Reader 'Scotian' expresses a good point in comments to a post at Kevin Drum's site. It articulates what I've been mulling as I've listened to the media interviews of people in New Orleans expressing increasing frustration at the relief that has not arrived:

What really appalls me about all of this is that for the preceding 24-36 hrs before Katrina struck it had become obvious that this storm was going to wreak tremendous damage. So why then did not the federal government actually preposition as much as possible the obvious supplies, resources, and so forth? Take the ships that were just deployed to the region, if they had started their trip back then they would be in place a good two days earlier. No, there has been no leadership both before and after this hurricane struck, and I have to wonder how many avoidable deaths will end up having occurred because of this lack of thought/planning. I fear that though is an unanswerable question....

A nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans interviewed by CNN tonight, after describing conditions of trying to care for patients with no electricity and no running water and having to hand pump patients' ventilators, basically told the CNN host that she has been told for the past two days that the patients and hospital staff would be evacuated, but for some reason, help has not come. The nurse was almost in tears. A patient had died and been wrapped in a body bag because of the conditions. You basically can't provide modern medicine with no electricity and no running water. The nurse couldn't really understand why help had not arrived to one of only a handful of hospitals in the city. The host promised to put her plea to the FEMA director who she would be interviewing later in the program. Running downstairs later tonight, I heard a CNN reporter describing refugees from New Orleans moved to some other town in Louisiana that had not been equipped with anything, no portapotties, etc. I mean, talk about a way to start a health crisis.

It's not like this is Darfur. As Scotian points out, there was some warning about this hurricane. And one would expect that federal, state and local agencies would be practicing as a matter of course for similar crises, admittedly perhaps not as severe as the way the flooding engulfed New Orleans. And all such crises are inherently unpredictable and full of constantly moving targets. But so many things are predictable -- people need to be evacuated, electricity will go out and therefore the power needed to run water will shut down, the infirm and hospitalized will need to be rescued, law and order will need to be secured, refugees will need to be sheltered and given access to food, clean water and washing facilities. There seems to be an eerie deer in the headlights reaction to the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans coming through from the media reports. It's hard to believe four years after 9/11 that the response is not more effective.

Update: I guess Bush tried to kill FEMA and didn't quite get around to replacing it with anything else. Isn't this the sort of crisis management responsibility governors are supposed to be good at? Incredible. Can he deputize Leavitt to be in charge?

(Thx to MP for the correction).

Posted by Laura at August 31, 2005 10:57 PM