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Blame
September 03, 2005
An interesting observation I found today (via Free Will: Daily Libertarian Conservative News):
In the face of a catastrophic Hurricane Katrina, a mandatory evacuation was ordered Sunday for New Orleans by Mayor Ray Nagin.The mayor called the order unprecedented and said anyone who could leave the city should. He exempted hotels from the evacuation order because airlines had already cancelled all flights.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, standing beside the mayor at a news conference, said President Bush called and personally appealed for a mandatory evacuation for the low-lying city (emphasis added), which is prone to flooding.
Now, if that news story is true (originally published on NOLA.com), wouldn’t some of the “blame” on the slow response be put on the mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of LA? i.e., if they had started the evacuation order Saturday morning, instead of Saturday evening, maybe they could have used the hundreds of city and school buses to evacuate people? The city’s own plan recommends evacuation orders go out 72 hours before the hurricane is forecasted to hit… yet the order went out about 24 hours before. Sad. (And, if you want to know, there was a 70% forecast of hitting NO 72 hours before it did hit, so preparations could have begun.)
So, it was the President who called to ask (tell) the local authorities to start evacuation orders, because they were being too slow.
If I recall correctly, authorities gave evacuation orders in Mississippi on Saturday already…
Posted by paul at September 3, 2005 02:26 PM
Comments
jonny walker said on September 4, 2005 01:16 PMlast night, 2 different people told me about how Bush was racist and that's why the relief effort was so slow. I wanted to slap them. It was a terrible disater, the flooding made it a huge challenge for everyone. There was mistakes made, the rescue effort could and should have been better (hindsight is twenty twenty), but to just blame Bush and call him racist is just stupid.
Paul said on September 4, 2005 01:49 PMDo I know these two people?