There are millions of Americans not in the disaster area of the Gulf states who are noticing that the surrounding communities seem to be the first on the job. The one exception is the Coast Guard, the most underrated and overlooked branch of the government, now part of the Department of Homeland Security. It isn’t the fault of the military that they don’t respond in a timely fashion, the blame lies directly on the shoulders of a mismanaged, bulky, tossed-together Federal Emergency Management Administration. FEMA is its own disaster. It’s a good thing neighboring cities and towns volunteer their own people to work our disaster areas. And it’s pathetic that FEMA has so much power when it can do so little in a real disaster.
If FEMA is all you rely on for aid in a catastrophic event, then you’re in trouble. The town up the road is a better source of help.
Of course, disaster management by voluntary cooperation, minus bureaucratic red tape, has always worked better and faster than what the federal government provides. As one television reporter put it, “we are our brother’s keeper.” What has come out of hours of watching news and weather reporting is my impression that while far too many people elected to stay in a hurricane-prone area after being ordered to evacuate, it is the communities and their mayors that shoulder the burdens of first response. Their resources may be limited but something at least gets moving, some folks live who otherwise would die. They use what they have without waiting for some piece of paper.
There is no excuse in America for people to die because of floodwaters, lack of electricity or phone service, or even absence of safe roads in and out of the area. We have the equipment, we can’t get it mobilized. The locals cannot breach the airbases nearby and grab the choppers they need or the supplies.
If the New Orleans disaster proved one thing, it is that American government, four years past Nine Eleven, still is not prepared to do a turn-on-a-dime emergency response. FEMA may have a role to play, largely in handing out checks at the proper time and hopefully to the proper authorities to pay for the services of those who earned their pay and those who lost all their resources. As a first responder, it appears to be useless.
Well — no one expected Hurricane Katrina to be so devastating. My reply is, are emergencies supposed to be timed like a movie script or confined to certain magnitudes of disaster? Oh go away! The federal government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) knew two days prior to the landfalls near Grand Isle, LA and then Gulfport, MS, that they had an abnormally large hurricane on the move. I’m a weather watcher and that monster took up over half the Gulf of Mexico tip to tip! I tried to explain it to a friend who called. She wasn’t impressed. Later that evening she called me gasping in disbelief at the size of Katrina. I tried to tell her, she had not grasped it until she saw it. But what I saw, and she saw, was seen by millions of Americans, even the twits who didn’t have enough brains to leave the area when ordered to do so. Even by the government that brags on the efficiency and usefulness of FEMA. Yes, there were those who could not leave, they didn’t have transportation. Why? Couldn’t someone have commandeered all the school buses in the area? So far, everything the mayor of New Orleans has said sounds low key and slow motion. He was safe so what the hell? It’s a shame every city has its village idiots but it’s a sorry state of affairs when the public officials are among them!
My bias against the Gulf Coast is no secret. The Seese line to which I belong came to Baton Rouge some time between 1830 and 1845. But at least they stopped at Baton Rouge and stayed away from the soup bowl called New Orleans. If they had not, it is doubtful if any of the present-day Seeses would be here, as the flooding of New Orleans is not a new thing. The great Labor Day hurricane of 1935 occurred when I was not yet two months old, but my parents and I were living close to Santa Monica, California. I’ve been to New Orleans twice, once in 1987 as a one-day visitor staying in Gonzales, LA with friends. The second time was in March of 2004 to visit my cousins who had found me via the internet. The cousin who found me is a retired surgeon. He had a huge home in a suburb of New Orleans and a two-story beach house in Pass Christian that he finished rebuilding eight months ago from a previous hurricane’s devastation. Pass Christian has been described on the news reports as “leveled.” I don’t know about the home in Jefferson Parish. It may or may not be standing.
This rebuilding after hurricane disaster and destruction is beyond all reason. Yes, some years the Gulf coast doesn’t get hit by hurricanes. But it has and it will again. When disaster lurks with every summer hurricane season, it seems a bit unreasonable to even issue building permits for beach homes or allow commercial construction near the Gulf. Their economy is supposedly built on tourism and gambling, sinking sand enterprises that can come and go with the economic tides. Apparently the economies of these states are as vulnerable to disasters as their topography. While I admire their spirit, it seems terribly misdirected.
In northern Arizona, we have a gully called the Grand Canyon and it is a national park. No condos hang precipitously on the sides of the canyon walls. It’s a national park. People go there to gawk and take photographs. Some go to paint. Others just go there because it’s there. If building were allowed there, the developers would descend on it like vultures on a rabbit carcass.
The Gulf coast seems like an ideal place to establish a national park where tourists could go gawking, but not building at or below sea level. Engineers and meteorologists could establish the average surge devastation inland, and no building should be allowed any closer to the Gulf than that perimeter. I believe in freedom, but I also believe in traffic lights to control wild drivers.
And I believe the situation in New Orleans is proof enough that our federal government has a nice followup program that is supposed to be among the first responders — it costs enough.
It’s also feasible to believe that in spite of other impending disasters, New Orleans will be rebuilt on sinking sand with bigger pumps and a few other technological improvements rather than rebuilt as a theme park city where tourists can go see replicas of what was once “New Orleans.”
I’ll go on record as being against N’Awlins, against Mardi Gras, and against allowing any Gulf shore property to be anything more than a national park and tourist destination. Put the hotels, the homes and the businesses inland.
You know they won’t do that. They’ll rebuild, and rebuild, and rebuild with each devastating blow from the forces of things greater than man’s ability to manage. Now that’s stupid!
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”