FEMA, Communication Breakdown

I said earlier that I wasn’t interested in the partisan politics and the nasty fingerpointing about who did what wrong because most of the people spent their time badmouthing Bush and were not offering solutions to the problems of the moment. It felt to me like opportunistic grandstanding and inappropriate.

I felt that the most important job was to work together on search and rescue operations and to do whatever we could to try and make sure that lives were saved.

Now I am ready to look very hard at the situation and like so many others say what the hell is wrong with FEMA, but not just that, what the hell happened to the local and state authorities. They must have had plans.

Everyone who has taken the time to excoriate Bush has mentioned how this was a known scenario. They spend time talking about how he should have made arrangements, how he should have done this and that.

Well I am not trying to protect the man, but I do want to lay responsibility in the appropriate areas. Certainly if this was so well known the local and state authorities should have had plans on how to deal with this. What happened to these plans and what prevented them from moving more smoothly.

Because the local and state authorities should have been the first line of defense and then there should have been the FEMA plan. There should have been something in place. Michael Brown dealt with four hurricanes last year, he had some experience but it doesn’t seem to be showing.

So now I want to know what happened and what is going to happen to fix this so that it doesn’t happen again.

I’ll reiterate that I think that a lot of the opportunistic grandstanding is disgusting. The problem with the levees cannot be laid at the feet of Bush, it was an issue that preceded him. Carter, Clinton, LBJ and Reagan all cut those dollars too.

In 1947 a hurricane in New Orleans flooded large parts of the city and caused $100 Million in damage. This danger was not unknown.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t look at Bush with a critical eye and that I do not think that he could have done better too. I do, but the amount of hatred being spewed towards him is preventing a real and logical analysis of this tragedy and the way it has been handled and that is a real issue.

This is a tragedy an even bigger tragedy is about to take place. We mustn’t allow anger and emotion to prevent our learning from this so that we do better and this is not allowed to repeat itself again.