‘IT IS incredible, the government had no evacuation plan ... the first power in the world and it left its own population adrift.” It will be particularly galling that the man voicing those thoughts, echoed by many across the United States and around the world, was Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, and one of the Bush administration’s main hate figures.
That bewilderment, tinged with anger towards officials at local and national level, was shared at the scene of the disaster and by political commentators and disaster relief experts. In Louisiana, local and state officials voiced anger yesterday at the Bush administration’s response.
So what went wrong with the relief effort? Why, so many days after Katrina struck, is there still such chaos, despite the fact that there was ample warning of what might befall the Gulf coast? The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) has been accused of being so concerned about the possibility of a terrorist attack that it failed to prepare properly for a much more inevitable natural disaster. After the authorities in Baton Rouge had prepared a field hospital for victims of the storm, Fema sent its first batch of supplies, all of which were designed for use against chemical attack, including drugs such as Cipro, which is designed for use against anthrax. “We called them up and asked them: ‘Why did you send that, and they said that’s what it says in the book’,” said a Baton Rouge official.
Another possible cause for the chaos was that traditionally there have been so many warnings in the hurricane period that many residents in affected areas often shrug them off. For this reason, many may have not left the area. Local officials also seem to have grossly underestimated the needs of those who did not own cars. Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco defended the state’s actions saying they had requisitioned many school buses to evacuate those without cars. Residents, however, complained that many of them were left stranded, unaware of any such service.
“Yeah, they told us we needed to evacuate, but really that was for the rich people,” Curtis Vaughn, 48, told the Chicago Tribune. “A lot of these people live paycheck to paycheck and couldn’t afford even one night away from home.” Officials seem to have been taken by surprise by the breakdown in communications, in every sense of the word, with mobile phones and landlines not operating. Ms Blanco acknowledged that officials were struggling with faulty communication. She said she could reach White House officials on a satellite phone but not the army and other officials in nearby Baton Rouge. “Part of our problem is we’re not getting information delivered quickly enough,” she said. Most controversially, the National Guard, which can normally be relied on in times of crisis, are depleted and dispersed.
Nancy Lessin, of Military Families Speak Out, whose daughter is in New Orleans, said: “The numbers we have are that there are 11,000 National Guard personnel from Louisiana of whom about 3,000 are in Iraq with most of the heavy equipment. This included generators and high-water and other vehicles which could assist with the rescue effort.” Philip Crowley, director of homeland security at the Centre for American Progress, said the fact there were so many National Guardsmen from the area in Iraq inevitably affected the response.
There seems also to have been a failure in forward planning. Walter Baumy, a chief engineer with the US army corps of engineers, said the corps was confronted with riverbeds clogged with loose barges and debris and that it could not find contractors able to manoeuvre heavy equipment into the flood zone. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
