New Orleans Local Emergency Plan Solid

The plan was solid, it was just completely ignored.

From listening to the media the past couple of days I thought I was the only one in the USA that had a clue how every other hurricane had been dealt with. In each and every previous disaster the local and State governments were responsible for disaster preparedness planning and implementing the plan in anticipation of any arriving storm.

Florida was wiped out last year, did the media think the Feds were on the ball there? Truth is the state of Florida handled disaster preparedness and recovery coordination for the entire operation. Florida was not the Feds job and neither is the Gulf coast. FEMA provides the States an avenue for communication and coordination with the Federal government.

Th Federal goverment cannot plan for every disaster for every city, town or village in the USA. We set up our system of government 200+ years ago. It is time for the local officials to stop pointing fingers outside the state and start looking in the mirror.

Katrina: Dry Run Taught New Orleans Nothing

Marc from Cranial Cavity notes that the issues of evacuation had come to light before in New Orleans, almost exactly a year ago, in the advance of Hurrican Ivan through the Gulf. This report demonstrates that the problem experienced this week in The Big Easy did not arise from ignorance or a failure of imagination, but directly from incompetence in the city administration and specifically by Mayor Ray Nagin:

Don't Blame Bush for Katrina

George Bush and the federal government are not to blame for the disaster we have witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In fact, the primary responsibility for the disaster response lies with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and other local officials.

Yet leading Democrats and their allies in the major media are clearly using this disaster for political purposes and ignoring one obvious fact.

This fact – which needs to be repeated and remembered – is that in our country, state and local governments have primary responsibility in dealing with local disasters.

The founding fathers devised a federal system of government – one that has served us remarkably well through great disasters that have befallen America over more than two centuries.

But if we believe the major TV networks, George Bush, FEMA and the Republicans in Congress are all to blame for the current nightmare.

Disastrous disaster response from local and state La. officials

The facts coming out in the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina devastation point more to gross incompetence on the part of local and state officials in La. The response was apparently so poorly coordinated, that the feds on Friday attempted to wrest authority from La. Governor Blanco:

Couple this with the fact that La. failed to implement the following disaster evacuation plan (page marked number 9/Adobe page number 14, item D):

See photo of school buses submerged in water here.

Additionally, this is not the first time the city of New Orleans and state of La. have been criticized for their decisions regarding pre-and post hurricane responses (from a 9/19/2004 AP piece):

The 10 Spot - Sunday Katrina Edition

Ten stories on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina you may not have seen...

Burying The Lede

And the headline of the story is the ‘White House Shifts Blame.’ Go figure. An enterprising journalist might examine when Lt. Gen. Honore was dispatched, and what unit and where the convoy that reached the Superdome came from and when they were dispatched.

When the final story is written, and all the facts are known about this catastrophe, the reflexive Bush haters are going to be less gleeful than they are right now.