New Orleans Update

When campaigning for Louisiana Governor, Kathleen Blanco touted her competence regarding emergency preparedness:

first we would organize the office of emergency preparedness, a very terrifically professional operation; we would then encourage everyone — wherever we can determine where this hurricane will be landing — to begin evacuation processes immediately. We must protect the safety of our citizens. Then I think the next thing we need to do, is make sure all of our citizens — will be working with the media of course — are prepared for the areas that wont have such a direct impact but they are positioned correctly. And I will be on the media working with you and telling our people how to prepare for this hurricane attack. We pretty well have noted that, that Louisiana have weathered these storms on many, many occasions.

Of course, when the crisis came, Blanco's actions fell well short. Sorry about that, chief.

The December 6th New Orleans Times-Picayune shows Blanco re-launching the blame game, still targeting FEMA as the patsy:

In the postmortem on the state and federal response to Katrina, one of the key questions will be why it took so long to get thousands of people out of New Orleans after the storm.

Indeed, Blanco focused specifically on the federal failure to quickly provide buses in the written narrative that she supplied last week to congressional committees investigating the government response to the storm. She noted a conversation on the day of the storm with Michael Brown, the former head of FEMA, promising her that "FEMA has 500 buses on standby, ready to be deployed." When those did not arrive, the governor's staff jumped into action to get their own buses, Blanco wrote in her day-by-day breakdown of her activities.

But Blanco's own documents, released last week, are damning evidence to the contrary:

Though there was a focus on getting people out of the city, the governor did not issue the executive order that speeded the process of getting the buses until late Wednesday evening, Aug. 31. And the buses did not begin to appear in significant numbers -- growing eventually to 1,500 total commandeered -- until Thursday, Sept. 1, three days after the storm hit. By that time, the promised buses from FEMA also had begun to show up, according to people who were involved.

Right after the hurricane's winds began to subside, several of Blanco's aides concentrated first on boats necessary to rescue people from rooftops and attics. They later began to focus on buses to evacuate the growing number of people gathering on Interstate 10 and at the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center -- many without food or water in the oppressive August heat.

The first general evacuation buses did not begin showing up at the Dome until Thursday morning, said Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard, who oversaw security at the Dome as well as led the troops that secured the Convention Center on Friday. For the people waiting, the absence of transportation out of the increasingly uncomfortable shelters was acute.

"That is what they asked, 'When are we leaving? When are the buses going to be here?' " Thibodeaux said. "The anxiety that they felt: It kind of hurt us in our heart." . . .

But e-mails among Blanco's top staff indicate that there were some hitches in the bus-gathering activities Wednesday, prompted by the news from [Office of Rural Development head and top Blanco aide Ty] Bromell and Kleinpeter that FEMA would be filling the void.

"FYI . . . Ty instructed us that we didn't need buses. . . . We turned down a lot," wrote Rochelle Michaud Dugas, the governor's legislative director, on Wednesday about 9:30 p.m. . .

Bromell said his staff, who initially started making the bus calls Tuesday, resumed again after he spoke with the governor Wednesday afternoon. But by that point, many of the school board offices had closed for the day, making it difficult to reach the various superintendents.

Instead Bromell turned his attentions to helping write the executive order, which they later e-mailed to all the superintendents so they would see it first thing Thursday morning, he said.

The Baton Rouge Advocate agrees:

On Sept. 1, the same night that Nagin snapped at Blanco and President George W. Bush to stop holding "goddamn press conferences" until resources were delivered to his ruined city, the governor suggested dropping a prepared statement into New Orleans from the air.

Blanco's press secretary, Denise Bottcher, considered that a bad idea.

"I don't believe it's appropriate given the urgent nature and need to drop water and food," Bottcher wrote in an e-mail.

Nagin said he was tired of the repeated promises from the governor and the White House that 40,000 soldiers were on the way.

At the same time, the governor of Puerto Rico's frustration was mounting as he waited for Blanco to send a letter clearing his troops to come to Louisiana to help.

Puerto Rico wanted to send more than 1,000 National Guard members trained in hurricane relief.

"I don't know what to do and they keep calling me to get the latest as the troops are literally on standby to be deployed," Blanco's Capitol Hill lobbyist Stephanie Leger e-mailed an administration aide on Sept. 2.

"Can you please let me know what to do???" she continued. "I don't want to piss them off."

Indeed, even the NY Times reports Blanco focused more on burnishing her reputation than implementing pre-existing State disaster plans:

"We need to keep working to get our national surrogates to explain the facts - that the federal response was anemic and had been shortchanged by budget cuts and avoiding responsibilities like protecting Louisiana levees and wetlands," Mr. Kopplin wrote in one e-mail message a week after the storm hit.

"The governor needs to stay on message, and that is getting people out of New Orleans, provide stability for them and rebuild," Mr. Anderson wrote on Sept. 1. "The governor must look like the leader at all times."

Some of the best Katrina coverage comes from Junk Yard Blog's Bryan Preston--and he's livid:

The more I think about this, the more of a smoking gun I think it is. Blanco had her top personnel working not on storm relief, but on political relief. Rather than working strategies to get food and transportation lined up, they were lining up an air war against President Bush. Her actions are beyond criminal, and her decisions are beyond appalling. What we see in the Blanco communications is an attitude in which saving herself from political fallout took precedence over saving stranded people from floodwaters.

Now that we know this, it’s incumbent on all bloggers who have spent any time on Katrina to talk about this. The press will let Blanco off the hook if we let them. If she gets away with politicizing Katrina, she may be getting away with negligent homicide. At the very least, she’ll be getting away with a grotesque lie that has massively distorted the American people’s view of the storm and its aftermath. Her lie may well have profound consequences on the way we respond to storms in the future.

We now know the city levees were poorly constructed and destined to fail. As usual, Congress could do better. No one's defending Mike Brown's appointment or performance. And Federal help -- however flawed -- is by statute set-up as a secondary response.

Still, some blame racism or President Bush. Time Magazine and many in the blogosphere know otherwise. Says Junk Yard Blog regarding Blanco and Mayor Nagin:

They jumped all right, but not into action. They jumped into the blame game. They went out and dug up James Lee Witt and they got their national Democrat allies to start spinning the politics of the storm. It was on Sept 1 that Nagin gave his infamous and profane radio interview blaming Bush for the debacle. Meanwhile, the buses of New Orleans sat there in half a dozen lots around the city, some less than a mile from the Superdome where thousands were stranded. The buses flooded and became inoperable. Blanco and Nagin pivoted to blame FEMA and Bush, hoping to cover up their own failure, once the magnitude of their multiple blunders became apparent.

Look, this storm created a gigantic zone of destruction that ranged from New Orleans to Florida. Some confusion in the response to a disaster of this magnitude is to be expected, at all levels. What I find unacceptable is Blanco and Nagin’s response. They failed to prepare, then failed to use all available resources to evacuate, then failed to respond adequately, then allowed their own governing structures to collapse, then encouraged looting, then spread rumors of rampant lawlessness, then blamed it all on Bush and used their national Democrat allies to help ratchet up that blame. When it counted most, Blanco and Nagin not only failed to step up and lead, they helped create a monstrous myth to cover for their own incompetence.

(via Michelle Malkin)