Centerfield

Joe's a class act. I read his blog from time to time. I don't always agree with what he writes but that's OK.

If all political discourse were this humane and honest, politicians would have to work a little harder to earn votes and voters would have to think a little harder before casting their ballots since most discourse is reduced easy-to-understand attacks that demonize the other side coupled with a vague self-pat-on-the-back that offers little in the way of solutions.

Joe says:

So, yes, we now do feel you were made a scapegoat for higher ups who either wanted to avoid getting some of the blame or perhaps any blame that could actually have real consquences. And others agree with TMV. So you got the boot and information came out or was perhaps leaked that created an image of you as a guy who had a background in dealing with horses, was a crony and simply didn't have a clue.

Yup, I agree. Let's not forget that Mike Brown was the head of a FEMA that was not prepared, but the silent insinuation from the White House that it was all his fault was obviously a political ploy aimed at protecting some of those who should have done a lot more, a lot sooner.

Yes, by all means, let's find yet another way to blame President Bush. The attacks against Brown as a crony were NOT made by the White House, but by a media and a Democratic party hell-bent on making political hay out of a great national tragedy while the living victims were still being rescued.

Let's not forget that it was Michael Brown and his handlers who were busy worrying about what fancy restaurant to eat at the night of his visit to Louisiana rather than listening to the one FEMA employee stationed in the Superdome who was begging them for more help. It'll be fascinating to watch the Bush-detractors turn the firing of Michael Brown which THEY demanded into another thing to pin on the President.

At the same time, lets not be willing to absolve bush for his part.

As much of a I am obsessed with the recent disasters, I think even I'm saturated with Katrina coverage.

Yes, it was a disaster of biblical proportion.
Yes, pretty much everyone screwed up.

Isn't that why it was the “prefect storm”, human failings dovetailing with natures worst?

I watched Mike Brown on Bill Maher tonight. It looks like he really has been vindicated. I'm not saying he was all-clean, but certainly it seems like he didn't deserve ALL the heat he got over the mess.

Pat,

You are aware of the definition of the word apology, aren't you?

but by a media and a Democratic party hell-bent on making political hay out of a great national tragedy while the living victims were still being rescued.

You mean like the Republicans keep doing with 9-11, using it as a wedge issue against Democrats?You'd do well to hold the personal attacks, friend.

You'd do well to hold the personal attacks, friend.

I read and re-read Pat's comments and I guess I'm just totally missing the "personal attack." Pat merely pointed out a rather amusing irony--the very people that used Brown as a weapon to attack Bush and demanded his firing are now trying to use his firing as an excuse for attack, like someone Bush fired Brown (like they had demanded) to try to escape blame himself. I hardly think that can be termed a "personal attack." Just my two cents for what it's worth...

You'd do well to hold the personal attacks, friend.

I read and re-read Pat's comments and I guess I'm just totally missing the "personal attack." Pat merely pointed out a rather amusing irony--the very people that used Brown as a weapon to attack Bush and demanded his firing are now trying to use his firing as an excuse for attack, like someone Bush fired Brown (like they had demanded) to try to escape blame himself. I hardly think that can be termed a "personal attack." Just my two cents for what it's worth...

I haven't seen the tapes nor the transcripts but it does seem that we're all so desperate to find the one bad guy. Is it so hard to appreciate a severe situation (Category 4-5 hurricane) approaching a highly vulnerable area ( a city below sea level that is bowl shaped) with a prior history of cronyism and corruption that might affect infrastructure and planning and "rescued" by a confused, poorly coordinated rescue/relief effort ultimately supervised by a new agency primarily devoted to security. Throw in a whole cast of varyingly competent officials at all levels, too many sound bites and a highly charged press coverage and oh yes a bit a racial politics and you get.... a mess.

And yet we still search for that one "bad guy". And when we "pick" the wrong one we feel remorse. Shouldn't we stop searching for simplistic answers to highly complex problems.

The urge to scapegoat runs deep, and has for thousands of years. (See Frasier, The Golden Bough). The urge to make that scapegoat one of one's preferred hate symbols is even stronger.

...the very people that used Brown as a weapon to attack Bush and demanded his firing are now trying to use his firing as an excuse for attack...

It's called "trying to have it both ways." See the related "Have you quit beating your wife yet?" question.

I never absolved President Bush of anything. As I've said from literally day one, there's more than enough "blame" to go around. But I haven't seen relentless national pressure on our governor, or on the Congressmen (Republicans and Democrats alike) who voted to put FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security (the creation of which, as you should recall, President Bush initially opposed until Democratic Congressional pressure forced him to back down).

I just don't see the point in doing a 180 on anything based on a single AP hatchet-job story. Have you read any of the many criticisms of that story? Leaving aside the distinction between overtopping and breaching, the initial release of the tape OMITTED the part where the President asked Brown if he had everything he needed, and Chertoff asked Brown if he wanted him to contact DOD for more military assets, to both of which Brown said "no".

Go back and reread some of the e-mails between Brown and his staff written as people were dying in the Superdome and the Convention Center and see if you still think an apology is appropriate.

Now, I'm all for an apology that says: "Mr. President and Mr. Brown and Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin, we've been using this massive, unprecedented tragedy for political ammunition since 2 days after the storm. We apologize. The scale of this disaster was so huge that no human beings could have prepared adequate plans to cope with it ahead of time. We realize now that no American city could be 100% emptied of all people in just 3 days prior to such an event, or in less than 3 or 4 days after the entire city went underwater."

I've said it before and I'll say it again. When you start talking about "apologies" by individual politicians, you are talking about the blame game, not a neutral analysis of what went wrong and what things to fix for next time.

Rafique... you mean Brown cleaned up real nice and was able to make himself look like a good guy when interviewed by an entertainment personality who despises President Bush? Wow, that's sure conclusive evidence that he's been "vindicated".

Yep, the AP-edited tapes and transcripts ommited that little detail. Brown was asked twice at the end of the August 28 briefing, flat out, if he needed more federal or DoD resources. Both times he said no, he had everything he needed.

Hatchet job, with a full press assist.

For better or worse, they (except brown) are going to get a chance for a “do over” pretty soon.

If you look at the places most likely to be hit, and the trend in the number of hurricanes and their strength, then New Orleans and Houston are still excellent targets.

And always will be. Living near or below sea level on a coast has always been a chancy thing.

It may not be a bad idea to have these video teleconferences fed live to the networks.

It would give the publc first person information about what's going on, and at the same time greatly increase the number of people verifying the truth on the ground.

Also if a special point of contact was designated at Fema, then news organizations could send their latest information directly into the command center. MSM has thousands of reports scouring the disaster, why force the people in charge to constantly watch television?

Make the media part of the solution!

Meanwhile, this seems to pretty much put a lid on the "Bush lied about no one anticipating the levees breaching" meme

http://www.factcheck.org/article344.html

In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on September 1, President Bush said:

Bush: I don’t think anyone anticipated breach of the levees …Now we’re having to deal with it, and will.

Bush is technically correct that a "breach" wasn't anticipated by the Corps, but that's doesn't mean the flooding wasn't forseen. It was. But the Corps thought it would happen differently, from water washing over the levees, rather than cutting wide breaks in them.

Greg Breerword, a deputy district engineer for project management with the Army Corps of Engineers, told the New York Times:

Breerword: We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped. We never did think they would actually be breached.

And while Bush is also technically correct that the Corps did not "anticipate" a breach – in the sense that they believed it was a likely event – at least some in the Corps thought a breach was a possibility worth examining.

According to the Times-Picayune, early in Bush's first term FEMA director Joe Allbaugh ordered a sophisticated computer simulation of what would happen if a category 5 storm hit New Orleans. Joseph Suhayda, an engineer at Louisana State University who worked on the project, described to the newspaper in 2002 what the simulation showed could happen:

Subhayda: Another scenario is that some part of the levee would fail. It's not something that's expected. But erosion occurs, and as levees broke, the break will get wider and wider. The water will flow through the city and stop only when it reaches the next higher thing. The most continuous barrier is the south levee, along the river. That's 25 feet high, so you'll see the water pile up on the river levee.

Even those who thought that the levee breaching was a possibility, it wasn't expected, or anticipated. Thus I can't see how the President lied on this issue.

Now whether did enough to prepare for what was anticipated is another issue. And I think the evidence shows he didn't. But it's pretty clear to me that the "Bush lied" meme doesn't hold up. And the media needs to clarify this if they want people to respect them.

Bob, feeding those things live would be ueless to 99% of the people watching. Truth is, the news media had copies of these tapes since day one. FEMA sent them out. The content was just so dry that no one found them newsworthy and they got shelved and forgotten.

I incorrectly jumped on the President when this article came out. My personal feelings on the job he is doing made it easy for me to believe without seeing the video.

The breeches were not a surprise to me at all. Concerns of breeches after overtopping had been bandied around by people closer to the situation for some time. I don't know if this information was ever attempted to be passed up the chain or if it was and someone higher up thought it was outlandish.

This was a case where a primary rule of emergency management was broken. Expect the unexpected and respond quickly. Other then the Coast Guard responding in the manner they did, I can not think of any government group at any level that did a passable job. Bush is probably the least responsible for the screwups as any of them, though.

I am not ready to give Mr. Brown a pass yet. A lot of people can look good before the the fire. He did look prepared in the meetings. However, when the stress is on, I am not sure he was not overwhelemed and did not fold under the pressure. Just like some football players are great in practice; but can not do it on the field, people can be the same way in stressful situations.

I have seen the most confident and organized person crack under emergency situations. It is how someone can adapt to the unexpected that is what matters in situations like this.

Pat,

First off, I believe my words were, "it looks like," meaning that there seems to be an appearance of vindication. That's hardly conclusive, and I made no attempt to state that it was. Brown still has a lot to answer for. Those e-mails aren't going away, and he WAS the man in charge.

I'm still dealing in maybes at this point. Maybe Brown's been right all along. Maybe he's just covering his ass. Maybe. AS far as the blame game goes, I have always placed blame on the whole machine of government, from the top down. The feds blew it. Nagin and Blanco blew it. FEMA blew it.

So we can't mockingly say "You're doin' a heckuva of job Brownie" anymore?

Well he is doin' a heckuva of job deflecting blame away from himself. So I thing the phrase is still applicable. I'm not ready to buy into his tale yet.

Lets assume he did say all the right things to his bosses, and they did say all the right things back. In the end the rescue still looked like a cross between the keystone cops and Mad Max.

I keep saying that NO was a failure of imagination. Nothing in this latest episode seems to contradict that thought. In fact it seems to reinforce it. Even with hurricane Andrew and 9/11 as examples, people just didn't seem to understand what was coming. Namely the complete destruction of all local services for an entire city and a trapped population.

AS far as the blame game goes, I have always placed blame on the whole machine of government, from the top down. The feds blew it. Nagin and Blanco blew it. FEMA blew it.

I start from the bottom up. But I've been a first responder in some form or another for a couple o' decades, and I've seen a lot of natural disasters up close and personal, if not on that scale.

Contrary to the popular wisdom, and given the scope and scale of the "hit," for the most part the overall response to Katrina at all levels was actually pretty damned amazing. Had it not been, the wild-eyed cries about tens of thousands of dead would have been real, and not just media hysteria.

As was the original evacuation, Tully. Much as I fault Nagin and Blanco for their actions in the aftermath, the criticisms from the right about not getting enough people out is just bogus. We almost completely emptied an entire American city in about 72 hours. Look at the traffic snarl in Houston when they tried the same thing a month later.

Most of the people who stayed behind (not all, but most) were people who chose to, just as they had chosen to ride out every hurricane before Katrina. The drug dealer thugs who were the ones shooting at rescuers weren't about to leave and give up their territories and stashes of dope.

I spoke with a number of people at shelters here in Baton Rouge, people who had been evacuated from the Superdome and the Civic Center. They were far from universally the poorest of the poor. Many were lower middle class, who had owned cars of their own, but who just hadn't wanted to leave.

Pat: I've always suspected as much. I couldn't help notice that when people were rescued from a roof, there was usually a flooded car sitting in front of the house.

You are always going to have those that stay. Where the boneheaded mistakes were was in not evacuating hospitals and prisons. You had a Cat 5 storm forcast to hit a a high Cat 4, this was 72 hours out. I also have to wonder if NO had a system for evacuating those who could not evacuate themselves. Florida has a registry for such people. I know one of the biggest problem for people to keep them from evacuating are their pets. Shelters don't take them, for the most part.

Lousiana and New Orleans have always had issues with the inability to have good government. I am not sure you can find much less efficient government in the US. Where deficiencies like this show up most is in a time of crisis.
To be fair to FEMA, they are not a really good first responder group. That should be more of a responsibility of state and local. I think it would be a good idea to have a US military logistical unit trained to handle a mega disaster on short notice. I shudder to think what will be diaster response in an unexpeted major disaster, like a 7+ earthquake in LA or another major terroist attack that is devasting on a large metro area. This is where the focus needs to be. Not on a hunt for a scapegoat.

Bravo to Gandelman! He's long been near the very top of my personal "one of the genuinely good guys" list of bloggers who have earned my deep respect.

I don't know that it was in quite the same vein as Joe's excellent post... but I wrote something similar, abeit couched in a heavy dose of anti-Bush snark.

In any case, whether he was qualified for the job or not, the fact remains that Brownie was one of the very few (and that doesn't include Gov. Blanco or Mayor Nagin) who grasped the potential for a grave catastrophe in New Orleans and he deserves to be recognized for that. Joe did that as well or better than anyone I've read yet.

Heh. Local, state, and federal planners all understood what a Cat 4 or Cat 5 hit on NOLA meant. The Cat 4-5 planning scenario, in place for a couple o' years then, was semi-officially known as the "KYAG" plan. As in Kiss Your Ass Goodbye. You can find the NOLA general hurricane plan here. Feel free to use it as a checklist. The closest NOLA got to reaching their scenario-specific SOP's was opening the Superdome.

What Pat and Jim said. Despite the massive failure to actually implement NOLA's planning, when they got off the dime they evac'd well over a million folks in 38 hours, over 80% of residents. Pretty damned impressive from any angle. And the big evac failure wasn't the Superdome (which could and should have been handled differently), it was the failure to evac patients and prisoners. You can't do all that much for the folks who simply refuse to go. Some will insist on staying put even if you tell them they ARE going to die. Most all of those were saved anyway.

We still don't have a magic wand, and Moses is still booked. So now is the time for my regular admonition for people to get off their butts and check out their own local agencies for volunteer training opportunities, even if it's just opening mail for Red Cross.

But frankly, if you haven't listened for the last few years, you won't listen now. So screw it.

Several nursing home operators are being prosecuted right now. At least one refused help offered by the sheriff and EMTs in a parish (as per the plan), saying they had everything under control, then didn't get everybody out.

To understand the decisions made by those who stayed, including the hospitals, you must understand the history of hurricanes around here, and how close so many have come to being "the big one" only to turn away in the last hours before landfall. With hospital patients and nursing home residents, moving them at all poses a very substantial risk all by itself. Evacuating is NOT necessarily the safest choice in that circumstance. Say there's only a 75% chance of the worst-case hurricane scenario, while moving patient X from the ICU has an 85% chance of death from the move, well, the odds say stay your ground. And without the levee breach (which was NOT the type of flooding that had been predicted), staying would have been the best choice for the hospitals.

By the way, Kevin, EVERYBODY grasped the potential for something really, really bad to happen. Louisiana has lived with that fear for decades. We are intimately familiar with hurricanes. The mayor knew the dangers, the governor knew the dangers, everybody did. Michael Brown gets no brownie points for knowing that something really bad could happen. That wasn't a state secret. The problem was not in failing to anticipate that bad things could happen. The problem was in not adequately PREPARING for those bad things, and for not making the right DECISIONS about how to handle those bad things. And Michael Brown did not do real well in that regard.

The FEMA workers I spoke with in the week or two after landfall unanimously told me that the biggest problem was funding... if your particular department didn't have the word "terrorism" in its name, your funding requests were not fully met. And that problem has two roots... primarily, the decision to put FEMA under Homeland Security and secondarily, the failure of Brown and Chertoff to make and encourage Congress to make better budgetary decisions.

Well, your point is well taken Pat. I guess my response would be to ditto what others have said in that Brown doesn't get a pass across the board, rather that we're finding out that he most certainly didn't deserve to be the scapegoat he was made out to be... by folks on both sides of the aisle with fistfulls of political axes to grind. Nor did he act with the level of gross incompetence that he at first appeared to have acted with.

What Gandelman is being credited for is for owning up to his part in scapegoating Brown. If you wade thru the snark, I tried to do the same with my post.

The measure of a man or woman, IMHO, isn't in whether they're perfect, because none of us are, but rather in whether they own up to their imperfections. Joe Gandelman certainly deserves the props that Todd gave him here. IMHO of course.

To the extent Brown deserves any exculpation, it would be if what he claims in his response to Joe G. is tru, that he saw the failings of FEMA in January of 2005 and tried mightily but without success to bring about change. But by his own admission in that response, he couldn't even get enough funding to complete what he saw as a crucial study.

But at that level, if you see a major problem within your agency, and you have asked for and been denied the funding you believe is necessary to prevent or ameliorate major national catastrophes, then you have a duty to raise a stink about it to your boss and to Congress until they either give you what you need or they have publicly refused you and you resign in protest.

But at that level, if you see a major problem within your agency, and you have asked for and been denied the funding you believe is necessary to prevent or ameliorate major national catastrophes, then you have a duty to raise a stink about it to your boss and to Congress until they either give you what you need or they have publicly refused you and you resign in protest.

I don't disagree... But, look at what's happened to those who have publically disagreed with Bush Inc. after resigning or otherwise leaving his administration. To a person they've been very publically and very brutally eviscerated by Bush's base and their MSM allies. Surely Brown knew this perfectly well and it had to have played a role in the path he chose.

But, look at what's happened to those who have publically disagreed with Bush Inc. after resigning or otherwise leaving his administration. To a person they've been very publically and very brutally eviscerated by Bush's base and their MSM allies.

Ok, I missed the public splattering of guts about the place, but I did get a chuckle out of "MSM allies." :-)

Oh, those poor babies... went into the kitchen but couldn't take the heat.

Tell me again, who are Karl Rove's allies in the MSM?

Interesting... You talk as if you want government officials to do the right thing regardless of the costs but then you essentially blame them for whatever slander is aimed at them by partisans of the very individuals that you claim they ought to stand up to or resign.

I think that pretty much says it all.

You're speaking in riddles, Kevin.

Now boys, let's not beat on the new guy.

Kevin: I think you need to know that both Pat and Tully are hardened political veterans of state and local government (while I have a couple of decades in the federal government). Years of experience tends to color ones perspective.

Kevin's not new, Bob. He's been around quite a while. He has his own consistent perspective. Though yeah, experience does tend to breed cynicism. Mostly I'm trying to figure out who's been "eviscerated" and who the Bush base "MSM allies" are.

Of course, that's question-begging. What one person sees as "mainstream" another may see as wing media. And what one person sees as "evisceration" another will see as valid criticism. It so often depends on whose ox is being gored, and how.

Now, when someone can point to baseless criticism that relies entirely on opinion, offered up by a major media outlet, being promoted as substantive criticism or reporting rather than the editorialism or simple vituperation it is, then I get the point. I just want citations and analysis.