BatesLine

« BatesLine named best political blog | Main

September 04, 2005

City, state, and local responses to Katrina

Amidst all the finger-pointing about the mismanagement of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the blogosphere is digging for the facts.

Don Singleton has been tracking down the emergency response plans, and the timeline of official actions and responses. I haven't had time to wade through it all, but he's put it together here. Bottom line is that New Orleans wasn't prepared to execute and didn't execute its own plan.

Don links to JunkYard Blog, whose site has maxed out its bandwidth. JunkYard Blog has aerial and satellite photos showing hundreds of New Orleans school buses that were abandoned to the flood waters, rather than being used to evacuate NO residents before the hurricane hit, as the hurricane plan called for.

Since JYB's site is down, I'll point you to the key photos. This is a photo of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority's bus facility, less than a mile from the Superdome, with 146 buses, enough to ferry at least 9,000 passengers out of the city before the hurricane, if city officials had followed the evacuation plan.

This photo is of 255 New Orleans school buses, a site that's been dubbed the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool. There are enough buses here to have carried 13,000 to 17,000 passengers out of New Orleans (depending on bus capacity) prior to the hurricane.

Because JunkYard Blog is offline, and because I think this information needs to be available, I've taken the liberty of posting the entirety of "THEY HAD A PLAN", the entry from September 3, 2005, at 1:34 a.m, and "LOCAL SCREWUP: BUS-TED!" from September 2, 2005, at 1:46 p.m. I'll take them down if requested, or once JunkYard Blog is back up. If you're seeing this on the home page, you'll find it via the "Continue reading" link.

THEY HAD A PLAN

They just didn't follow it. So they were planning to fail. By "they," I mean pretty much every government official in Louisiana, and by "plan," I mean a signed-off set of procedures they were supposed to follow in the event of a catastrophic hurricane. You know, like the one that just hit. And by "fail" I mean complete catastrophic failure.

Here's the southeast Louisiana evac plan supplement, most recently revised in 2000. Go to page 13, read paragraph 5. It states:

5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.

Well, well. Can you say "smoking gun," Mr. Mayor? Mr. Ebbert? How about a smoking arsenal? I guess whether or not you decide to act is based on how you define "school and municipal buses" and "staging area." Or "hurricane." Or "mandatory," as in "mandatory evacuation."

Also see page 18, paragraph 2a 2 and 3.

Page 20, paragraph 3a 5.

Page 21, paragraph c 4.

Page 29, all of it.

And this is just one part of a 250-page state Emergency Operations Plan.

Consider this strange quote too:

Previous hurricanes evacuations in New Orleans were always voluntary, because so many people don't have the means of getting out. Some are too poor and there is always a French Quarter full of tourists who get caught.

So the existence of people who may be stuck in the bowl actually leads to a decreased hurricane evacuation level to match their helplessness instead of increased urgency and planning for buses? Are you kidding me? Is that called "Nawlins logic" or what? Well, now we know why the President of the United States had to be the one to give the order for a mandatory evac. Sad.

The poor folk provide crucial votes for the local politicians, and the tourists provide the dollars, but yet before a major hurricane they can't even get a bus ride? If the MSM did not exist, President Bush might be seen as a hero now to the survivors of New Orleans for at least trying to force the local pols to get a clue and to think about the poor, sick and helpless for once when it's not election time. That's compassionate conservatism. He feels your pain before you do and tries to prevent liberals from inflicting it.

There is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans.

So when the situation goes south, the levee breaks and the people who should have been evacuated based on the plan are dying, these same officials who decided to improvise the whole thing now blame it all on the President who begged them to just get everyone the hell out of there already.

Nice.

(I added a couple more paragraphs above since posted just a bit ago. See below for further updates...Chris R)

MORE: Some thoughts on planning vs. failure from a Powerline reader who says the NOLA folks knew all about regular mandatory evacuations. Maybe that was before Mayor Nagin came along.

UPDATE: Yep, it looks like this will go down in history as gross (local) negligence:

A year ago, New Orleans reviewed its hurricane disaster plans after Hurricane Ivan gave the city a major scare forcing the evacuation of nearly 1 million people from the area.

What happened last September bears striking similarities to the problems encountered before Hurricane Katrina struck. The only difference was Ivan missed the city.

There were hours-long traffic jams. Those who had money fled, while the poor stayed. The warnings were the same: Forecasters predicted that a direct hit on the city would send torrents of water over the city's levees, creating a 20-foot-deep cesspool of human and industrial waste.

"They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that," Latonya Hill, 57, told the Associated Press at the time. "If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either."

Advocates for the poor were indignant in 2004 – just as they are complaining now.

"If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature," said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU.

With Ivan, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then, just hours before the storm was set to hit land, they agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs.

Mayor Ray Nagin's spokeswoman, Tanzie Jones, insisted that there was no reluctance at City Hall to open the Superdome, but said the evacuation was the top priority.

"Our main focus is to get the people out of the city," she said.

But again, in 2004, no city or school buses were used to take people to safety.

Callers to talk radio complained about the late decision to open up the dome, but the mayor said he would do nothing different.

And, indeed, he didn't do much different last weekend before Katrina struck.

Even the problems that occurred at the Superdome this week had a precedent – during a threat by Hurricane Georges in 1998. An estimated 14,000 poured into the stadium, but theft and vandalism were rampant.

During the threat by Ivan, only 1,100 fled to the Superdome and they were supervised by 300 National Guardsmen, who were able to avoid major crime problems.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged after the Ivan near miss they needed a better evacuation plan.

Wow. Speechless.

As Instapundit has been reminding people, this storm wasn't a surprise. The blogosphere and Accuweather were on top of it very early.

JPod sums it up nicely:

With the local and state governments of Louisiana collapsing both tactically and emotionally, there was nowhere for that sense of frustration to flow other than toward the federal government. And there it will remain until the president succeeds in convincing the nation that he has taken personal responsibility for the management of this unprecedented disaster. At which point the responsibility might well begin to flow back again to the local and state authorities whose negligence in the days preceding the catastrophe border on the homicidally negligent. But not until then.

I think it's starting. The MSM just hasn't caught up to the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Mudville Gazette has more info on the New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan which has a few more specifics but is still not nearly as detailed as you would think it should be in following state guidelines. Both plans are just outlines for what is in other SOPs.

...Due to the geography of New Orleans and the varying scales of potential disasters and their resulting emergency evacuations, different plans are in place for small-scale evacuations and for citywide relocations of whole populations.

...Major population relocations resulting from an approaching hurricane or similar anticipated disaster, caused the City of New Orleans Office of Emergency Preparedness to develop a specific Hurricane Emergency Evacuation Standard Operating Procedures, which are appended to the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan.

The SOP is developed to provide for an orderly and coordinated evacuation intended to minimize the hazardous effects of flooding, wind, and rain on the residents and visitors in New Orleans. The SOP provides for the evacuation of the public from danger areas and the designations of shelters for evacuees.

...Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the Mayor of New Orleans in coordination with the Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and the OEP Shelter Coordinator.

The SOP, in unison with other elements of the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, is designed for use in all hazard situations, including citywide evacuations in response to hurricane situations and addresses three elements of emergency response: warning, evacuation, and sheltering.

Posted by B. Preston at 01:34 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

LOCAL SCREWUP: BUS-TED! **lots of updates, scroll down

Or, if you prefer, The Buses of New Orleans.

This is infuriating:

An angry Terry Ebbert, head of New Orleans' emergency operations, watched the slow exodus from the Superdome on Thursday morning and said the Federal Emergency Management Agency response was inadequate. The chaos at the nearby New Orleans Convention Center was considerably worse than the Superdome, with an angry mob growing increasingly violent and few options for refugees to leave the scene.

"This is a national disgrace. FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control," Ebbert said. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

Ebbert's job is to coordinate New Orleans' response to emergencies. Somebody should show him this picture and tell him to stop blaming everyone but himself:

New Orleans owns those buses. Here's their significance:

I count 205 busses. When I was a kid, I remember that school busses could carry 66 people. If that is still the case, 13,530 people could be carried to safety in ONE trip using only the busses shown in that picture.

One trip.

Houston is 350 miles from New Orleans. At 50 miles per hour, 13,530 people could have reached Houston in seven hours. Turn the buses around. 14 hours later another 13,530 people are in Houston, far away from Katrina's wrath. In a little more than a day's time, you've gotten the poorest people who wanted to leave but couldn't leave on their own out of the city. And you don't have to drive them as far as Houston. It's the closest huge city, but there are lots of smaller towns you could ferry people to more quickly. The shorter the drive, the more trips you can make. Pretty soon 26,000 saved becomes everyone saved. If anyone left behind in the storm survives and then loots, at least they're not endangering thousands of innocent people. Those innocent people aren't there to be endangered. They're somewhere else.

You see, buses have these interesting features on them, Mr. Ebbert, called wheels. They allow buses to move about the streets of a city under the control of a human. Because of their wheels, buses can go to where the people are and offer them a ride. You could tell people to congregate at street corners for easier pickup. Moreover, since the buses are on the road picking up people and moving them out of the city, they're not in the path of the flood when the levee breaks. So you can keep using them to get the few stragglers who managed to survive the storm and the floods. And you can use them to haul in supplies. Troops. Whatever you need.

But since no one mobilized these buses before the storm--ahem, Mr. Ebbert--since no one mobilized them before the storm, the poor in New Orleans had no way of getting out. And now the buses are waterlogged and useless. All 205 of them. They will go on the expense side of the ledger instead of the asset side. That's your fault, Mr. Ebbert. The blame rests with you, sir. You knew the city owned those buses, you knew where to get them, where to fuel them and you probably had a list of the drivers who operate them. Yet there they sit, half submerged.

One emergency manager with half a clue and a couple hundred drivers could have more or less saved New Orleans from turning into Mad Max territory. Terry Ebbert can blame everyone else all he wants, but this crisis is almost entirely his fault.

Now that National Guard and probably true federal troops will be put into New Orleans to quell the violence, and since the city is crawling with journalists and videographers, we're liable to get something on our TVs that will look like a cross between Waco circa 1993 and Tiananmen Square circa 1989. But with the added twist of a racial component. Great.

And it all probably could have been avoided with judicious use of a couple hundred school buses--those inside the frame above as well as the probably dozens of others outside it.

UPDATE: Here's a tight satellite view of the bus lot. It looks to me like there are more than 205 buses there. That's a freeway next to the lot, in the upper part of the frame. It leads to the Superdome in one direction and out of the city in the other.

Here's a link to a wider view, cropped so that the Superdome is in the lower left and the bus lot is in the upper right. They're not that far apart--a mile or two maybe. That view is cropped down from a much larger image, which is here. Fwiw.

I will say this--if the city's emergency planners couldn't figure out that the bus lot, the freeway and the dome make a pretty tight emergency staging and evacuation system all by themselves, those planners are beyond incompetent. Ebbert and his staff should be held accountable for this to the nth degree.

DRUDGE ASKS: Why didn't you deploy the buses during the mandatory evacuation, Mayor?

Good question.

WELCOME Corner readers!

MORE: I guess the local NO officials will blame Bush and FEMA for this, too.

UPDATE: The one guy in that entire city who actually used a bus to drive people to safety gets bus-ted for it? This is too much.

"If it weren't for him right there," he said, "we'd still be in New Orleans underwater. He got the bus for us."

Eighteen-year-old [Jabbar] Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control.

"I just took the bus and drove all the way here...seven hours straight,' Gibson admitted. "I hadn't ever drove a bus."

The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there. ...

"I dont care if I get blamed for it ," Gibson said, "as long as I saved my people."

Ouch! That last line just dropped like a sledgehammer on some local politicians. Who does Jabbar Gibson think he is? He's "an American citizen." As one reader just commented: "Jabbar Gibson for Mayor!" When cops are telling people to go to hell because it's every man for himself, Jabbar's actions are far from outrageous. It doesn't look at all like a busjacking for instance.

MORE: Superdome refugees weigh in:

At the New Orleans Convention Center, some of the thousands of storm victims awaiting their deliverance applauded, threw their hands heavenward and screamed, "Thank you, Jesus!" as the camouflage-green trucks and hundreds of soldiers arrived in this increasingly desperate and lawless city.

"Lord, I thank you for getting us out of here," said Leschia Radford.

But there was also anger and profane catcalls.

"Hell no, I'm not glad to see them. They should have been here days ago. I ain't glad to see 'em. I'll be glad when 100 buses show up," said 46-year-old Michael Levy, whose words were echoed by those around him yelling, "Hell, yeah! Hell yeah!"

And this:

"If you want to save a life get a bus down here," said Carter, whose district includes the French Quarter. "I'm asking the American people to help save a wonderful American city." Her voice cracking with emotion and her eyes bloodshot from fatigue and distress, Carter said pledges of money and other assistance are of secondary importance right now to the urgent need for transportation.

"Don't give me your money. Don't send me $10 million today. Give me buses and gas. Buses and gas. Buses and gas," she said. "If you have to commandeer Greyhound, commandeer Greyhound. … If you donn't get a bus, if we don't get them out of there, they will die."

And finally this from Mayor Nagin himself:

"I need reinforcements," he pleaded. "I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. ...

I've done it all man, and I'll tell you man, I keep hearing that it's coming. This is coming, that is coming. And my answer to that today is BS, where is the beef? Because there is no beef in this city. "

Nagin said, "Get every Greyhound bus in the country and get them moving."

The lesson: "It's the busses, stupid." Even if you can't fill 'em up full of people before the storm, you drive them up the road and then back again later to pick people up after the storm passes and the city floods.

From Random Jottings:

And it's important to remember (well, it wouldn't be if certain people crazed with partisan venom weren't slinging stupid accusations non-stop) that the responsibility for planning for a predictable disaster is local. Not federal. It is the job of San Francisco to plan for earthquakes (and we do); to have the necessary communications and organization to coordinate emergency response. Including asking for and coordinating state and federal help when needed. New Orleans has been facing the possibility of flooding for at least 40 years, with the Mississippi flowing right through town, well above the height of many buildings. ...

The thing is, it is extremely difficult for outsiders to accomplish much when they are groping around unfamiliar territory. They can spend days just finding out what's needed, and establishing communications.

Well said.

UPDATE: Galveston, TX is on the ball.

The city of Galveston is taking action in case of a major storm.

You don't have to look far in Galveston to find kids being kids. But Renee Hill knows something the little ones don't.

They live in the Palm Terrace public housing complex, and if a hurricane threatened the city they'd be among the most vulnerable.

Most people here couldn't evacuate without assistance.

"I think about it but I don't know what I'm gonna do though," said Hill. "You know, it's like you don't have a car, where you gonna go? Who'll come get you?"

Galveston emergency planners said they have 17 city buses and 40 school buses, which could be used to evacuate residents. And now the city is set to make an agreement with the housing authority itself.

In fact, by late Tuesday afternoon the deal was done. Some buses will now go directly to the housing complexes and pick up residents.

"For safety, they should have some type of transportation so we can get out," said Hill.

Yeah. They should.

MORE: Bill Hobbs is on the same page. He notes that New Orleans public transit has 364 buses it could have used to carry out the mandatory evacuation. Those buses could have ferried 22,000 New Orleans residents to safety in one single trip. But they were never pressed into service.

Mayor Nagin and his emergency sidekick Terry Ebbert have displayed lethal, mind boggling incompetence before, during and after Katrina. According to this Freep post, Ebbert has quite the resume and a salary to match:

Ebbert, 60, has been directing the city's new Office of Homeland Security and Public Safety since his appointment by Mayor Ray Nagin on Feb. 11. A highly decorated war hero and the former executive director of the nonprofit New Orleans Police Foundation, Ebbert has been given major powers and responsibilities as an executive assistant to the mayor. His duties are commensurate with his $114,676 annual salary.

Ebbert is charged with coordinating the city's terrorism response capabilities and obtaining federal and state funds for homeland security. He also will oversee the police and fire departments, the Office of Emergency Preparedness and city Emergency Medical Services, and the 911 Center or Orleans Parish Communications District.

His duties extend beyond a crisis or special events such as Mardi Gras. Ebbert has responsibility for the daily operations and planning of all those departments as well as the management of their budgets, Nagin told Gambit Weekly last week, after presenting his plan to re-organize city government to the City Council. "Mr. Ebbert is responsible for all matters related to public safety," the mayor said.

$114,676 for doing what, exactly? Blaming others for his own failure? If Ebbert has any honor, he'll resign, give back every cent of salary he has taken since assuming his powerful office, and wait for the lawyers of New Orleans to catch up with him. And they will.

As for Mayor Nagin, he and his profile in pathetic leadership police chief should resign as well. That city's government is incompetent from one end to the other. The people of New Orleans deserve better than this crowd of clowns is capable of giving them.

If you're keeping track, these boobs let 569 buses that could have carried 33,350 people out of New Orleans--in one trip--get ruined in the floods. Whatever plan these guys had, it was a dud. Or it probably would have been if they'd bothered to follow it.

UPDATE: Looks like the bus lot now has a name: "Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool"
Posted by B. Preston at 01:46 PM | Comments (47) | TrackBack

Posted by Michael at September 4, 2005 10:58 PM
Technorati Tags: Hurricane+Katrina Ray+Nagin+Memorial+Motor+Pool

Tr4ckb4ck P!ngs

To p!ng this entry:
http://www.batesline.com/cgi-bin/mt/gnipgnop.cgi/1878

Comments

There will be plenty of blame to go to the local, state and federal level when the dust finally clears on this shameful episode.

Frankly, I'm mad at everybody. Something has to change -- at all levels.

Posted by: W. at September 4, 2005 11:57 PM

Post a comment