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Thursday, September 1

Governor Blanco, what do you mean your administration did everything possible?

For those who did not watch Governor Kathleen Blanco's press conference yesterday, here are selected quotes. (Transcript available on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer website at this link.)
JIM LEHRER: As the frustrations have grown in New Orleans and the surrounding area today, government relief efforts have been criticized by some local residents. A short time ago Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco responded to those criticisms and spoke about her own frustrations.

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO: You need to understand that we are working in what is essentially a primitive site condition. These conditions make it extremely impossible to do everything that is absolutely essential to be done simultaneously. So we have deployed our people in a prioritized fashion. And our goal is to save as many lives as possible.

We begged all of those people, the mayor begged the people; the parish presidents begged people to get out. The people who stayed chose to stay in some cases and in other cases had limited resources. But they were given -- even those with limited resources were given opportunities and perhaps the communications network did not filter rapidly enough. We were working on a very short time line when that hurricane turned its fire power on Louisiana. We acted as rapidly as humanly possible and we got out over a million people out of that region. Now, you know, we have limited resources.

No state, no region is prepared for the dimensions that we have dealt with. [...]
Since when does a major American city constitute a "primitive site condition" prior to a disaster?

Since when does "begging" people to leave a site constitute a valid execution of a mandatory order to evacuate?

Since when do only the most rudimentary and wholly inadequate disaster preparations constitute a "goal to do everything possible to save lives?"

Now let's stop clowning around. Let's look at just a few of the facts that are well known to virtually every American adult who has lived through a severe storm and its aftermath in an urban US region -- or closely followed news about such.

And we'll examine a few facts that would be well known to anyone who is apprised about the nature of the flooding threat to New Orleans from a storm higher than a Category 3. This knowledge would be shared by emergency preparedness planners in the city administration of New Orleans and the state capital.

> When a bad storm hits, the first thing that almost inevitably fails is electricity.

> Widescale electrical outages from storm damage can take weeks to repair.

> Hospital emergency generators can fail if electrical outages continue longer than 24-48 hours.

> When electricity fails, pumping stations fail.

> When pumping stations fail, water pressure and plumbing fails.

> With electrical outage and without a large emergency stockpile of chemical toilets, any refugee site in a city would have a health problem within 24 hours of usage.

> A category 4 or 5 storm near New Orleans would mean a storm surge that would flood the city and render impassible most if not all vehicular routes into/out of the city.

> It could take a month or longer to drain city of floodwaters.

> In a region cut off from electricity, food, water and critical medical supplies, citizens will break into stores/storage sites to obtain such supplies. Criminal element will organize to systematically loot and they will rob gun stores first.

> When an evacuation order is issued, the poorest, the oldest, the sick and the handicapped most likely cannot evacuate without vehicular assistance, meaning that planners must provide transport and create contingency measures for arranging pickup and/or loading sites.

> When an evacuation order is issued, those who comply will form long lines at gas stations to tank up; this will slow down evacuation and deplete gasoline/diesel fuel in the immediate region. Without large emergency gasoline and diesel fuel stockpiles, transport (including boat and air) used for search and rescue operations will be unusable.

> If an evacuation order is not fully enforced, extensive search and rescue will be needed in a flooded region after a storm.

> Prisons without electricity mean plans would need to be effect to evacuate prisoners prior to the strike of a category 4 or 5 storm.

> If an evacuation order is fully complied with, it could be virtually impossible to fully evacuate the city of New Orleans ahead of a storm depending on the time frame because of the limited number of vehicular exit routes. Therefore, extensive planning would need to be done to shelter those who could not make it out of the city in time.

> Because of the very small number of vehicular routes leading to and from New Orleans, emergency supplies could not be trucked into the city with an evacuation order in effect about 2-3 days ahead of a storm. This is because all routes designated for entry to the city would need to be transformed into exits to support the evacuation order.

> In a region without electricity and without large emergency stockpile of batteries, communications instruments such as portable radios and cell phones would be unusable. Electrical outages would also affect cell phone towers.

All these things and many more along the same lines have been absolutely positively known to disaster planners in every major urban region on the planet since there have been modern cities and communications systems.

So the Louisiana state/New Orleans city administrations knew all these things. Very definitely, they could project what would happen if a category 4 or 5 hurricane struck at or near New Orleans.

Very definitely, the administrations could project the kind of emergency stockpiles and contingency measures required to avert a disaster from secondary consequences created by a Category 4 or 5 hurricane striking directly at or near New Orleans.

Very definitely, the authorities could project what would happen to the city of New Orleans if a storm surge broke or overflowed the levees.

Very definitely, the authorities knew that a breach of the levees was likely from a category 4 or 5 storm.

And successive administrations had decades to prepare for a worst-case scenario -- which I might add, the Katrina storm did not represent for New Orleans.

So what really happened to disaster planning for the city of New Orleans? I do not know. What I do know, from anecdotal accounts I've read and heard in recent days, is that lower income house owners in New Orleans cannot afford home insurance. That would guarantee they would be unable to rebuild after a catastrophic storm -- provided they lived through a category 4 or 5 hurricane if not evacuated.

I also recall a report that roughly 80% of the housing in New Orleans is substandard and that Formosa termites have infested the wooden residential structures.

Beyond that -- if I had his phone number, I'd ring up Robert Mugabe and ask what he thought really happened in New Orleans.

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