Pres. Bush’s nightmare, texas nightmare, Southeast nightmare
Rita is packing 150 mph wind, nearing cat. 5, moving along west at 13 mph.
Toward Galveston and corpus cristie,
So this storm is the size of Katrina. Plus or minus 40 or 50 miles of uncertainty it is headed directly towards the coast, with the leading eastern edge that we all know by now packs the highest winds and the most rain headed directly to wards Galveston and Houston.
It’s the perfect storm. They are shutting down the refineries in the area, as well as the oil rigs. Oil and gasoline prices are in the opposite of a free fall, what do you call that?
So, lets review.
Katrina Redux
Rita today looks exactly like Katrina a few weeks ago. On the TV weather report, CNN, Fox, Weather channel, ABC or whatever, it is a large orange and red blob that has just crossed the Florida keys, and heading west, seems to be about the fill the whole gulf of Mexico. Its is scary looking.

On the Friday before Katrina’s Monday morning landfall, I predicted that this would be the big one they have all been warning about. The one that would take a direct hit on New Orleans which everyone knew was a soup bowl below sea level, surrounded by high levees.
Not that I was some kind of prognosticator. By Saturday morning all of the cable news channels were saying the same thing. And they all had these beautiful graphics showing that if the storm surge entered Lake Ponchartrain pushed by that wicked wind from the storms southeast quadrant then it would fill the lake and as the storm moved through, the wind from the tailing edge of the hurricane would push that water back into the city, overtopping the levees. And those animated TV graphics dutifully showed the cutaway soup bowl filling up with blue.
So, the first question, wasn’t anybody at homeland security watching? If so, what were they thinking?
Then, Mayor Nagin called for evacuations. And we out in cable land saw the highways filling up with cars flowing north filling both sided of the highways..
Now, my second question, if you evacuate a large city, don’t you bring in the national guard right then to prevent looting the empty streets? Or put them on standby to bring in when the storm ebbs, or something?
Well, while Nagin called for evacuation, he was understandably reluctant to make it mandatory, to call for the emptying out of the whole city. He did not make that mandatory call until Saturday evening. Still 24 hours to go. Hindsight on this is 20/20 as usual.
But, perhaps the greatest mistake of his administration was to make no provisions for evacuating the poor, the disabled. the hospitals are another story. . Instead, The city provided buses to the superdome as a shelter of last resort. That means that it was not a Red Cross shelter with food, water and security, it was just a place to get out to the rain.
I guess they were thinking that when the rain stopped in 8 or ten hours, everyone would go home. I guess that was what Gov. Blanco and Homeland Security chief Chertoff, and that hapless Michael Brown were thinking too.
Not evacuating the poor, and then not providing and adequate shelter will probably come to be seen as the two first big mistakes. But they were to get plenty of company.
It seems today that the powers that be in Homeland security, the White House, the Texas governors office and the national guard have learned a few things these last few weeks. Today you can turn on CNN and see busses massing to evacuate Galveston, and lower lying areas of Houston. At least the images are positive.
If they had done so in new Orleans they would have faced massive destruction, but not the harrowing scenes of people crying out for help from rooftops.
Which brings us to the next set of massive miscalculations. Now it’s true that the poor were imperiled by the very structure of the city: their neighborhood, the lower ninth ward was bequeathed to the poor because it was a low-lying swamp that no one else wanted. And if you really analyze the levee system, it’s clear that it protects the poor and not the rich: many of the better off neighborhoods never did flood.
And of course as we have seen, they never did have anyway to evacuate, not having cars, and caring as they did for the communities disabled and elderly in wheelchairs, homebound, etc.. Why did they not listen to city and state officials?? Well, we’ll get to that too. Let’s just call it a scarce economy of trust.
So while some of them went to the superdome, others stayed home. So, the hurricane passes over, does damage, but on Monday afternoon everyone is thanking their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet. Then the levees failed.
This is where the failures of racism come in.
Not that the coast guard discriminated by who they rescued, Bush assured us they did no, ….but as they rescued people, they simply took them to the convention center, or to high ground, with no provision to remove people from the city.
So, my third big, big, question has to be, where were the buses after it became clear that New Orleans was filling up like a soup bowl? The confusion at this point was abysmally clear, Chertoff saying, “no one predicted,” a lie. Bush saying “no one could have anticipated,” false. The press and bloggers have had a field day with those quotes, but in some ways they are beside the point. By Tuesday the city was full of water, people were on rooftops, the Superdome was in crisis, where were the busses?
Where were the busses? This is where we see the extensive buck passing in a round robin from mayor to governor to FEMA to national guard to city police and around again.
FEMA says they had the busses but the city police said it was too dangerous to being them in.
I think this is where blame or responsibility if you will, shifts the New Orleans city police. Now I know that I am going out on a limb here. But you have to read between the lines, listen to the unspoken.
Those rescued from the Superdome and from the rooftops and from three days on the freeway overpasses and taken to Houston were amazed at the kindliness of strangers, the generosities of people that were not their neighbors or their community or their family. So why was that? Let’s just suppose it was that for years they have come to understand the depths of the hole they have been pushed into by the city administration and the police. All we really read in the papers about New Orleans is notoriously corrupt, etc. no details. What has been the nature of this corruption? Why is it the crime capital? Needs further research, obviously. But let me suggest that the reaction of the refugees from the superdome, 60% of who announced that they were not going back to the city, surprised by the kindness of strangers, suggests how these people were used to being treated. Their treatment in the Superdome fiasco just confirmed for them that they mattered not at all to the powers that controlled their city.
So, the Superdome fiasco. The first mistake as we have seen was in not providing a true shelter somewhere in the city. But the second mistake was in ignoring the cauldron of neglect for five days. If they had provided security, food and water, and evacuated in 48 hours, the fiasco would not have been as bad. If national guard had moved in on Tuesday morning, the looting would not have happened. If busses had arrived to evacuate. But it was the city officials, (read, I think, the police department) that advised the Red Cross that it was too dangerous to go into the city.
This is where the overt racism comes in. “city officials” read the situation as too dangerous because the victims, the mss of victims in the superdome were black and poor. A few reports have confirmed that SWAT teams went in to “rescue” tourists, and the wife of one official who was white.
It was the protestations of the city police who would rather have left women, children, the elderly without food or water for four days that “risk” bringing aid that doomed the crowd at the Superdome, and then by extension those in the convention center. Abdication of responsibility from top to bottom exacerbated the problem as no one stepped in to provide evacuation, or aid.
And whatever the rationalizations of the Gretna police and city council, the people of New Orleans are aware that their neighbors across the river would not step in to help them. Thus their surprise at the kindness of strangers.


Doesn't seem like things are going much better in Houston.
No Way Out: Many Poor Stuck in Houston - New York Times: "With Hurricane Rita breathing down Houston's neck, those with cars were stuck in gridlock trying to get out. Those like Skinner -- poor, and with a broken-down car -- were simply stuck, and fuming at being abandoned, they say."