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Originally Posted by shoot
Before this storm came in every politician in town was saying how they had been waiting and preparing for this storm for all of their lives. Can anyone identify a single action that was planned?
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Go read about the Ted Koppel interview last night of FEMAs director. Read the interview of New Orleans mayor. They had been complaining for years about the 17th Street Canal levee that was not finished for two years when federal resources authorized by Congress suddenly could not be found. Need I tell you where the levee broke?
FEMA already did an exercise just for this event. They knew that 100,000 people might not have resources to leave the town. FEMA knew this disaster was coming days before and did not even bring in fleets of flatbed trucks to take the people out. The town was declared a Federal Disaster Area long before Katrina arrived. And yet still FEMA made no effort to provide transport for those people.
You can also blame the Governors. Within hours of the storm, already loaded National Guardsman should have been moving south in AL LA and MS. It is not the long term planning that is at fault. New Orleans should have been more than just flooded. It should have been pummeled by hurricane waves accross all broken levees. New Orleans suffered little of what FEMA knew was coming. Yet FEMA cannot even address that problem. FEMA did not even have plans to immeidately setup air traffic control in nearby airports. Insteaed, cars drove to those airports to distribute satellite telephones. What kind of response is that? Same as the American response to a Tsunami only a year ago. Pathetic.