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September 05, 2005
Here's Your Evacuation DVD...Now Get Lost
Brad DeLong offers damning and unanswerable evidence of the state of New Orleans' hurricane preparedness:
In storm, N.O. wants no one left behind; Number of people without cars makes evacuation difficult By Bruce Nolan, Staff writer, New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005:
City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.
In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. "You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. "But we don't have the transportation." [...]
Production likely will continue through August. Officials want to get the DVDs into the hands of pastors and community leaders as hurricane season reaches its height in September, Katz said. [...]
Meanwhile, some churches appear to have moved on their own to create evacuation plans that assist members without cars. Since the Hurricane Ivan evacuation of 2004, Mormon churches have begun matching members who have empty seats in cars with those needing seats, said Scott Conlin, president of the church's local stake.
Emphases mine. So what we have is Nagin and company making DVDs for the citizens of New Orleans that admit the city cannot provide for the poorest among them. And the result is that churches are forced to carpool among their members if they wish to evacuate. Brad DeLong:
They were going to make a DVD. A DVD saying, "you all are on your own." They didn't even care enough to make the DVD before the hurricane season began.
No. New Orleans did not have a functioning government as of the summer of 2005. This is a catastrophic failure of local governance--much worse than FEMA's failures.
Lots of liberals are trying to deflect the blame by arguing that disasters of this magnitude are always handled by the Feds. Wrong, wrong, wrong...as usual they're employing the zero-sum fallacy. The federal government, especially FEMA and Homeland Security, have to answer questions. But the grading of their performance has no effect on the fact that first responsibility, both chronologically and in chain of command, lies with the local government. And it appears the local government's failures dward those of any other agency.
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Comments
southern style eugenics in my mind..disgusting!
Posted by: fran at September 12, 2005 11:24 AM
