The most disheartening aspect of all of this is the fact that so many people who should have known better appear to be caught by surprise.
- If your city is on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, below sea level, surrounded by a lake and a mighty river and is only dry because of levies and numerous pumping stations, how can the Mayor of New Orleans and the Govenor of Louisiana NOT have a disaster plan in place, ready to go, that facilitates a massive evacuation of a city underwater?
- How can the Mayor and Govenor of Louisiana not have understood the human toll? They know how many people own cars in New Orleans. They also know how many people live in New Orleans. Yet, they did not know that thousands of poor would have no quick way to exit the city?
- How can the Mayor and Govenor of Louisiana provide a "solution" where they plop thousands of people in the Superdome without beds, without water, without food and without generators?
- How can news reporters get into the area, but soldiers or police cannot?
- How can news helicopters fly around, but helicopters full of water cannot?
- How could all of this been a surprise to anyone who's job it is to know that this could happen?
I feel so badly for those displaced people in New Orleans. Personally, I think they should tear everything down, call it Lake New Orleans, and rebuild the place in the spirit of Venice, Italy... a city on the water.Unfortunately, there are months ahead of more painful lessons to be learned. The only silver lining I can find out of this horrible event is that I hope our government officials are better suited to respond to such widespread destruction in a much more efficient manner. Because I believe it is only a matter of time before a terrorist organization unleases a WMD in the US, whether that be a dirty bomb, a nuke or a virus of some sort... I can only hope and pray that our government response will be vastly better from the lessons learned from the awful events unfolding after Hurricane Katrina.
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If I'm the mayor of a city under sea level, at worse case I have a storage location out of the city full of inflatible rafts with a couple bottles of water and some food inside, then drop them in via helicopter.
And couldn't someone fly over with loud speakers to tell residents where to go for assistance and then actually have the assistance ready?
Last year when we were hit with four hurricanes, Jeb Bush didn't need the federal govt. to figure out how to help FL residents. When FEMA called, he merely told them where they would best help. The LA Govenor is expecting the feds to have a plan in place for every catastrophe for every major city in the US, instead of having a plan themselves.
No excuse, in my opinion.
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