Criticism For New Orleans Disaster Preparedness

• September 1, 2005

From what I’ve seen and heard I’d agree with this assessment:

Amid the sympathy, however, there was criticism.
As U.S. military engineers struggled to shore up breached levees, experts in the Netherlands expressed surprise that New Orleans’ flood systems failed to restrain the raging waters.
With half of the country’s population of 16 million living below sea level, the Netherlands prepared for a “perfect storm” soon after floods in 1953 killed 2,000 people. The nation installed massive hydraulic sea walls.
“I don’t want to sound overly critical, but it’s hard to imagine that (the damage caused by Katrina) could happen in a Western country,” said Ted Sluijter, spokesman for the park where the sea walls are exhibited. “It seemed like plans for protection and evacuation weren’t really in place, and once it happened, the coordination was on loose hinges.”

Before we start pointing fingers I think we should wait for some of the smoke to clear and the water to recede. Still, though, its hard to imagine a disaster like this happening. Especially given the close call with a hurricane New Orleans had last year and the day-to-day realities that go with living in a city on the coast that exists below sea level.
By the way, if you’re interested in seeing some on-the-ground pictures of the fallout from this disaster check out Flickr’s Katrina tag. Lots of user-submitted pics of damage and destruction with more flowing in all the time.
It really is shocking.

Tags: Domestic Issues

http://onestackmind.com/ Robin S.

Only problem is, us humans are only human.

That’s the main reason I don’t much care for the criticisms that’re coming now. They sound too much to me like “It’s their own fault.” That’s true to some degree for some of the people, but now’s not the time to be saying so to the press.

Rescue as many people as we can, help them get back on their feet, then we can worry about why it happened and how to prevent it from happening again. That’s my stance.
http://verizon.net/ Bob

My heart goes out to all those suffering from this disaster, and now everyone is pointing fingers at whose fault it is that this happened.

Why weren’t everyone evacuated? Why did it take 5 days to provide help? Why weren’t the levees designed to protect against a category 4 hurricane?

Left unsaid is that a small part of the blame for some of all this needs to go toward the citizens who 1. didn’t evacuate. There have been a number of pictures of flooded homes in Mississippi and Alabama with dead bodies nearby but cars in the driveways. Why didn’t they evacuate? And 2. didn’t stock up on supplies. Everyone is requested to have food and drink for at least 3 days. Obviously a lot of people didn’t have food or drink for even 1 day.
http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

I wonder if you did have 3-days of supplies if they would have been destroyed.

The fact is that when you are on the southern coast and your town is below sea level, you MUST have a valid evacuation plan.

The local disaster planners are IMO criminally negligent.
Marty

I think most of the effort down there has been towards the flooding of the mississippi river, due to torrential weather systems upstream (re 1927). Which means they were more/less prepared for a steady rising flood with early warning and mitigation factors well underway long before things got dangerous.

The floodworks down there are massive undertakings, and very expensive to build and maintain. But i’m not sure they were ever designed to protect against this type of event. I’m not sure they could be.

(PS: do hurricanes ever reach the netherlands? i thought not…)
http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

Not Fair, the dutch have that little boy that stuck his finger in the dike.

Seriously you’d think that every contingency would be covered. After all with a city 14 feet below sea level, we knew that sooner or later we’d be hit.

Still it seems that we usually wait until after the disaster to prepare for it. In fact that’s the story with the Dutch sea wall.
WOOF

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA [Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project] dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313
Marty

Besides, people from down there on the gulf (trust me, i now have 7 homeless cajun relatives) see hurricanes come and go every year. People evacuate at the very last moment, if at all, because the storms almost always turn, and rarely cause such extensive devastation across so wide an area. I imagine you don’t hear about those storms much, in Dakota — there’s no real reason you would.

My extended family left New Orleans before the rush, on saturday night. And not expecting the worst (with no reason to treat this one any differently than all the others), they took very little with them, only expecting to be gone a night or two. Those that waited 24 more hours hopefully spent that time packing the car with valuables and storing things in the attic. But i doubt many of them did… They waited for the same reason my folks didn’t pack up the silver… 24 hours later, there wasn’t time for anything but getting the hell outta dodge.
http://sayanythingblog.com/ Seth Yantiss

Still it seems that we usually wait until after the disaster to prepare for it.

Tell that to the designers of the Titanic.

As Marty says, we are only human!

I’m agree with Robin. We don’t need to assign blame, as we could assign blame on everyone, including the city’s founders.

Blame Cananda! (or the French!)
Marty

Seriously you’d think that every contingency would be covered.

Yeah, that’s what they said after the Challenger, after 9-11, after the Columbia. Only problem is, us humans are only human.
Marty

Damn terrorists!
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

Point taken, Robin.

SayAnythingBlog.com

Criticism For New Orleans Disaster Preparedness

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