Jo's Cafe

I have heard more and more comments & stories about how slow the government was to respond to the disaster, specifically in New Orleans. This drives me up the wall, and I just have to rant.

On Monday, the hurricane came through. Nothing the Feds could do at that point. There were already complaints that the NO mayor didn’t call for mandatory evacuations soon enough. Okay, fine. I personally think evacuation notices should be given even if there’s a threat of hurricane impact — but given all the crying about how many couldn’t leave anyway and how many refused to go, would it have made a tremendous difference?

By Monday evening, everyone was shaking their heads wondering what the big deal was (in New Orleans specifically I mean). They dodged the bullet, no big deal, shutup and go concentrate on Mississippi.

Tuesday morning, all hell broke loose when the levee was breached.

Now somebody explain to me how anyone was supposed to be prepared with an immediate response to a disaster that happened ONE DAY AFTER the actual disasterous hurricane?????

Thirty-six hours later, they say things are really moving and they’ll have most of the Superdome emptied today. Huge tanker trucks of food and water have arrived. Money is pouring in.

I’m not here to claim that the response is perfect. It’s obvious that more law enforcement was/is needed to keep order. They underestimated the need for food & water in the Superdome. No one is even talking about Mississippi, where whole towns have been destroyed.

Why is 36-48 hours response time so horrible? There was a time when you couldn’t have expected such response at all, or if you did it would take weeks or months. There was a time when a levee breach such as we saw would have meant certain death, either immediately or later via disease, etc, for anyone still in the city. These improvements have happened within my lifetime (and I’m in my 30s). We have come a long way in terms of disaster response.

Should the government have had thousands of National Guard troops mobilized on Monday, standing in NO, to get washed away by the same floods that took so many innocent lives?

Should we have had trucks of food sitting idly by waiting, to possibly also be destroyed if they were inadvertantly placed in the path of the storm?

Should we have evacuated an entire city (over 400,000 people) on the basis of a maybe?

What would the critics have done if we had done all that, and NO hadn’t flooded? They would have screamed about the waste of money and the overreaction. They would have accused the government of doing all that “staging” for political purposes. They would have blamed Bush — oh, wait, they always blame Bush. Scratch that.

We have become a society where if it doesn’t happen within seconds, it’s cause for screaming. It’s a damn shame.

Update: It is common for me to joke that my mathematics degree gave me the power to do quadratic equations and prove that 2+2 can indeed equal 5, but squeezed the ability to do basic math out of my brain

If the levee broke on Tuesday morning, 36 hours later is Wednesday afternoon, not Friday morning. I meant to say 72 hours. Might have been smarter for me to just say 3 days, but smarty just had to start playing with multiplication….!!

My opinion has not changed — I’m simply setting the record straight, and then slowly sneaking out the kitchen door!!!