• Welcome To ShotTalk.com!

    We are one of the oldest and largest Golf forums on the internet with golfers from around the world sharing tips, photos and planning golf outings.

    Registering is free and easy! Hope to see you on the forums soon!

Katrina

DaveE

The golfer fka ST Champ
Aug 31, 2004
3,986
3
"Even Dubya has said the relief effort hasn't moved as quickly as it should have done. So I'm really not sure how you can say people are getting there as fast as they can."

The only reason I say that is because I can't imagine what would motivate them to do anything else. It's one thing to get through with a pickup truck and another to there with a ship or tractor trailers.

The other factor is that anytime the govt. is in charge it's going to take longer. I completely agree that help's not getting there as fast as it should, but I don't think it helps for the media to imply that the people involved don't care or that they are not trying. This is unchartered territory and many lessons will be learned about preparedness and dealing with disastors.

One of the lessons that should be learned is that cities should never be built below sea level. But the biggest lesson to learn here might be to not leave the poorest people behing in an evacuation. How many lives and millions of dollars would have been saved if the City of NO and the state LA would have bused the people out sooner.

But since that wasn't even attempted it's now easy to blame the Fed. govt. for not getting there fast enough to fix things.
 

Bravo

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2004
5,822
15
Well here is another update from my friend Karen who lives here...just spoke with her on the phone. Her parents and two of her five brothers live in Metarie LA which is a nice NO suburb fairly close to downtown. As I have written previously, they are all here now - in her house. She has rented an apartment for her parents who move in a week from tomorrow. I am going over to help set everything up for them, furniture..etc.

She told me a few minutes ago that NONE of them want to go back to NO - never want to live there again. From her 77 year old parents to her 20 year old nephews. They are moving away and never going back.

Her parents told her that refugees who have been able to walk out of the city into Metarie are breaking into homes to find food and a bed to sleep in. Metarie is above sea level and if the refugees can find a house that is standing - it likely did not have storm surge in it. Maybe water from a broken window, but no standing water. She told me tearfully that she couldn't bear the thought of vagabonds breaking into her family house that she grew up in and were just living there.

She also got on a blog from her high school class. These are people who are in the prime of their lives - mid-40's with children in school. She said they All want to leave...pull up stakes and find a new life somewhere else.

This is just wild. I mean, everytime you see a disaster on TV - people say, "This is home, we will re-build. We will make it again". Yet these people are saying the opposite..."I don't care if I ever see the place again"...
 

Silver

I don't have a handicap.
Dec 5, 2004
1,863
1
Well, a story from here. We sent our search and rescue team (44 members) down to help with recovery. What are they doing? Last I heard they were in hiding because of being shot at.

Bad apples ruin the bunch.
 

Bravo

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2004
5,822
15
If anyone cares to take the time, here is an article I read last week when the storm was approaching the city.

You can click on the link and then click for the large JPG image. This is a superb discussion of 'what would happen' if a large hurricane hit the city. This research and article were published several years ago.

Their description hit it exactly....

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf?/washingaway/goingunder.html

The JPG is huge and you have to scroll around but it is an image from a two page spread in the New Orleans Times Pickaune. Explains the physics of 'what would happen' with uncanny accuracy.
 

DaveE

The golfer fka ST Champ
Aug 31, 2004
3,986
3
Silver said:
Well, a story from here. We sent our search and rescue team (44 members) down to help with recovery. What are they doing? Last I heard they were in hiding because of being shot at.

Bad apples ruin the bunch.

That's what I'm saying. Even with the govt. going a poor job, it's being made worse by some of the very people who need help. You know that your team isn't the only one being hampered in their attempt to rescue people.

The military needs to take a hard line with the criminal element there but they'll be butchered in the press if do. And if they don't the reporters will criticize them for not restoring order. This is gonna get even uglier before it's over.
 

Bravo

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2004
5,822
15
The kids just came home from school explaining about the new students enrolling at school from New Orleans. I mean the storm came through last Monday and next Tuesday (after the Labor Day Holiday) they are going to be in class.

Our school district is extremely strict regarding the permanent residency requirement before enrolling. When we moved back from Texas three years ago, they wanted me to show them the deed to my property before they would enroll my children. (Of course you could also be a renter too - must have proof of renting house or apartment).

The Board of Education is waiving the requirement as long as you are domiciled somehow within the city limits. In the vast majority of cases, people are moving in with family members and friends and they are requiring virtually nothing except a drivers license from south Mississippi or Louisiana...

I think it is great and we are lucky to have some room for extra kids this year.
 

EDSGolf

Well-Known Member
Aug 24, 2005
446
0
I have a question. Are they cleaning the water before they pump it out? If not, isn't that dangerous? The images I see of that water, it looks awfully polluted.
 

Bravo

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2004
5,822
15
I talked to my friend Lew who drove a van down to the Missisippi Gulf Coast on Wednesday.

He said they arrived in Gulfport MS and just happened to drive around a bit. He told me that homes that were located on the beach had nothing left standing but "the front steps" and its owners were sorting through the wreckage. Very little police presence there - but frankly none needed. These residents (more affluent) apparently had food/water somewhere and were simply returning to their properties to check on them. Nobody seemed to seek relief and were more focused on dragging whatever they could salvage out of their homes or rubble - as case may be.

They finally arrived in an area where individuals were seeking relief. Food For Children had a van there. Once again, No FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), Red Cross etc. When they rolled up, the 'Food for Children' people asked, "Which agency are you with?" They replied...just a bunch of lawyers from Birmingham..."

So they opened the doors and people proceeded in an orderly fashion to receive what they had. The Only time it got testy - was when a woman spied the gasoline (petrol) cans in the back of the van and repeatedly said, "I want your gas". (This is what worried me the entire time).

Other than that, the trip was uneventful. They needed some of the gas in the plastic cans to get all the way back as there was no electricity to run the pumps at stations for 150 miles...

This area is different from NO. While it has both prosperous and poor people - there is no sense of 'lawlessness' such exists there...

I told my buddy I was proud of him and really am...he made a difference that day.
 

Rockford35

Shark skin shoes
Staff member
Admin
Aug 30, 2004
21,798
1,080
Canada
Country
Canada Canada
Good stuff, B.

Give Lew the thumbs up from Canada for me.... :canadafla

R35
 

DaveE

The golfer fka ST Champ
Aug 31, 2004
3,986
3
Bravo said:
I told my buddy I was proud of him and really am...he made a difference that day.

Give him a big pat on the back from me too. And they're lawyers huh? I guess there's hope for Silver after all. :D
 

Bravo

Well-Known Member
Aug 27, 2004
5,822
15
Well ladies and gentlemen, as the fallout from Katrina continues, we are seeing more and more information about the failures of government in response to this disaster...and that is what it is - literally and figuratively - a disaster.

I found this article today about why American government does such a crappy job on so many fronts. It is rooted in the original construction of the government that came out of the revolution itself, when colonists made it abundantly clear that they feared a strong central government. As a result, the "founding fathers" (as we know them in the U.S.) constructed a mostly de-centralized governmental system, leaving most functions to be performed at the state and local levels.

As many of you know, I worked in healthcare IT for 20+ years and have worked in law enforcement/public safety IT for the past four. It is during these past four years - working in the government sector - where I have seen the numerous problems that our current 'governmental construct' presents.

Anyway, here is the article - which I believe is spot on...

WASHINGTON -- The muddled federal response to Hurricane Katrina has exposed a simple truth well known among government insiders: For reasons that run deep and probably can't be fixed, Washington has difficulty making long-range plans, coordinating its actions and tackling the tough political decisions required for swift disaster response and other critical responsibilities.


Katrina's immediate aftermath saw heroic service by individuals and stellar work by agencies such as the Coast Guard and U.S. Postal Service -- the latter of which acted on early storm warnings and saved thousands of tons of mail by diverting it from the hurricane's path.

But overall, as President Bush finally acknowledged this week, Katrina "exposed serious problems in our response capability."

How could this happen?

Safeguarding its citizens is government's highest calling, and certainly no one in government service is actively working against that responsibility. Then why have the repeated warnings of experts and blue-ribbon commissions gone unheeded? Why, four years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revealed precisely these deficiencies, have we not come to grip with them?

The answers go to the very heart of American democracy.

"You've got to redesign the system," said Newt Gingrich, former conservative Republican speaker of the House and fiery government reformer.


Spread out, short-sighted


Washington veterans cite these key factors:

-- Power and authority, as the founding fathers intended, are scattered across Congress, the White House, executive agencies and on through state and local governments. That complicates coherent planning, allocation of money and accountability.

-- Two- or four-year election cycles keep attention spans short and focused on the next campaign. Money is appropriated year to year, with results demanded immediately.

-- The executive and congressional bureaucracies stifle initiative and smother creativity, a problem some say has grown worse with the proliferation of congressional committees and subcommittees and the consolidation of independent agencies into the vast Department of Homeland Security.

-- The rising demands of bitterly fought election campaigns tend to stifle political courage and spur partisan squabbling.

"Katrina laid all this bare -- that Americans don't feel safe, and that's the No. 1 essential mission of government independent of party," said Gordon Adams, director of security policy studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

"It is a scary time," said Joan Claybrook, a longtime Washington player who headed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the Carter administration and is now president of Public Citizen, a government reform group.

"Every generation has seen challenges, but today we see the speed and destructive power of international and domestic threats. There is little time to adjust," she said. "We don't have the luxury of time anymore."


Infighting persists


Chief among the federal government's structural problems is its division of responsibility, said Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University and author of many books on government reform.

"It's built into the Constitution that we have a federal system where states and localities have a lot of responsibility," he said. "Part of this is embedded in the system that we don't want a strong federal presence. ... The founders were clear in wanting to protect citizens from the national government."

Hence the initial and continuing confusion over who is in charge of the response to Katrina, the awkward breach between active-duty military commanders and the National Guard, the quarreling between Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Washington.

Despite the lessons of the recent past, "the bureaucratic infighting and turf protection seem undiminished," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the Sept. 11 commission that aired the government's shortcomings related to the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"The word is 'caution,'" Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in an interview last spring, in explaining how the Pentagon responds to emergencies. "We have to look at a mission and decide if a civilian capability is available and appropriate."

Caution is proper, he said -- not from fear that the military "will impose its values on an unwilling society at the point of a bayonet," but out of concern that people will come to depend too much on the military. Even in a disaster, he said, "the military role should be limited."


Focus on the here and now


A second structural problem is embedded in the calendar.

"If it's beyond the next election cycle, we'll worry about it next year after we get ourselves elected," said Winslow Wheeler, recently retired chief defense analyst for the Senate Budget Committee.

Work within the executive branch is similarly compressed, first by a four-year clock of presidential elections, then by the sheer number of crises.

Adams, senior budget director for national security in the Clinton administration, described his White House work this way: "I am standing with a paddle in the middle of a big room. All around the edge of the room, people are throwing balls at me. My job is deciding which balls to hit back. In the White House, that's long-range planning."

In that kind of pressure cooker, "you become risk-averse," said Wheeler, author of "The Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security."

"If you are outside the conventional wisdom, you are vulnerable," he said. "Both parties have purged themselves of big thinkers and a diversity of views."

So bad is the bureaucratic undertow, Gingrich said, that if you dropped a couple of whiz-bang business executives into the federal government, "in 60 days they'd become slower and less competent."

And without clear political vision, the work of Congress and the executive branch can dissolve into parochial sniping and pork-barrel politics.

"Retail politics seem to trump leadership," a frustrated Ben-Veniste pronounced after almost three years of investigating the government's failures in the Sept. 11 attacks. "Time and time again you see the political will is just lacking to make the kind of sacrifices that are needed."


No one saying 'no'


Nowhere is this clearer than in the federal money distributed in the name of homeland security, including terrorism and disaster preparedness, a process that seems to ignore the most urgent needs.

Under congressional direction, for example, the Department of Homeland Security last year handed out grants to states for "counterterrorism" activities. South Dakota received $26.13 per capita, while New York -- arguably a greater terrorist target -- was given $5.37. Wyoming was given $37.13 per capita, while New Jersey got $6.37, according to DHS figures.

"No one in government is making hard choices," said David Williams, vice president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit reform group in Washington. "It's about handing money out. There's very little of somebody saying, 'No.'"

And that, of course, includes the public. It's an old adage, but true: We get the government we demand.

"What is required here," Ben-Veniste said, "is a level of outrage from the citizenry to require that those in positions of leadership lead the country in a way that transcends those retail political concerns."

Not so fast, Adams said: "We are the nation of quick fix. Americans as a culture are into the short-term mentality: Fix me now.

"The difficulty with an outraged citizenry is impatience, and it's very hard for an outraged, impatient citizenry to focus on the long term," he said.

"But that's what we've got to do now."
 

goatster

SUPER SOAKER
Feb 20, 2005
2,360
2
just got back from the big easy for the second time.things are getting a little more back to normal in most places the french qaurter is back open.heard the nith ward and some of the other areas that still dont have water and power should get it back early next week.
 

🔥 Latest posts

Top