreds of buses in parking lots. The city and the state.

LANDRIEU: That is underwater. Those…

WALLACE: It wasn’t underwater before the…

LANDRIEU: Those buses were underwater. Those buses…

WALLACE: They weren’t underwater on Saturday; they weren’t underwater on Sunday.

LANDRIEU: We had two catastrophes. We had a hurricane and then we had a levee break. When the levee broke, not only did New Orleans go underwater, but St. Bernard when underwater and St. Tammany Parish went underwater.

WALLACE: But they weren’t underwater on Sunday.

LANDRIEU: And Plaquemines went underwater. And because the mayor evacuated the city, we had the best evacuation between Haley Barbour and Kathleen Blanco of any evacuation I’ve seen. I’m 50 years old; I’ve never seen one any better.

WALLACE: But there were a hundred thousand people left in the city.

LANDRIEU: They did a hundred thousand people left in the city because this federal government won’t support cities to evacuate people, whether it’s from earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. And that’s the truth.

And that will come out in the hearing.

Because the Fed’s wont support cities to evacuate people! Does this make any sense? How is it that the Federal Government is now responsible to evacuate people in a city?

The New Orleans Emergency Plan specifically states the following:

“Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.”

For those lefties out there, it said “RESPONSIBILITY OF THE MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS”.

Want some more?

WALLACE: OK, thank you. But you’re the one who’s done the finger-pointing. You were the one who, on the Senate floor, talked about the federal response being incompetent and insulting to the people of Louisiana. You were the one ? if I might ? and, I want to ask you, also, because you’ve also pointed the finger at the Bush administration for failing to spend enough on flood control.

Here’s what you said this week on the Senate floor. Let’s take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LANDRIEU: They gambled that no one would notice if Louisiana’s critical and vital role in our national economy was threatened. And Washington rolled the dice and Louisiana lost.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: But here is what the Washington Post found in an article this week, Senator. And let’s put that up on the screen if we can: “The Bush administration’s funding requests for the key New Orleans flood-control projects for the past five years were slightly higher than the Clinton Administration’s for its past five years.”

And, Senator, the article went on to say that Louisiana politicians, in too many cases, were involved in pork, rather than in trying to protect the city of New Orleans. And let’s go back to the article. Let’s put up another part of it: “For example, after a $194 million deepening project for the Port of Iberia flunked a Corps…” ? that’s an Army Corps of Engineer ? “… cost-benefit analysis, Sen. Mary Landrieu tucked language into an emergency Iraq spending bill ordering the agency to redo its calculations.”

So, question, Senator: Is it just the president who gambled and lost or, frankly, did a lot of Louisiana politicians, including you?

LANDRIEU: The president gambled and lost, and I’ll tell you why, if you’ll let me answer this question. Number one, it is true that the president gave slightly more than Bill Clinton. But what is also true is Bill Clinton was running the largest deficit created by the Reagan administration before him and the Bush administration before him.

President Bush was running a surplus. Yet, when he had a surplus, he didn’t invest it in levees and flood protection for people from Miami to Orlando to New Orleans to Biloxi or to Mobile. He had other priorities.

Bill Clinton was running the largest deficit?

Um, Bush had a very small surplus his first year but since then he has been running a deficit. Clinton had a surplus. How can she even possibly think she can rewrite history and get away with it?

Funny funny stuff. You can watch the video here.

Then the Mayor was interviewed by Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: What’s the biggest mistake you made?

MAYOR NAGIN: My biggest mistake is having a fundamental assumption that in the state of Louisiana, with an $18 billion budget, in the country of the United States that can move whole fleets of aircraft carriers across the globe in 24 hours, that my fundamental assumption was get as many people to safety as possible, and that the cavalry would be coming within two to three days, and they didn’t come.

MR. RUSSERT: Many people point, Mr. Mayor, that on Friday before the hurricane, President Bush declared an impending disaster. And The Houston Chronicle wrote it this way. “[Mayor Nagin’s] mandatory evacuation order was issued 20 hours before the storm struck the Louisiana coast, less than half the time researchers determined would be needed to get everyone out. City officials had 550 municipal buses and hundreds of additional school buses at their disposal but made no plans to use them to get people out of New Orleans before the storm, said Chester Wilmot, a civil engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert in transportation planning, who helped the city put together its evacuation plan.” And we’ve all see this photograph of these submerged school buses. Why did you not declare, order, a mandatory evacuation on Friday, when the president declared an emergency, and have utilized those buses to get people out?

MAYOR NAGIN: You know, Tim, that’s one of the things that will be debated. There has never been a catastrophe in the history of New Orleans like this. There has never been any Category 5 storm of this magnitude that has hit New Orleans directly. We did the things that we thought were best based upon the information that we had. Sure, here was lots of buses out there. But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren’t available.

MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Mayor, if you read the city of New Orleans’ comprehensive emergency plan– and I’ve read it and I’ll show it to you and our viewers–it says very clearly, “Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.”

It was your responsibility. Where was the planning? Where was the preparation? Where was the execution?

MAYOR NAGIN: The planning was always in getting people to higher ground, getting them to safety. That’s what we meant by evacuation. Get them out of their homes, which–most people are under sea level. Get them to a higher ground and then depending upon our state and federal officials to move them out of harm’s way after the storm has hit.

MR. RUSSERT: But in July of this year, one month before the hurricane, you cut a public service announcement which said, in effect, “You are on your own.” And you have said repeatedly that you never thought an evacuation plan would work. Which is true: whether you would exercise your obligation and duty as mayor or that–and evacuate people, or you believe people were on their own?

MAYOR NAGIN: Well, Tim, you know, we basically wove this incredible tightrope as it is. We were in a position of trying to encourage as many people as possible to leave because we weren’t comfortable that we had the resources to move them out of our city. Keep in mind: normal evacuations, we get about 60 percent of the people out of the city of New Orleans. This time we got 80 percent out. We encouraged people to buddy up, churches to take senior citizens and move them to safety, and a lot of them did. And then we would deal with the remaining people that couldn’t or wouldn’t leave and try and get them to higher ground until safety came.

Great questions by Russert here. When he punches him with a question about his leadership ability Nagin doesn’t answer. He just talks about the city never having to endure a Cat 5 hurricane before and they couldn’t find drivers. Isn’t that kind of stuff spelled out in a Emergency Disaster Plan?

To top it off he say’s they “encouraged” people to leave. Since when does a mandatory evacuation been you “encourage” people to leave?

Russert then ask’s about Amtrak:

MR. RUSSERT: Amtrak said they offered to remove people from the city of New Orleans on Saturday night and that the city of New Orleans declined.

MAYOR NAGIN: I don’t know where that’s coming from. Amtrak never contacted me to make that offer. As a matter of fact, we checked the Amtrak lines for availability, and every available train was booked, as far as the report that I got, through September. So I’d like to see that report.

MR. RUSSERT: They said they were moving equipment out of New Orleans in order to protect it and offered to take evacuees with them.

MAYOR NAGIN: I have never gotten that call, Tim, and I would love to have had that call. But it never happened.

Hmmm, well lookie lookie here:

“In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a ?dead-head? train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. ?We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm?s way,? said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. ?The city declined.?

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.”

The Mayor, The Governor, and The Senator….The voters couldn’t have picked any better huh?

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