Subject: RE: Outraged over Bush! (Hurricane Katrina)
From:
CarolC
Date: 15 Sep 05 - 03:32 PM
"Truth", Guest,G? More like "whitewash", I think.
All of this stuff has already been posted in this thread and in others, rarelamb. Had you actually read them, you would already know this stuff.
A note on the links in this post. All of them were good at the time they were previously posted. Now all of them are defunct. So it looks like the whitewash has begun, and is even extending to blogs like dailykos. This is more than a little bit frightening.
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From the Mayor of Hattiesburg, Mississippi...
"FEMA, meanwhile, has refused to release 50 trucks carrying water and ice sitting at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Hattiesburg Mayor Johnny DuPree said.
'They're sitting down there right now because one person from FEMA won't make the call to say, "Release those trucks,"' he said.
Two-thirds of the residents of the southern Mississippi city have no power, and that figure was 100 percent for three-and-a-half days, he added.
He said FEMA representatives did not arrive in Hattiesburg -- 95 miles from New Orleans -- until Saturday.
'People from all over America have come in to help us," he said. "But the people who get paid to do this haven't done what I think they should have done.'"
www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/04...topstories
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The agency has more than 1,700 truckloads of water, meals, tents, generators and other supplies ready to go to the affected areas of the Gulf Coast, Chertoff said. Federal health officials have started setting up at least 40 medical shelters. The Coast Guard reports rescuing more than 1,200 people.
But residents, especially in Biloxi, Miss., said they aren't seeing the promised help, and Knight Ridder reporters said they saw little visible federal relief efforts, other than search-and-rescue teams. Some help started arriving in areas Wednesday by the truckload, but not everywhere.
'We're not getting any help yet,' said Biloxi Fire Department Battalion Chief Joe Boney. ``We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm.'
www.miami.com/mld/miamihe...hurricanes
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Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard:
Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago. FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel." Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis."
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9179790/
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In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he knew "for a fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested that New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than Sunday morning.
But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview, the general charged with operations for the military's Northern Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come our way."
"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5 storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the United States. . . . I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."
Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested, Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone, according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they weren't sent."...
www.washingtonpost.com/wp...01653.html
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'Bill is a member of a volunteer firefighter team in the Houston area. He and his team have a lot of experience helping after hurricanes. And they also have special expertise -- a lot of them work for a living on oil infrastructure and repairs. Bill is a professional logistics expert whose assignments have included getting a client's tsunami-flattened distribution facility back operating within a couple of weeks, and pre-invasion logistics work in Kuwait.
On Monday night, his group assembled their rescue equipment and tools, and packed them into their boats along with all the emergency supplies they could carry. By Tuesday morning, they were almost to New Orleans. "We were stopped at gunpoint by FEMA and told to turn back," he told me. When I asked, he clarified that they did not point the guns at them, but they were carrying and displaying their weapons.
FEMA told him that no one was allowed to enter the city to help "until it was secured by the National Guard." The Houston team asked if they could wait. The FEMA staff told them yes, but that they shouldn't expect anything to change.
So they set up camp in the parking area where they had been stopped, and they waited. By Thursday night, when they were still waiting in the same place, some of the team returned to Houston. The rest decided to wait longer. And still nothing changed, so the remaining team members returned to Houston on Saturday night.
Needless to say, Bill is livid about this. I asked him why they had not been sent to some of the other communities in the hurricane-stricken area where security was not as much of an issue.
"We asked," he told me, "but they said that our expertise was more needed in the New Orleans area." The @#%$ catch-22 -- they were needed in New Orleans, so they weren't allowed to go elsewhere, but they weren't allowed to go into New Orleans, so the upshot was that they did nothing except sit and wait, and then go home in frustration.
What had him frosted more than anything else is that they also have very specific expertise, as individual professionals as well as a firefighter team, in dealing with damage to oil infrastructure in the aftermath of a natural disaster. "We've been doing this more than 10 years," he told me. "We are not amateurs, and we have an enormous amount of experience with areas which have been hit by hurricanes."
"A lot of the damaged oil facilities aren't even in the city of New Orleans itself," he told me, "so they weren't in an area that you would think would have looters or security problems that were different from any hurricane we've worked in. We're used to arriving and immediately going to work."
They didn't just sit and wait -- they kept going back to the FEMA people who were holding them up and making suggestions about how and where they could be useful. But FEMA had no interest in listening, and the line never changed. "You can wait if you wish, but don't expect any change anytime soon. Or you can go home."
You know all that "help is on the way" BS that was spouted? A lot of it wasn't just "on the way" -- it was already there, but blocked from doing anything because of FEMA.
We've heard so much of this over this past week, of help and supplies arriving and not being allowed in, of the USS Bataan cruising off the city with helicopters, medical facilities, and supplies, but doing nothing because they hadn't been asked to help.
I thought my outrage meter was already off the dial, but I discovered it had new levels when I heard the first-hand account from a friend who had left work for a week to bring specific expertise to the disaster, and who was among the thousands of such people blocked by FEMA and their incompetent bureaucracy from doing anything at all.'
www.dailykos.com/story/20...05538/7048
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sj
