Katrina Fallout

[Newt]

I live about 700 miles NE of Gulfport, MS, where the storm did it's worst. We received zero direct impact other than a couple days of rain and not even an unusual amount.

 

However ....

 

Our petrol supplies mainly came via a pipeline that was damaged so we have seen

- petrol prices jump by 100% and now eased back to about 80% higher than pre-storm

- petrol shortages that have resulted in the local schools

.. stopping the drivers education program to save on the fuel the students would otherwise have burned driving the school provided autos

.. stopping any field trips until supplies are back to normal

.. stopping competative sports at middle school and below (12 y/o and younger)

 

We do have some number of refuges although nothing like the numbers in Texas or other neighboring states. Only slightly over 2000 not counting those who had family in this area and have informally moved here.

[Brian Carragher]

I think the biggest fallout Newt has been the breakdown in the love affair that the USA media and voters have had with GWB.

Seems to me that for a man portrayed as an action man, someone who can get things done, hes now portrayed as inertia man,a sad clueless and lost individual whom the residents of those states affected by Katrina seem to blame for a lack of any co-ordinated rescue plan.

Like the USA we in the UK are also being hit with petrol sanctions with ours being price based increases that most folk believe are oil companies profiteering during a natural disaster

[snotty]

I'm sorry to hear that the school kids are having their education affected by Katrina Newt, and it will take generations for some of these families to recover from the devastation caused them.

 

Please don't take this the wrong way, I know your reason for posting was in no way looking for sympathy merely helping us over here to get some sort of insight into the terrible events and their wide reaching effects, but it sure is hard for me to feel bad about U.S. fuel costs when we have to pay in English pounds roughly what you guys pay in U.S. dollars for a gallon of petrol.

 

In parts of the U.K. we are now paying £1 or more per litre since the 'shortage' kicked in.

 

I suppose its just not technically feasible for refineries in the U.K. and elsewhere to 'up' their production to go a little way to meeting demand. I understand its not the non-availability of crude thats the problem its the refining capacity.... mmm sounds like another cash cow just arrived on the farm.

[Newt]

More Katrina effects I hadn't thought of - just heard that as of this week, around 330,000 school age children have no school to attend. A combination of areas where the buildings are destroyed and areas with lots of refuges that simply don't have the extra classroom space, teachers, supplies, etc.

 

snotty - your £1 per liter works out to $7.00 per gallon which is about double what we are paying so I'm sure you aren't feeling bad about the fuel costs over here. Wouldn't expect you to. Still and all, our cost jumped from around $2.30 to $3.50 per gallon in the space of a week and that much of a jump does pinch.

 

It really doesn't work well to compare our fuel cost to yours anyway. Your cost is largely tax and since the UK has chosen to offer some fairly expensive items for 'free' they have to be paid for somehow. TANSTAAFL

 

I think your fuel tax along with VAT and some others are designed to pay the costs of NHS health care, easily available dole, readily available low cost/no cost housing, and probably some other items I'm not aware of.

 

Nothing really wrong with your way or our way but they are different so fuel cost UK and fuel cost US is not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

 

Brian - it is a fact that Bush and the entire Federal Government did not respond quickly enough to suit many people. Not even fast enough to suit GeorgeW based on some public comments he made. And as the man at the top, he can and should take some of the heat for that. I'll be interested to see how the investigation shakes out in a few months. Meanwhile, you might be interested to read a thing I posted to a US forum - some information that many Americans evidently weren't aware of so I'm sure that almost no Brits would have been. Click here if you want to read the original post and some pro & con responses from some US anglers.

[Peter Waller]

The cost in human terms is incalculable, my sympathies are without question. I have, more than anything, been amazed at the speed with which lawlessness and indescribable depravity took over in New Orleans.

 

Changing weather patterns are largely blamed on the depletion of the ozone layer, perhaps the US government will now review its stance on the Kyotto Agreement.

[Vagabond]

Read your thread Newt, and understood the points being made.

 

However, it would seem that a mechanism for instant Federal action in an emergency in your country is lacking. That can't be good, for all sorts of reasons.

 

Surely there should have been a series of telephone conference calls between the NO mayor, the governers of the three threatened states, and the president's office, with an agreement being reached that whatever action was needed would be taken, and the protocol sorted out afterwards.

 

"It's against the rules" should never be taken as an excuse for inaction in a crisis.

 

We have a story here of we Brits sending a million military 24-hr food packs, which sat on a US runway for four days because unloading the meat-containing packages was against US import regulations, and it took that long to find someone with the authority to over-ride the regulations.

 

Some butt-kicking needs to be done.

 

On a more positive note, my daughter and her husband (both Brits) offered to house a couple who had to leave everything in their NO home. They will stay for "as long as it takes"

 

They are also, with a group of friends, loading supplies onto a number of light planes and flying then down to isolated areas in the Pasagoula River basin.

 

There are lots of isolated small communities there who seem to have been forgotten with the main emphasis being on NO and Gulfport. Many are cut off with no supplies. Just rural and small-town Texans looking out for their counterparts in Mississippi, cos no-one else seemed to be doing so.

[Jeff S]

Not sure if this has been posted yet... I ran across this article and thought it might spark some interest or at the least a debate...

 

 

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

 

 

 

by Robert Tracinski Sep 02, 2005

 

 

 

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them,

because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

 

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials Is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

 

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

 

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

 

 

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

 

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

 

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

 

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In

fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

 

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously

organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own

initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the

spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

 

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

 

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

 

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

 

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

 

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

 

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

 

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

 

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs

to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

 

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

 

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

 

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the

informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the

residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails --so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

 

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

 

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of

the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to

ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

 

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

 

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and

complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

 

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own

anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

 

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

 

 

 

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[Newt]

Vagabond:

"It's against the rules" should never be taken as an excuse for inaction in a crisis.

 

We have a story here of we Brits sending a million military 24-hr food packs, which sat on a US runway for four days because unloading the meat-containing packages was against US import regulations, and it took that long to find someone with the authority to over-ride the regulations.

 

Some butt-kicking needs to be done.

I completely agree with about 99% of what you are saying vagabond.

 

After this whole thing shakes out, there will certainly be a number of officials who should be immediately dismissed (since shooting them is out of the question). Many, many more butts will deserve at least one swift kick and maybe more.

 

I just hope (doubt but hope) that we wait until it is clear who needs shooting and who needs promoting. Sacrificial lamb, scapegoat, are just a couple of terms that spring to mind here.

 

However, I would not have condoned the President violating the law to take action even if that action would have been a good idea. Setting that particular precident would IMO have caused worse damage in the future than the storm could possibly do.

[Ken L]

Personally I'd have thought that one of the first jobs for an new agency like FEMA would have been to work out how to obtain waivers for certain rules in the event of an emergency.

Having doctors and nurses sitting around for a week because they're not licenced and or insured to practice in a neighboring state is unacceptable.

Having rations sat on a runway is insane but so is the inability of central government to comendere suplies and transportation from the folks that distribute them anyway - the big supermarket chains.

 

America needs to look long and hard at how it facilitates aid within it's own boarders and once that's resolved, it needs to look at warehousing rations, tents, medical suplies, coldweather gear, water purifiers etc so that what's needed can be selected by the palet and marshalled for immediate dispatch to disaster victims whether at home or abroad.

[Vagabond]

Newt:

However, I would not have condoned the President violating the law to take action even if that action would have been a good idea.  

Interesting philosophical point that. If that involved "violating the spirit of the law" I would agree with you.

 

OTOH Overiding the letter of the law, in order to save lives, and protect American citizens from harm, seems OK to me.

 

I think it was the Duke of Wellington, (but no doubt someone will correct me if I am wrong) who said "Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and for blind observance by fools"

 

That piece by Robert Tracinski is certainly food for thought. Places the blame squarely on the "liberal" ethos. I can imagine a similar response by people in London should that suffer a similar flooding.

 

Not that anyone here will take heed.

 

"What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it"

 

Georg Wilhelm Hegel 1770-1831