Hurricane Katrina; Is the U.S. responding fast enough?
- Thread starter s0nny80y
- 266 comments
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- Alabamamania
risingson77
This is what it's turning into; we've seen the gamut of self-sufficiency and self-pity, and it's just hard to imagine all of this is happening in the United States in the 21st century.
As I stated yesterday, the prevailing attitude of a hurricane causing devestation in New Orleans seemed to be an aferthought; poor city construction coupled with a populace that hadn't been hit by any serious hurricane during the entire time since the city's founding (in 1699).
As for turning the issue into a black or white thing is completely nonsenscial, since the population of New Orleans is one of many mixed cultures and plenty of interracial marriages and such. The entire town was affected; it just so happens that many of the people trapped in the city are black (since it makes up a huge percentage of the population of New Orleans) and poor (no ability to flee the city, likely don't have cars or can afford to disperse).
Who's to blame? I don't really know. I just have to put myself in the shoes of those stricken right now, having seen the National Guard and others assisting Miami-Dade County with food, water, and temporary shelter just 48 hours after Katrina had entered Florida. If I had seen those images on TV, and then seen what a piss-poor emergency plan was in effect in my city I'd be mightily angered and dismayed, too.
Many things came together to impede the flow of help. Bridges and roads were either flooded or completely destroyed; there was debris everywhere. Surrounding towns and cities were also battered, there wasn't an easy way to get to New Orleans from any direction.
Whomever was in charge of hurricane preparedness for the city of New Orleans ought to really feel a little bit of shame for not having some sort of back-up plan. Or was it a lack of funds, misappropriated monies, no back-up plan? Were the people in charge on a State or Federal level involved and knowledgeable of the situation?
Maybe the questions need to be asked and answered now, because last I checked, we are still in hurricane season until December 1st.
First priority is to get as many live people out as possible, get them to a safe place, with food, water, supplies, care, etc. Don't bother helping those who steadfastly refuse help or fire back.
Second priority is to block off any possible means of water flowing into the already-flooded city. Next, is to get the pump system operational again. After that, I haven't a clue how the city is going to clean-up from this lethal mess.
Perhaps someone can develop biological microbes that can eat oil, human waste, and other contaminants in the water. It can't go back into the ocean or Lake Ponchartrain, it will kill or mutate most anything larger than a pea.
After all this, New Orleans needs to find a way to clean-up its image after the past week. What was always looked at as a town with it's own history, character, and flair is now a filthy ghost town and the images of many a nightmare. New Orleans is very much a tourist-based economy; will people from other places in the country and world recall this event 5-10 years later?
Nobody can say for sure.
- 434
pupik, you basically took care of what i am thinking.
its not even about politics and its really bothering me that people are saying blah blah people would not say this if it was a democratic president.
its not even about bush, its about the people stuck on their homes waiting for the help that may not arrive for possibly days.
i don't care if the mayor is a democrat or republican, obviously they screwed up and the people of Lousiana are paying for it, its unacceptable.
its not even about politics and its really bothering me that people are saying blah blah people would not say this if it was a democratic president.
its not even about bush, its about the people stuck on their homes waiting for the help that may not arrive for possibly days.
i don't care if the mayor is a democrat or republican, obviously they screwed up and the people of Lousiana are paying for it, its unacceptable.
Young_Warrior
(Banned)
- 2,285
Everything you do and everything around you has politics involved. Ofcourse politics would come into this matter. In Jamaica when a cat 5 hurrican hit them their government managed to save loads of people lives by sending out army choppers ASAP and their whole island was engufled by the hurricane. Hell my Grandads house was mostly underwater and he lives in the middle of nowhere inbetween wild goats and nature and the government sure reacted a hell of alot faster.
You american guys need to ask yourself what went wrong and why. Quite frankly for your technology infrastructure and wealth this should have never happened in the first place.
You american guys need to ask yourself what went wrong and why. Quite frankly for your technology infrastructure and wealth this should have never happened in the first place.
- 19,311
- Inland Empire SoCal
- SOLID_LIFTERS
And they started it all to mask their incompetence. These two truly are extemely pathetic and contemptible. It was their only way to hold onto jobs they both don't deserve to keep.Viper Zero
- 2,208
pupik
I keep seeing outraged reporters from every news service saying that they and their crews could freely drive in and out of the Convention Center and Superdome area. Access to those masses of refugees has been free and unimpeded all along.
The failure of the relief effort to simply drive some trucks and buses in there and get those people out, or even to bring them water and a bit of food, is beyond all comprehension.
The fact that there are still people trapped in the flooded neighborhoods a week later is a true national disgrace. What, there was just no way they could round up small boats and go in and get them? What rule or regulation says they can only be helicoptered out? Volunteers would have rushed in from all over with their small boats, but the call for assistance has never been made. What in God's name is going on down there? This is shameful.
- 38,949
- Application hell
- MP-Omnis
Young_Warrior
"What went wrong, self?"
"Oh, I dont know. Perhaps, a few levees broke and rinsed the place out. New Orleans is drastically below sea level, after all."
"Interesting..."
"Mmm...Indeed."
The elevation has a lot to do with it, but I agree with you. There's no excuse, but you can't exactly go back in time.
- 2,208
Unlimited funding will always be readily available for our Middle Eastern crusades, but protection of a strategic economic area from natural disaster is way down on the list of priorities for those running the show now:
From The Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2005 -
Despite Warnings, Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects
To cut spending, officials gambled that the worst-case scenario would not come to be.
By Richard A. Serrano and Nicole Gaouette, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON For years, Washington had been warned that doom lurked just beyond the levees. And for years, the White House and Congress had dickered over how much money to put into shoring up century-old dikes and carrying out newer flood control projects to protect the city of New Orleans.
As recently as three months ago, the alarms were sounding and being brushed aside.
In late May, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers formally notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock out two of the big pumping stations that must operate night and day even under normal conditions to keep the city dry.
Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need to be raised. And it reminded Washington that an ambitious flood-control study proposed four years before remained just that a written proposal never put into action for lack of funding.
What a powerful hurricane could do to New Orleans and the area's critical transportation, energy and petrochemical facilities had been well understood. So now, nearly a week into the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, hard questions are being raised about Washington officials who crossed their fingers and counted on luck once too often. The reasons the city's defenses were not strengthened enough to handle such a storm are deeply rooted in the politics and bureaucracy of Washington.
With the advantage of hindsight, the miscues seem even broader. Construction proposals were often underfunded or not completed. Washington officials could never agree on how much money would be needed to protect New Orleans. And there hung in the air a false sense of security that a storm like Katrina was a long shot anyway.
As a result, when the immediate crisis eases and inquiries into what went wrong begin, there is likely to be responsibility and blame enough for almost every institution in Washington, including the White House, Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers and a host of other federal agencies.
For example, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps commander, conceded Friday that the government had known the New Orleans levees could never withstand a hurricane higher than a Category 3. Corps officials shuddered, he said, when they realized that Katrina was barreling down on the Gulf Coast with the vastly greater destructive force of a Category 5 the strongest type of hurricane.
Washington, he said, had rolled the dice.
Rather than come up with the extra millions of dollars needed to make the city safer, officials believed that such a devastating storm was a small probability and that, with the level of protection that had been funded, "99.5% of the time this would work."
Unfortunately, Strock said, "we did not address the 0.5%."
Corps officials said the floodwaters breached at two spots: the 17th Street Canal Levee and the London Avenue Canal Levee. Connie Gillette, a Corps spokeswoman, said Saturday there never had been any plans or funds allocated to shore up those spots another sign the government expected them to hold.
Nevertheless, the Corps hardly was alone in failing to address what it meant to have a major metropolitan area situated mostly below sea level, sitting squarely in the middle of the Gulf Coast's Hurricane Alley.
Many federal, state and local flood improvement officials kept asking for more dollars for more ambitious protection projects. But the White House kept scaling down those requests. And each time, although congressional leaders were more generous with funding than the White House, the House and Senate never got anywhere near to approving the amounts that experts had said was needed.
What happened this year was typical: Local levee and flood prevention officials, along with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), asked for $78 million in project funds. President Bush offered them less than half that $30 million. Congress ended up authorizing $36.5 million.
Since Bush took office in 2001, local experts and Landrieu have asked for just short of $500 million. Altogether, Bush in his yearly budgets asked for $166 million, and Congress approved about $250 million.
These budget decisions reflect a reality in Washington: to act with an eye toward short-term political rewards instead of making long-term investments to deal with problems.
Vincent Gawronski, an assistant professor at Birmingham Southern College in Alabama who studies the political impact of natural disasters, said the lost chances to shore up the levees were a classic example of government leaders who, although meaning well, clashed over priorities.
"Elected politicians are in office for a limited amount of time and with a limited amount of money, and they don't really have a long-term vision for spending it," he said.
"So you spend your pot of money where you feel you're going to get the most political support so you can get reelected. It's very difficult to think long-term. If you invest in these levees, is that going to show an immediate return or does it take away from anything else?"
Gawronski said flood control projects do not have the appeal of other endeavors, such as cancer research and police protection. At the same time, Congress habitually approves billions of dollars for highways and bridges and other infrastructure that politically benefits individual congressmen.
Gawronski called it inexcusable for the United States to have been "gambling so long" that the old levee system in New Orleans would hold.
"Disasters are often low probability, high consequence events, so there's a gamble there," he said. "It's not going to happen on my watch, there's the potential it might, but I'll bet it won't."
In the case of New Orleans and flood control, another factor was at work: the reputation of the Corps of Engineers. Over the years, many in Washington had come to regard the Corps as an out-of-control agency that championed huge projects and sometimes exaggerated need and benefits.
The Corps began as a tiny regiment during the Revolutionary War era; it now employs about 35,000 people to build dams, deepen harbors, dig ditches and erect seawalls, among other things. But critics say some projects are make-work boondoggles.
In 2000, Corps leaders were found to have manipulated an economic study to justify a Mississippi River project that would have cost billions. The agency also launched a secret growth initiative to boost its budget by 50%. And the Pentagon found in 2000 that the Corps' cost-benefit analyses were systematically skewed to warrant large-scale construction projects.
As a result, said a senior staffer with the Senate Appropriations Committee who spoke on condition of anonymity, requests by the Corps for flood control money were especially vulnerable to budget cutting. "A lot of people just look at it as pork," said the staffer.
The Bush administration's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, was known as an aggressive advocate for Corps reform who cast a skeptical eye on its budget requests.
"The Army Corps of Engineers has a very large budget, and it has grown a lot over recent years," Daniels, now the governor of Indiana, said. "To the extent there's been any limitation of [the Corps'] budget, it has to do with previous tendencies to build marinas and things that don't have much to do with preparing us for disaster."
The Bush White House maintains it never ignored the security needs of the Gulf Coast. "Flood control has been a priority of this administration from Day One," said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
He said hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the New Orleans area in recent years for flood prevention, and he said the failure of the levees was not a matter of money so much as a problem with drawing the right plans for the dike work and other improvements.
"It's been more of a design issue with the levees," he said.
Other administration officials said there were not enough construction companies and equipment to handle all the work that had been proposed.
John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, who has responsibility for the Corps of Engineers, said: "It's true, we cannot accomplish all of our projects at full funding all the time. I think that's true of any agency, particularly any public works agency, but we had a lot of work underway in New Orleans, and I was personally supportive of it.
"As a native of Louisiana," Woodley said, "I understand the problems associated with flooding in New Orleans. I don't think there's any lack of support for flood control projects in New Orleans, particularly within the context of other projects around the country."
On Capitol Hill in recent years, several Democrats warned that more money should be marked for the protection of New Orleans. For instance, in September 2004, Landrieu said she was tired of hearing there was no money to do more work on levees.
"We're told, can't do it this year. Don't have enough money. It's not a high enough priority," she said in a Senate speech. "Well, I know when it's going to get to be a high enough priority."
She then told of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected several thousand body bags in the event of a major flood. "Let's hope that never happens," she said.
But in May 2004, then Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he had visited the levees as a guest of Landrieu and believed them adequate.
He praised the ancient water pumps for keeping the waters from cascading into the city, proclaiming them "these old, old pumps that hadn't been changed since before the turn of the century, that still keep New Orleans dry."
"It was as clean as a restaurant," he added. "These big old pumps work."
Today, eight of those 22 pumps are underwater and inoperable.
Over the years, several projects either were short-changed or never got started. The Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project was authorized by Congress after a rainstorm killed six people in May 1995. It was to be finished in 10 years, but funding reductions prevented its completion before Katrina struck.
The Army Corps of Engineers did spend $430 million to renovate pumping stations and shore up the levees. But experts said the project fell behind schedule after funding was reduced in 2003 and 2004.
The Lake Pontchartrain Project was a $750-million Corps operation for new levees and beefed-up pumping stations. Because of funding cuts, it was only 80% complete when the hurricane hit.
The project that never was started was an examination of storm surges from large hurricanes. Congress approved the study but did not allocate the funds for it.
In May, Al Naomi, the Corps' senior project manager for the New Orleans district, reminded political and business leaders and emergency management officials that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane was always possible. After that meeting, Walter Brooks, the regional planning commission director, came away shaking his head.
"We've learned that we're not as safe as we thought we were," he told the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
Last week, Corps commander Strock defended past work, saying, it was his "personal and professional assessment" that work in New Orleans was never underfunded. What he meant by that, he explained, was that no one expected such a large disaster before all the renovations and other improvements could be completed.
"That was as good as it was going to get," he said. " We knew that it would protect from a Category 3 hurricane. In fact, it has been through a number of Category 3 hurricanes."
But, he said, Katrina's intensity "simply exceeded the design capacity of the levee."
Asked whether in hindsight he wished more had been done, Strock said: "I really don't express surprise in my business. We don't sit around and say 'Gee whiz.' "
From The Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2005 -
Despite Warnings, Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects
To cut spending, officials gambled that the worst-case scenario would not come to be.
By Richard A. Serrano and Nicole Gaouette, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON For years, Washington had been warned that doom lurked just beyond the levees. And for years, the White House and Congress had dickered over how much money to put into shoring up century-old dikes and carrying out newer flood control projects to protect the city of New Orleans.
As recently as three months ago, the alarms were sounding and being brushed aside.
In late May, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers formally notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock out two of the big pumping stations that must operate night and day even under normal conditions to keep the city dry.
Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need to be raised. And it reminded Washington that an ambitious flood-control study proposed four years before remained just that a written proposal never put into action for lack of funding.
What a powerful hurricane could do to New Orleans and the area's critical transportation, energy and petrochemical facilities had been well understood. So now, nearly a week into the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, hard questions are being raised about Washington officials who crossed their fingers and counted on luck once too often. The reasons the city's defenses were not strengthened enough to handle such a storm are deeply rooted in the politics and bureaucracy of Washington.
With the advantage of hindsight, the miscues seem even broader. Construction proposals were often underfunded or not completed. Washington officials could never agree on how much money would be needed to protect New Orleans. And there hung in the air a false sense of security that a storm like Katrina was a long shot anyway.
As a result, when the immediate crisis eases and inquiries into what went wrong begin, there is likely to be responsibility and blame enough for almost every institution in Washington, including the White House, Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers and a host of other federal agencies.
For example, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps commander, conceded Friday that the government had known the New Orleans levees could never withstand a hurricane higher than a Category 3. Corps officials shuddered, he said, when they realized that Katrina was barreling down on the Gulf Coast with the vastly greater destructive force of a Category 5 the strongest type of hurricane.
Washington, he said, had rolled the dice.
Rather than come up with the extra millions of dollars needed to make the city safer, officials believed that such a devastating storm was a small probability and that, with the level of protection that had been funded, "99.5% of the time this would work."
Unfortunately, Strock said, "we did not address the 0.5%."
Corps officials said the floodwaters breached at two spots: the 17th Street Canal Levee and the London Avenue Canal Levee. Connie Gillette, a Corps spokeswoman, said Saturday there never had been any plans or funds allocated to shore up those spots another sign the government expected them to hold.
Nevertheless, the Corps hardly was alone in failing to address what it meant to have a major metropolitan area situated mostly below sea level, sitting squarely in the middle of the Gulf Coast's Hurricane Alley.
Many federal, state and local flood improvement officials kept asking for more dollars for more ambitious protection projects. But the White House kept scaling down those requests. And each time, although congressional leaders were more generous with funding than the White House, the House and Senate never got anywhere near to approving the amounts that experts had said was needed.
What happened this year was typical: Local levee and flood prevention officials, along with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), asked for $78 million in project funds. President Bush offered them less than half that $30 million. Congress ended up authorizing $36.5 million.
Since Bush took office in 2001, local experts and Landrieu have asked for just short of $500 million. Altogether, Bush in his yearly budgets asked for $166 million, and Congress approved about $250 million.
These budget decisions reflect a reality in Washington: to act with an eye toward short-term political rewards instead of making long-term investments to deal with problems.
Vincent Gawronski, an assistant professor at Birmingham Southern College in Alabama who studies the political impact of natural disasters, said the lost chances to shore up the levees were a classic example of government leaders who, although meaning well, clashed over priorities.
"Elected politicians are in office for a limited amount of time and with a limited amount of money, and they don't really have a long-term vision for spending it," he said.
"So you spend your pot of money where you feel you're going to get the most political support so you can get reelected. It's very difficult to think long-term. If you invest in these levees, is that going to show an immediate return or does it take away from anything else?"
Gawronski said flood control projects do not have the appeal of other endeavors, such as cancer research and police protection. At the same time, Congress habitually approves billions of dollars for highways and bridges and other infrastructure that politically benefits individual congressmen.
Gawronski called it inexcusable for the United States to have been "gambling so long" that the old levee system in New Orleans would hold.
"Disasters are often low probability, high consequence events, so there's a gamble there," he said. "It's not going to happen on my watch, there's the potential it might, but I'll bet it won't."
In the case of New Orleans and flood control, another factor was at work: the reputation of the Corps of Engineers. Over the years, many in Washington had come to regard the Corps as an out-of-control agency that championed huge projects and sometimes exaggerated need and benefits.
The Corps began as a tiny regiment during the Revolutionary War era; it now employs about 35,000 people to build dams, deepen harbors, dig ditches and erect seawalls, among other things. But critics say some projects are make-work boondoggles.
In 2000, Corps leaders were found to have manipulated an economic study to justify a Mississippi River project that would have cost billions. The agency also launched a secret growth initiative to boost its budget by 50%. And the Pentagon found in 2000 that the Corps' cost-benefit analyses were systematically skewed to warrant large-scale construction projects.
As a result, said a senior staffer with the Senate Appropriations Committee who spoke on condition of anonymity, requests by the Corps for flood control money were especially vulnerable to budget cutting. "A lot of people just look at it as pork," said the staffer.
The Bush administration's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, was known as an aggressive advocate for Corps reform who cast a skeptical eye on its budget requests.
"The Army Corps of Engineers has a very large budget, and it has grown a lot over recent years," Daniels, now the governor of Indiana, said. "To the extent there's been any limitation of [the Corps'] budget, it has to do with previous tendencies to build marinas and things that don't have much to do with preparing us for disaster."
The Bush White House maintains it never ignored the security needs of the Gulf Coast. "Flood control has been a priority of this administration from Day One," said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
He said hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the New Orleans area in recent years for flood prevention, and he said the failure of the levees was not a matter of money so much as a problem with drawing the right plans for the dike work and other improvements.
"It's been more of a design issue with the levees," he said.
Other administration officials said there were not enough construction companies and equipment to handle all the work that had been proposed.
John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, who has responsibility for the Corps of Engineers, said: "It's true, we cannot accomplish all of our projects at full funding all the time. I think that's true of any agency, particularly any public works agency, but we had a lot of work underway in New Orleans, and I was personally supportive of it.
"As a native of Louisiana," Woodley said, "I understand the problems associated with flooding in New Orleans. I don't think there's any lack of support for flood control projects in New Orleans, particularly within the context of other projects around the country."
On Capitol Hill in recent years, several Democrats warned that more money should be marked for the protection of New Orleans. For instance, in September 2004, Landrieu said she was tired of hearing there was no money to do more work on levees.
"We're told, can't do it this year. Don't have enough money. It's not a high enough priority," she said in a Senate speech. "Well, I know when it's going to get to be a high enough priority."
She then told of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected several thousand body bags in the event of a major flood. "Let's hope that never happens," she said.
But in May 2004, then Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he had visited the levees as a guest of Landrieu and believed them adequate.
He praised the ancient water pumps for keeping the waters from cascading into the city, proclaiming them "these old, old pumps that hadn't been changed since before the turn of the century, that still keep New Orleans dry."
"It was as clean as a restaurant," he added. "These big old pumps work."
Today, eight of those 22 pumps are underwater and inoperable.
Over the years, several projects either were short-changed or never got started. The Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project was authorized by Congress after a rainstorm killed six people in May 1995. It was to be finished in 10 years, but funding reductions prevented its completion before Katrina struck.
The Army Corps of Engineers did spend $430 million to renovate pumping stations and shore up the levees. But experts said the project fell behind schedule after funding was reduced in 2003 and 2004.
The Lake Pontchartrain Project was a $750-million Corps operation for new levees and beefed-up pumping stations. Because of funding cuts, it was only 80% complete when the hurricane hit.
The project that never was started was an examination of storm surges from large hurricanes. Congress approved the study but did not allocate the funds for it.
In May, Al Naomi, the Corps' senior project manager for the New Orleans district, reminded political and business leaders and emergency management officials that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane was always possible. After that meeting, Walter Brooks, the regional planning commission director, came away shaking his head.
"We've learned that we're not as safe as we thought we were," he told the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
Last week, Corps commander Strock defended past work, saying, it was his "personal and professional assessment" that work in New Orleans was never underfunded. What he meant by that, he explained, was that no one expected such a large disaster before all the renovations and other improvements could be completed.
"That was as good as it was going to get," he said. " We knew that it would protect from a Category 3 hurricane. In fact, it has been through a number of Category 3 hurricanes."
But, he said, Katrina's intensity "simply exceeded the design capacity of the levee."
Asked whether in hindsight he wished more had been done, Strock said: "I really don't express surprise in my business. We don't sit around and say 'Gee whiz.' "
- 2,208
Yeah, its all the fault of that damned governor of Louisiana. Our tax dollars at work:
From The Washington Post, September 4, 2005 -
Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top
By Susan B. Glasser and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.
Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.
Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.
But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."
If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."
"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.
Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.
But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.
"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."
The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.
"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."
The DHS experiment is so far-flung that the department's leadership has focused much of its attention simply on the massive complications that resulted from creating one entity out of agencies as varied as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Transportation Security Administration. When Chertoff took office earlier this year, he made his top priority an entirely new bureaucratic reorganization less than two years after the department's creation, dubbed the "second-stage review." The review, still pending, recommends taking away a key remaining function, preparedness planning, from FEMA and giving it to "a strengthened department preparedness directorate."
The procedures for what to do when the inevitable disaster hit were also subjected to a bureaucratic overhaul, still unfinished, by the department. Indeed, just last Tuesday, as New Orleans was drowning and DHS officials were still hours away from invoking the department's highest crisis status for the catastrophe, some department contractors found an important e-mail in their inboxes.
Attached were two documents -- one more than 400 pages long -- that spelled out in numbing, acronym-filled detail the planned "national preparedness goal." The checklist, called a Universal Task List, appeared to cover every eventuality in a disaster, from the need to handle evacuations to speedy urban search and rescue to circulating "prompt, accurate and useful" emergency information. Even animal health and "fatality management" were covered.
But the documents were not a menu for action in the devastated Gulf Coast. They were drafts, not slated for approval and release until October, more than four years after 9/11.
"Basically, this is the rules of engagement for national emergency events, whether natural or manmade. It covers every element of what you would have expected to already have been in place," said the contractor who provided the e-mail to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his firm's work. "This is the federal government template to engage, and this is being discussed in draft form."
FEMA Lost in the Shuffle
Until 1979, the federal government had no one agency responsible for dealing with disaster.
But that year, President Jimmy Carter created FEMA out of a patchwork of smaller agencies. Born at the tail end of the Cold War, FEMA had a mission largely defined as nuclear fallout shelters and other civil defense measures, though in reality it dealt with "hurricane after hurricane," as Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran who was FEMA chief of staff in President Bill Clinton's administration, noted.
After Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, federal response was panned, and FEMA was due for an overhaul. It got it in 1993, when Clinton brought in James Lee Witt, a veteran emergency manager and political ally, to take over, granted the agency Cabinet-level status and gave it a highly visible role it had not previously had. Its response to crises such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing received high marks, though some Republicans complained that it was used as a pot of money doled out to bolster Clinton's political standing.
But after 9/11, FEMA lost out in the massive bureaucratic shuffle.
Not only did its Cabinet status disappear, but it became one of 22 government agencies to be consolidated into Homeland Security. For a time, recalled Ervin, even its name was slated to vanish and become simply the directorate of emergency preparedness and response until then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge relented.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from hurricane-prone states fought a rear-guard action against FEMA's absorption. "What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent agency," said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.). In creating DHS, "people were thinking about the possibility of terrorism," said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "They weren't thinking about the reality of a hurricane."
Hurricanes were not totally absent from the calculations about the new department, according to several former Bush administration officials. Bush tapped his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to supervise DHS's creation; a decade earlier, Card had been personally deputized by Bush's father to go to Florida and take charge of the much-criticized response to Hurricane Andrew.
"We definitely did worry about it," recalled Richard A. Falkenrath, who served as a White House homeland security adviser at the time DHS was being formed. "We knew we should do no harm to the disaster management side. The leadership of the White House knows the political significance of disasters."
From the day it came into existence on March 1, 2003, the department of 180,000 employees and a nearly $40 billion annual budget was tasked by a presidential directive with developing a comprehensive new plan for disasters. The National Response Plan was supposed to supersede the confusing overlay of federal, state and local disaster plans, and to designate a "principal officer in the event of an incident of national significance." An accompanying new National Incident Management System would integrate all the cascades of information.
"The problem was, who was in charge on 9/11? Who the hell knew? They kept asking and asking. You needed some clarity," Falkenrath recalled. "It was supposed to pull it all together. . . . But FEMA was grousing about that; they thought it was taking things away from them."
Focus on Terrorism
In creating the department, President Bush made one of its central missions "all-hazards preparedness," operating on the philosophy -- as the government has for at least the past two decades -- that most disaster preparation is the same, whether the crisis is natural or manmade.
Yet DHS in reality emphasized terrorism at the expense of other threats, said several current and former senior department officials and experts who have closely monitored its creation, cutting funding for natural disaster programs and downgrading the responsibilities and capabilities of the previously well-regarded FEMA. In theory, spending resources on response to terrorism should result in improved response to any disaster, but FEMA's supporters argue that the money was being spent outside the framework of the agency actually equipped to respond.
"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."
The White House's Homeland Security Council developed 15 scenarios for the department to concern itself about -- everything from a terrorist dirty-bomb attack to a Baghdad-style improvised explosive device. Only three were not terrorism scenarios: a pandemic flu, a major earthquake and a major hurricane.
By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.
New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."
"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."
But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it."
Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing fixed."
Rebuffed Offers of Aid
On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2 hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there was surprisingly little action. "It was like nobody's turning the key to start the engine," the official recalled.
Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.
"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."
But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.
In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he knew "for a fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested that New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than Sunday morning.
But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview, the general charged with operations for the military's Northern Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come our way."
"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5 storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the United States. . . . I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."
Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."
Federal authorities say there is blame enough to go around. In a news conference yesterday, Chertoff cautioned against "finger-pointing" and said no one had been equipped to handle what amounted to two simultaneous disasters -- the hurricane and subsequent levee break.
Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. "Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."
But many outraged politicians in both parties have concluded that the federal government failed to meet the commitments it made after Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said DHS had failed. "We've been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency that comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."
Thompson said, for example, that oil pipelines in the Southeast have been identified by DHS as critical national infrastructure to be protected against terrorist attack. In the wake of the hurricane, they have been crippled by floods." We have to review all our systems," Thompson said. "If a byproduct of what happened in New Orleans is we have this gas crisis all over the country, it doesn't matter whether a terrorist hits it or a hurricane hits it. You have the same effect."
Staff writers Peter Baker, Bradley Graham, Spencer S. Hsu, Dafna Linzer and Michael Powell and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
From The Washington Post, September 4, 2005 -
Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top
By Susan B. Glasser and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.
Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.
Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.
Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.
But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."
If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."
"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.
Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.
But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.
"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."
The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.
"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."
The DHS experiment is so far-flung that the department's leadership has focused much of its attention simply on the massive complications that resulted from creating one entity out of agencies as varied as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Transportation Security Administration. When Chertoff took office earlier this year, he made his top priority an entirely new bureaucratic reorganization less than two years after the department's creation, dubbed the "second-stage review." The review, still pending, recommends taking away a key remaining function, preparedness planning, from FEMA and giving it to "a strengthened department preparedness directorate."
The procedures for what to do when the inevitable disaster hit were also subjected to a bureaucratic overhaul, still unfinished, by the department. Indeed, just last Tuesday, as New Orleans was drowning and DHS officials were still hours away from invoking the department's highest crisis status for the catastrophe, some department contractors found an important e-mail in their inboxes.
Attached were two documents -- one more than 400 pages long -- that spelled out in numbing, acronym-filled detail the planned "national preparedness goal." The checklist, called a Universal Task List, appeared to cover every eventuality in a disaster, from the need to handle evacuations to speedy urban search and rescue to circulating "prompt, accurate and useful" emergency information. Even animal health and "fatality management" were covered.
But the documents were not a menu for action in the devastated Gulf Coast. They were drafts, not slated for approval and release until October, more than four years after 9/11.
"Basically, this is the rules of engagement for national emergency events, whether natural or manmade. It covers every element of what you would have expected to already have been in place," said the contractor who provided the e-mail to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his firm's work. "This is the federal government template to engage, and this is being discussed in draft form."
FEMA Lost in the Shuffle
Until 1979, the federal government had no one agency responsible for dealing with disaster.
But that year, President Jimmy Carter created FEMA out of a patchwork of smaller agencies. Born at the tail end of the Cold War, FEMA had a mission largely defined as nuclear fallout shelters and other civil defense measures, though in reality it dealt with "hurricane after hurricane," as Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran who was FEMA chief of staff in President Bill Clinton's administration, noted.
After Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, federal response was panned, and FEMA was due for an overhaul. It got it in 1993, when Clinton brought in James Lee Witt, a veteran emergency manager and political ally, to take over, granted the agency Cabinet-level status and gave it a highly visible role it had not previously had. Its response to crises such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing received high marks, though some Republicans complained that it was used as a pot of money doled out to bolster Clinton's political standing.
But after 9/11, FEMA lost out in the massive bureaucratic shuffle.
Not only did its Cabinet status disappear, but it became one of 22 government agencies to be consolidated into Homeland Security. For a time, recalled Ervin, even its name was slated to vanish and become simply the directorate of emergency preparedness and response until then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge relented.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from hurricane-prone states fought a rear-guard action against FEMA's absorption. "What we were afraid of, and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent agency," said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.). In creating DHS, "people were thinking about the possibility of terrorism," said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "They weren't thinking about the reality of a hurricane."
Hurricanes were not totally absent from the calculations about the new department, according to several former Bush administration officials. Bush tapped his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to supervise DHS's creation; a decade earlier, Card had been personally deputized by Bush's father to go to Florida and take charge of the much-criticized response to Hurricane Andrew.
"We definitely did worry about it," recalled Richard A. Falkenrath, who served as a White House homeland security adviser at the time DHS was being formed. "We knew we should do no harm to the disaster management side. The leadership of the White House knows the political significance of disasters."
From the day it came into existence on March 1, 2003, the department of 180,000 employees and a nearly $40 billion annual budget was tasked by a presidential directive with developing a comprehensive new plan for disasters. The National Response Plan was supposed to supersede the confusing overlay of federal, state and local disaster plans, and to designate a "principal officer in the event of an incident of national significance." An accompanying new National Incident Management System would integrate all the cascades of information.
"The problem was, who was in charge on 9/11? Who the hell knew? They kept asking and asking. You needed some clarity," Falkenrath recalled. "It was supposed to pull it all together. . . . But FEMA was grousing about that; they thought it was taking things away from them."
Focus on Terrorism
In creating the department, President Bush made one of its central missions "all-hazards preparedness," operating on the philosophy -- as the government has for at least the past two decades -- that most disaster preparation is the same, whether the crisis is natural or manmade.
Yet DHS in reality emphasized terrorism at the expense of other threats, said several current and former senior department officials and experts who have closely monitored its creation, cutting funding for natural disaster programs and downgrading the responsibilities and capabilities of the previously well-regarded FEMA. In theory, spending resources on response to terrorism should result in improved response to any disaster, but FEMA's supporters argue that the money was being spent outside the framework of the agency actually equipped to respond.
"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said, "FEMA has been marginalized. . . . There is one focus and the focus is on terrorism."
The White House's Homeland Security Council developed 15 scenarios for the department to concern itself about -- everything from a terrorist dirty-bomb attack to a Baghdad-style improvised explosive device. Only three were not terrorism scenarios: a pandemic flu, a major earthquake and a major hurricane.
By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.
New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."
"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. "Absolutely." The former FEMA chief said he had encountered bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster, such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of "tornadoes and rising waters."
But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke" after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action, militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding it."
Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing fixed."
Rebuffed Offers of Aid
On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2 hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm. Inside, there was surprisingly little action. "It was like nobody's turning the key to start the engine," the official recalled.
Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.
"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered our ability, made it even more complex."
But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan? Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there is water around it? They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.
In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he knew "for a fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested that New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than Sunday morning.
But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview, the general charged with operations for the military's Northern Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come our way."
"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5 storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the United States. . . . I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."
Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."
Federal authorities say there is blame enough to go around. In a news conference yesterday, Chertoff cautioned against "finger-pointing" and said no one had been equipped to handle what amounted to two simultaneous disasters -- the hurricane and subsequent levee break.
Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local level," said one state official who works with FEMA. "Did the city have the situational awareness of what was going on within its borders? The answer was no."
But many outraged politicians in both parties have concluded that the federal government failed to meet the commitments it made after Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said DHS had failed. "We've been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency that comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."
Thompson said, for example, that oil pipelines in the Southeast have been identified by DHS as critical national infrastructure to be protected against terrorist attack. In the wake of the hurricane, they have been crippled by floods." We have to review all our systems," Thompson said. "If a byproduct of what happened in New Orleans is we have this gas crisis all over the country, it doesn't matter whether a terrorist hits it or a hurricane hits it. You have the same effect."
Staff writers Peter Baker, Bradley Graham, Spencer S. Hsu, Dafna Linzer and Michael Powell and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Zardoz
Calls were put out on every local Louisiana news channel as well as every radio station covering the event for people who have boats to call the Coastguard so they could give a bit of info on what they could do, then told where to go.
Of course, they are still retarted...before they actually put the call out, hundreds flocked to New Orleans with boats of all sorts, and alot were turned away.
- 12,993
- USA! USA!
Yes, the federal gov't is responding fast enough - I believe $500 million are being spent every day on it. I don't even know if that's possible to spend 500 million dollars a day (not even Brewster could do it). Is that the true amount or am I making it up - I know I heard it somewhere.
The people who are looting and stealing plasma televisions/shooting the rescue workers/raping and killing others in the SuperDome certainly aren't helping.
I hear everyone yelling, "What is Bush doing? Where is Cheney? Why aren't we helping these poor Louisiana residents more?" but I don't know what the hell can be done. It definitely shouldn't be up to the federal government to completely support these people. I'm all for helping them somehow, but how? It's a natural disaster and **** happens.
I'm not cruel, it's just the way it is. It sucks, but what exactly can you do?
I hate Kanye West, by the way. The only thing that offends me is when someone unnecessarily brings the race card into the equation. It's seriously the only thing that can offend me. It's shallow, deceitful, and just an overall annoyance.
The people who are looting and stealing plasma televisions/shooting the rescue workers/raping and killing others in the SuperDome certainly aren't helping.
I hear everyone yelling, "What is Bush doing? Where is Cheney? Why aren't we helping these poor Louisiana residents more?" but I don't know what the hell can be done. It definitely shouldn't be up to the federal government to completely support these people. I'm all for helping them somehow, but how? It's a natural disaster and **** happens.
I'm not cruel, it's just the way it is. It sucks, but what exactly can you do?
I hate Kanye West, by the way. The only thing that offends me is when someone unnecessarily brings the race card into the equation. It's seriously the only thing that can offend me. It's shallow, deceitful, and just an overall annoyance.
- 1,620
Zardoz
I agree wholeheartedly. Its kinda like the art department catching on fire at school, no one really cared, but if the maths or science wings caught fire, they would be rebuilt straight away. If this hurricane had hit new york or washington etc, there would be MUCH faster and more organised response. Who cares about poor black people, they're dispensable. Thats the message the US is giving out.
Not having time to mobilise help isn't an excuse, the US had 5 days warning.
- 12,993
- USA! USA!
Then the rest of the world is stupid, and if they are, who gives a ****?
I don't really care what the rest of the world thinks. I don't expect anyone in Europe of Africa to give a damn what I think about his country.
Race has zippo to do with this. The only racists here are the people who bring race into it and say, "Bush hates black people" or something equally stupid.
There are white people in Louisiana too, the last time I checked. Asians, and Mexicans, and all sorts of other people there too. It's quite amazing.
I don't really care what the rest of the world thinks. I don't expect anyone in Europe of Africa to give a damn what I think about his country.
Race has zippo to do with this. The only racists here are the people who bring race into it and say, "Bush hates black people" or something equally stupid.
There are white people in Louisiana too, the last time I checked. Asians, and Mexicans, and all sorts of other people there too. It's quite amazing.
- 12,993
- USA! USA!
If the US government had 5 days warning, so did the residents of Hurricane Alley.James2097I agree wholeheartedly. Its kinda like the art department catching on fire at school, no one really cared, but if the maths or science wings caught fire, they would be rebuilt straight away. If this hurricane had hit new york or washington etc, there would be MUCH faster and more organised response. Who cares about poor black people, they're dispensable. Thats the message the US is giving out.
Not having time to mobilise help isn't an excuse, the US had 5 days warning.
If I hear that a category 5 hurricane is headed right at me in five day, I'm running the **** out of there. Don't tell me these people are so poor that they can't ride a bicycle out of town, or take a bus to Oklahoma or something. Yeah it sucks to have all your belongings destroyed (do poor people have belongings?), your house destroyed, but that's the price you pay for living in Hurricane Alley under sea-level.
Nothing like this would happen in New York, so who know what differences there would be. Natural disasters like hurricanes don't really happen in New York.
- 434
klostrophobic, i don't really know if you have some deep seeded hate for people that are effected by natural disaster, but is there any country that does not help its people after a horrible disaster?
like i said earlier, im getting tired of people blaming politicians and etc., their political party has nothing to do with it at this point. maybe people could get over it and start doing something instead of pointing fingers.
it did take quite a while for El Presidente to actually appear at the scene though (even though that does not really mean much unless he was physically helping)
like i said earlier, im getting tired of people blaming politicians and etc., their political party has nothing to do with it at this point. maybe people could get over it and start doing something instead of pointing fingers.
it did take quite a while for El Presidente to actually appear at the scene though (even though that does not really mean much unless he was physically helping)
- 12,993
- USA! USA!
I have no hate. I just don't feel as bad for people who knew this was coming. I feel bad that these people have their lives turned upside down, but it's easily avoidable if you just move to a safer part of the country. It's not the federal government's job to support these people. I don't want to the government to completely turn their back on them (and they haven't) but you can't just completely overahaul the budget to send 50 trillion dollars to Louisiana.
- 1,620
I never said I thought race had anything to do with it, only there may be a perception that race/poorness could be an issue, even subconciously. The minute you go saying everyone else is stupid, you're really starting to cement the image the world has of America, one that seems increasingly accurate...Klostrophobic
The request to evacuate was only given a day before. A poor person could quite literally be stuck there, as its logistically impossible to move every single person out in 1 day, especially by bus. Complacency is the problem here. The fact is that not all was done to prevent unecessary deaths, considering America's potential for carrying out huge relief operations.Klostrophobic
Yes, but it was said completely hypothetically. America would act more decisively if a more important town (with more big-business, money, richer status) was in trouble. I was only trying to say that the government wasn't responsive enough, not by a long shot. Things should've got moving 5 days before the hurricane even hit, so there wasn't this huge delay. I would've thought a country so seemingly paranoid about its own safety would care about its people a little more, regardless of socio-economic status.Klostrophobic
You may say its pointless to be critical at this stage, but you need to make sure any future disaster plan is better thought through. Being critical is the most helpful thing one can do to ensure things are better in the future. Face it, at one point there WILL be more hurricanes/floods/fires/etc and you need better plans.
If its not the government's job to ensure the safety of its citizens, I don't know what is. This is what being a civilised country is all about.Klostrophobic
- 12,993
- USA! USA!
I didn't say everyone else was stupid. I had a huge modifier if in there somewhere.James2097
If you want to get out of there badly enough, you can get out of there. Some people were stubborn and stayed there. There is only so much the government can do - do you want them to hand out individual rescuers to carry them to safety. I believe a warning was in effect 5 days prior, was it not? I may be wrong there, and if I am please do call me out, but I'm pretty sure the national weather service had a warning out.
I don't see how you can say this falls on the shoulders of America. It's largely up to the citizens of the area to get out if there is a disaster warning. Why isn't one day enough time to move a couple million people? Open up all the roads to lead out and it shouldn't be a major, major problem if the citizens aren't morons. Allow travel on both sides of the highway.
I never said it was pointless to be critical. I just think it's pointless to blame Bush and the government without giving a plan of action they could have followed instead. OK, you say start evacuatin 5 days before - is that going to make a difference? Will these people actually evacuate? Set up more buses - will that make a difference? What percentage of people made a concerted effort to actually evacuate? I'm guessing it's a rather small percentage.
It's primarily the individual's job to ensure his own safety. I don't need the government to keep me safe from natural disasters that can be seen days in advance. Yes, it can help, but it's my responsibility to get out of the area. From terrorist attacks, and the like - sure, the government can keep me safe there, but only so much can be done to avoid death by natural disaster. If people aren't smart enough to realize there is a huge possibility to massive flooding when they reside in a below sea-level area in hurricane alley, they probably aren't going to respond well to an evacuation.
- 2,093
Duke
Well, in a way yes. A hurricane notwithstanding, the levees should never have given way. And the levee that broke first was the one that would have been finished reconstruction on a month ago if Bush hadn't scrapped funds for that project. Another project, of which the budget was halved by Bush in 2001, was the preservation of the marshlands outside New Orleans that would have slowed a hurricane down a lot (hurricanes slow down almost immediately when they reach land).
In fact, Bush scrapped a lot of funds on that since 2001, and appointed an incapable FEMA boss too boot, of course an old friend of his. This all the while with the levees braking being the 3rd most likely big disaster to hit the U.S. that featured a terrorist attack on New York as the number one most likely disaster. Some Dutch engineers/ levee experts talked about the issues as they had been there to inspect the levees, and warned about this, and indicated a lot of people were aware of the problems. One even suggested that the Mayor would probably have been pretty sure when he gave the order that the levees were going to give, as most people involved knew the state of the levees.
A lot of people have been slack here.
But it was Bush who ultimately decided the funds were needed elsewhere - i.e. Iraq. Basically he chose to pay 100% attention to the number one risk, one that lay outside the U.S., and neglected the others.
But the risks for New Orleans were well documented, and newspapers had been running big features on current problems for a fair while these last years.
I'm anxious to see how this is going to be spin-doctored.
Klostophobric, you should be ashamed of yourself and inform yourself better. The first things that were cancelled when the evac order was given, were bus, train and airport services into, but also out of New Orleans. If you didn't have a car, you couldn't get out. Lots of people there are extremely poor (over 20% lives under poverty line) and wouldn't have had the money to stay anywhere else. They didn't have a whole lot of time, and a day isn't much. All lanes were in fact opened for outgoing traffic, but they were still packed. And then of course there were people who decided to stay - based on previous hurricane experiences, they had a decent reason to if they had a well protected home. But many didn't realise the bad state the levees were in and how likely they were going to give. They thought the evac order was for the hurricane alone.
Its always easy to say everything is everyone's individual responsibility, but that is both insulting and doesn't do the complexity of the real world any justice, klostro.
Young_Warrior
(Banned)
- 2,285
If everyone tries to evacuate a cirty you will hit gridlock and most people in new orleans dont have cars and therefore the government should have provided the means for everyone to get out but because they didnt people had to stay because of the short notice it would be pretty damn hard for people to get out.
I just noticed one thing however. Evn though america is the richest country in the world your poor people are a hell of alot poorer than british poor people.
I just noticed one thing however. Evn though america is the richest country in the world your poor people are a hell of alot poorer than british poor people.
- 464
- blentley
i say no
i think the reason why is because of america's latent racism toward black people.
all the white people in new orleans have been evacuated because they are rich enough to find a way out
the rich (white) conservatives(the administration) could not care less about their less fortunate (black) countrymen
had something like this happened in say manhattan, then i think the response would have been a lot different
i think the reason why is because of america's latent racism toward black people.
all the white people in new orleans have been evacuated because they are rich enough to find a way out
the rich (white) conservatives(the administration) could not care less about their less fortunate (black) countrymen
had something like this happened in say manhattan, then i think the response would have been a lot different
///M-Spec
Staff Emeritus
- 4,928
Everyone up and down the chain of command has some responsiblity in all this. People are quick to blame the feds, but I think the people at the local and state level have some answering to do themselves.
It's easy to say things would have been better if FEMA had it's act together from the first moment everyone realised Katrina could have breached the levees. It's easy to say because it is most probably true. The personel and equipment should have been standing by; ready to act the minute conditions were safe for operation.
However, helicopters and rescue personel can only react to a disaster, not to actually mitigate one.
There was also opportunity for officals at the CITY level to make sure when disaster did strike, the number of people affected were less than the estimates we see being discussed. Everyone seems to forget that local and state politicians have a responsiblity to their constituants as well.
If it was popular knowledge that the levees would not hold up against a Cat 4+ storm, the city should have had a better evacuation plan; particularly for the infirm or the elderly.
At the very least it could have done a better job warning people far ahead of time of the dangers, even if it was too cash-strapped to actually do anything about it. I'm not talking 5 days ahead of Katrina, I'm talking years ahead of Katrina. How many close calls has New Orleans had in the last few years? Anyone remember Ivan?
How about this year alone? The mayor should have released a press statment every time they had a close call. He should have been standing behind a podium surrounded by cameras saying "folks, if the next one is as big as this last one, you should get the HECK out of Dodge". That costs very little money, because the local news agencies will carry that message out for you.
If people who had means to leave the city were better informed on the state of the levees and were told that a Katrina... (or a Charlie .. or a Dennis... etc) could wipe the city off the face of the map, then they probably less likely to gamble on staying.
And speaking of gambling... at the end of the chain is the individual. I cannot imagine many of the residents were held in the city of New Orleans against their will. I'm sure everyone in the Gulf coast knew exactly what happened to Pensecola.. to Mobile.. etc. in the last couple of years.
Yet there they were, living in a city that was poorly sited from the begining, had insufficient protection against hurricanes in one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. They gambled living there. And when you gamble, sometimes you lose.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't still have sympathy for the victims. I do feel very badly for them. Even the ones that made a poor choice in staying. For the record, my wife and I donated early Wednesday morning to the Red Cross and yestarday dropped off a care package at the local shelter in town.
But I do question the notion that every single person stranded after the floodwaters came in were stuck in New Orleans and there was not a single thing they could have done about it beforehand.
Yes, there were the infirm, the very young and the very elderly. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about able bodied people who could have made the decision years ago that they were not going to live in a city that may eventually drown them. Or at least if they did, made sure they have the means to escape if it tried.
But I'm going to avoid blanket statements because blanket statements are usually wrong to some degree. Everyone affected directly by this disaster has their own unique story, so I don't think any one person is completely to blame or is completely free of responsiblity. Even that fella in the Oval Office.
M
It's easy to say things would have been better if FEMA had it's act together from the first moment everyone realised Katrina could have breached the levees. It's easy to say because it is most probably true. The personel and equipment should have been standing by; ready to act the minute conditions were safe for operation.
However, helicopters and rescue personel can only react to a disaster, not to actually mitigate one.
There was also opportunity for officals at the CITY level to make sure when disaster did strike, the number of people affected were less than the estimates we see being discussed. Everyone seems to forget that local and state politicians have a responsiblity to their constituants as well.
If it was popular knowledge that the levees would not hold up against a Cat 4+ storm, the city should have had a better evacuation plan; particularly for the infirm or the elderly.
At the very least it could have done a better job warning people far ahead of time of the dangers, even if it was too cash-strapped to actually do anything about it. I'm not talking 5 days ahead of Katrina, I'm talking years ahead of Katrina. How many close calls has New Orleans had in the last few years? Anyone remember Ivan?
How about this year alone? The mayor should have released a press statment every time they had a close call. He should have been standing behind a podium surrounded by cameras saying "folks, if the next one is as big as this last one, you should get the HECK out of Dodge". That costs very little money, because the local news agencies will carry that message out for you.
If people who had means to leave the city were better informed on the state of the levees and were told that a Katrina... (or a Charlie .. or a Dennis... etc) could wipe the city off the face of the map, then they probably less likely to gamble on staying.
And speaking of gambling... at the end of the chain is the individual. I cannot imagine many of the residents were held in the city of New Orleans against their will. I'm sure everyone in the Gulf coast knew exactly what happened to Pensecola.. to Mobile.. etc. in the last couple of years.
Yet there they were, living in a city that was poorly sited from the begining, had insufficient protection against hurricanes in one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. They gambled living there. And when you gamble, sometimes you lose.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't still have sympathy for the victims. I do feel very badly for them. Even the ones that made a poor choice in staying. For the record, my wife and I donated early Wednesday morning to the Red Cross and yestarday dropped off a care package at the local shelter in town.
But I do question the notion that every single person stranded after the floodwaters came in were stuck in New Orleans and there was not a single thing they could have done about it beforehand.
Yes, there were the infirm, the very young and the very elderly. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about able bodied people who could have made the decision years ago that they were not going to live in a city that may eventually drown them. Or at least if they did, made sure they have the means to escape if it tried.
But I'm going to avoid blanket statements because blanket statements are usually wrong to some degree. Everyone affected directly by this disaster has their own unique story, so I don't think any one person is completely to blame or is completely free of responsiblity. Even that fella in the Oval Office.
M
- 2,208
Arwin
From the top to the bottom, going in both directions, tragic mistakes in prioritization and errors in judgement have been made.
When a person makes the decision to enter public life and begins working towards getting themselves into positions of authority in government, they assume the responsibility for what the government does in cases just such as this.
If you are enough of an egotist to think you are up to the job of being a President, a state governor, a Senator, a big-city mayor, or the head of a federal relief agency, then you had damned well better get your priorities in order and think through the consequences of your actions and decisions. If you're going to swagger around calling yourself a "leader", you'd better act like one.
As this story develops, we keep finding out about how many studies have been done over the years that predicted exactly what would happen if a storm like Katrina plowed into the New Orleans area. They all came to the same conclusion. They all predicted the catastrophic scenario that occurred.
Everything was predicted accurately, right down to the total breakdown in communications and the large numbers of poor who would not have the means of evacuating on their own.
And yet, sufficient federal funds to beef the levees were withheld every year. Somehow, a truly comprehensive plan was never really put together on the state and local level. Hard as it is to believe, we're learning that proper planning for this worst-case scenario has never really been done. Now we're paying the price for the mistakes these leaders have made.
Good lord, considering everything that has been known by those people down there about what would happen, couldn't they at least have run some drills over the years? Have they ever done anything like that? Knowing what would happen in the residential neighborhoods if the levees broke, how could they not have distributed flood "manuals" throughout the city, giving the residents of all those one-story houses simple life-saving tips such as stashing an ax in the attic so they could break through the roof when the water drove them up there?
Knowing what would happen, why was an evac alert and preparation plan not triggered as soon as Katrina passed over Florida and entered the hot water of the gulf? Why did they not really get moving until the monster was only a day away?
Why was the National Guard not fully mobilized as soon as Katrina turned right out in the gulf and headed northwest? Did they think that somehow they wouldn't be needed? The Guard should have been pouring into the area soon after the center of the storm had moved through, of course, yet somehow those in charge seemed to adopt a "wait and see" attitude!
What greater priority could they have had than planning for this? Yet somehow, it was not properly done. This is the catastrophe it has become because of a failure of leadership at virtually every level.
- 438
- mybad4990
For all you detractors of the responce time, lets go back in history and look at a couple of disasters, seeing how long it took for troops to arrive (note: data is based off of media reports):
Hurricane Andrew (largest hurricane prior to Katrina to hit the US): 5 days before first active troops arrive in FL.
Asian Tsunami : 6 days before first US military troops arrive in the affected area.
For comparison, it took 4 days to respond to Hurricane Katrina, a much larger crisis than Andrew (and FL was full of rich Floridians who vote Republican too) or the Asian Tsunami (poor folk who Bush supposedly doesn't care about). And in both of those cases you didn't have a flooded city to deal with. So, that and the following:
1). You have a person who has absolutly no experience in running Emergency Management in charge of FEMA
2). A govenor who didn't call for active troops until after they realized that they had a major problem (remember folks, the US can't just go sending troops into places on US soil. The govenors have to ask for them, even with a federal emergency declaration).
3). A mayor who a). knew that it would take 55-72 hours to completely evacuate the city and b). left over 300 school buses in a parking lot in nice neat rows instead of using them for evacuations (please, Mayor, explain that to everyone).
I'd say that 4 days, while still a long time for a responce, was resonable. Also, as someone mentioned before, FEMA was in New Orleans within 24 hours of the hurricane striking. The National Guard and coast guard also were in there within 24 hours. Yes, FEMA Director Brown will most likely be fired after the responce is over, but lets put some perspective on this.
Hurricane Andrew (largest hurricane prior to Katrina to hit the US): 5 days before first active troops arrive in FL.
Asian Tsunami : 6 days before first US military troops arrive in the affected area.
For comparison, it took 4 days to respond to Hurricane Katrina, a much larger crisis than Andrew (and FL was full of rich Floridians who vote Republican too) or the Asian Tsunami (poor folk who Bush supposedly doesn't care about). And in both of those cases you didn't have a flooded city to deal with. So, that and the following:
1). You have a person who has absolutly no experience in running Emergency Management in charge of FEMA
2). A govenor who didn't call for active troops until after they realized that they had a major problem (remember folks, the US can't just go sending troops into places on US soil. The govenors have to ask for them, even with a federal emergency declaration).
3). A mayor who a). knew that it would take 55-72 hours to completely evacuate the city and b). left over 300 school buses in a parking lot in nice neat rows instead of using them for evacuations (please, Mayor, explain that to everyone).
I'd say that 4 days, while still a long time for a responce, was resonable. Also, as someone mentioned before, FEMA was in New Orleans within 24 hours of the hurricane striking. The National Guard and coast guard also were in there within 24 hours. Yes, FEMA Director Brown will most likely be fired after the responce is over, but lets put some perspective on this.
Young_Warrior
(Banned)
- 2,285
What about the things Kanye West had to say ladies and gentlemen?
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