Random thoughts
Aug. 31st, 2005 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerWe got back Sunday evening from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wolfgangemilio and littleclaypig's wedding. I was going to post about it, but I got completely distracted by the hurricane coverage. I may come back to the wedding, but not right now.
*
I have never been to New Orleans, but one of the members of my critique group, Harry LeBlanc, grew up there and set his novel in a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. Tainted Cotillion is a fantastically weird, darkly hilarious novel: it has talking rats that have started an organized crime ring to shake down restaurant owners for food, to mention the minor plot thread I was most entertained by. Alas, it currently remains unsold. Harry gave every major character a name that was significant in some way -- the hero, Toussaint, is named after the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion. There's also a viciously nasty old lady named Camille.
*
I can understand the difficulty of creating a reasonable evacuation plan for New Orleans -- not that I condone the plan of leaving the poorest 20% to drown but I can at least recognize that it's going to be really hard to create a plan to get thousands of carless people out of a densely populated city in a short time under incredible pressure.
Creating a plan for dealing with the aftermath should have been do-able, though. The hurricane plan apparently was, "Put everyone in the Superdome." This turned out to be a better plan that I would have thought, as the Superdome made it through the hurricane. From all appearances, however, disaster planning ended with the end of the hurricane. You've got thousands of people in a stadium without air conditioning or toilets, so now what, exactly? According to news reports this morning, they were still trying to figure that out. Late morning reports said that they'd decided to move everyone to the Astrodome in Houston. At least that should have air conditioning and working toilets, which is a big step up, but why on earth did it take this long to figure out a place to send people? They knew this could happen. They've known for decades that this could happen. Oh, and in the last four years we've all stepped up disaster planning, and if the Office of Homeland Security is useful for anything at all they ought to be able to assist cities in planning for mutual cooperation, so why wasn't the Astrodome plan -- or, even better, a plan that didn't hinge on housing thousands of people in a sports stadium -- ready to go on, say, Monday?
*
pegkerr noted in her journal that President Bush only just now cut his vacation short. Someone raised the question of what he should have done.
There are limits to presidential power, obviously, and I don't blame him for the lack of a reasonable evacuation plan; that was the job of the officials of New Orleans. (The lack of money to repair the levees apparently can be traced to expenditures on Bush's war. However, let's set that aside for the moment.)
The post-hurricane evacuation has been a catastrophic failure of planning and initiative. If ever there was a time for the President to use his influence (to lean on governors of neighboring states to offer space), this would be it.
I mean, good grief. If he really couldn't think of anything helpful to do, maybe he should have called Giuliani and asked for ideas.
wolfgangemilio and littleclaypig's wedding. I was going to post about it, but I got completely distracted by the hurricane coverage. I may come back to the wedding, but not right now.*
I have never been to New Orleans, but one of the members of my critique group, Harry LeBlanc, grew up there and set his novel in a post-apocalyptic New Orleans. Tainted Cotillion is a fantastically weird, darkly hilarious novel: it has talking rats that have started an organized crime ring to shake down restaurant owners for food, to mention the minor plot thread I was most entertained by. Alas, it currently remains unsold. Harry gave every major character a name that was significant in some way -- the hero, Toussaint, is named after the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion. There's also a viciously nasty old lady named Camille.
*
I can understand the difficulty of creating a reasonable evacuation plan for New Orleans -- not that I condone the plan of leaving the poorest 20% to drown but I can at least recognize that it's going to be really hard to create a plan to get thousands of carless people out of a densely populated city in a short time under incredible pressure.
Creating a plan for dealing with the aftermath should have been do-able, though. The hurricane plan apparently was, "Put everyone in the Superdome." This turned out to be a better plan that I would have thought, as the Superdome made it through the hurricane. From all appearances, however, disaster planning ended with the end of the hurricane. You've got thousands of people in a stadium without air conditioning or toilets, so now what, exactly? According to news reports this morning, they were still trying to figure that out. Late morning reports said that they'd decided to move everyone to the Astrodome in Houston. At least that should have air conditioning and working toilets, which is a big step up, but why on earth did it take this long to figure out a place to send people? They knew this could happen. They've known for decades that this could happen. Oh, and in the last four years we've all stepped up disaster planning, and if the Office of Homeland Security is useful for anything at all they ought to be able to assist cities in planning for mutual cooperation, so why wasn't the Astrodome plan -- or, even better, a plan that didn't hinge on housing thousands of people in a sports stadium -- ready to go on, say, Monday?
*
pegkerr noted in her journal that President Bush only just now cut his vacation short. Someone raised the question of what he should have done. There are limits to presidential power, obviously, and I don't blame him for the lack of a reasonable evacuation plan; that was the job of the officials of New Orleans. (The lack of money to repair the levees apparently can be traced to expenditures on Bush's war. However, let's set that aside for the moment.)
The post-hurricane evacuation has been a catastrophic failure of planning and initiative. If ever there was a time for the President to use his influence (to lean on governors of neighboring states to offer space), this would be it.
I mean, good grief. If he really couldn't think of anything helpful to do, maybe he should have called Giuliani and asked for ideas.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 06:06 pm (UTC)-Commandeered all city and school buses of New Orleans to evacuate at least some of the people who were showing up at the Superdome on Sunday. You know, *before* it got flooded.
-Not sent the majority of the Louisiana National Guard (along with much of the equipment that would be useful right about now) to Iraq. I heard on the radio that there are about 900 National Guard troops in Louisiana and about 3000 in Iraq.
-Done drills for a cat-4/5 hurricane. Apparently they'd only done drills for a cat-3.
Also, a good source of news about the hurricane is www.nola.com.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-01 01:38 pm (UTC)I also was surprised they hadn't been more prepared for such a disaster - especially with all the hurricanes in the area lately. We don't get a lot of tornadoes right where I live, but we still have preparations in place just in case!