The Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool
by David Benzion · 09/04/2005 1:19 am255 buses left abandoned and unused in New Orleans:
[Hat-tip JunkYardBlog, via LGF]
Reasonable estimates are that 13,000 people could have made it out, if these had been deployed effectively. Read the whole thing.
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19 Responses to “The Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool”Search
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As someone whose entire family was in New Orleans and spent 13 years there I am grateful, proud - living in Doha Qatar but seeing Texas especially Houston portrayed exactly as they are - people who care, who help - who step up. There has always been a difference in my recent 11 years living in Houston (moved there from New Orleans)between Texans and Non-Texans and Sky News Worldwide just showed a map of where the victims were distributed, 97% to Texas, speaks for itself. I know you are not seeing this but I and 2 million expats and 2 billion people are. The petty arguments over race are completely ignored as crap here because the effort is obviously massive and frantic. They see on worldwide broadcasts Texas National Guardsmen getting feces thrown at them and spit upon and yet they load them up and send them to Texas, where they are cleaned fed and treated. This had such a profound effect on everyone here that the Emir has donated 100 million dollars. In Houston despite our differences, despite our arguments - we can act quickly and decisively. As a former high ranking law enforcement official from New Orleans - I can tell you that a levee break was never contemplated, because there basically is only one road out (US 90 was always assumed to be stricken with traffic or destroyed within hours of any weather storm only leaving I-10) To evacuate New Orleans would be a mute point. My father told me that no one was told to leave but to go to the dome or East Jeff High School about 15 hrs before landfall. in the weeks and months to come you will see that many corporations did not give shift workers time off until Sunday. In short - New Orleans - again - did not evacuate, and they never do. God Bless Texas is more than a musical theme, these words are a concrete testimony to the faith of people in the Churches and the streets of Houston. God Bless Texas, the United States, our National Guardsmen, All of you helping, praying and doing Eric Johnson Doha Qatar
Even the electorate in LA could not possibly re-elect this pair of boobs (sorry, Gov.), could they?
The whining and blame-avoiding Mayor and the Governess standing around looking like a bobble-head doll will go down in history as the most pitiful and incompetant pair of “administrators” ever put in office, perhaps in the entire history of mankind.
Maybe the pervasive corruption in LA politics and especially NOLA politics will at last be pushed aside by the voters and cast into the trashbin of history. This pain and suffering may be the beginning of the rebirth of LA as a real functioning part of the rest of the world.
We can only hope and pray that this trial will herald a new life for the folks affected so deeply.
How dare you ridicule the mayor for not using those busses? Have you seen the price of gas? Plus their mileage is much worse than an SUV. It’s bad enough that W didn’t sign the Kyoto accord and now you want the mayor to contribute to more hurricanes in the future? How dare you?
There is plenty of blame to go around, and a whole lot of people could have done a whole lot more earlier within the view of all the armchair quaterbacking.
But one thing is clear - In a disaster of unprecedented nature in our nation, there has been a catastrophic failure of leadership of an equally unprecedented scale.
This type of situation is one of the reasons that we have a federal government. And by their own desire and design they have the primary responsibility for preparation and response to disasters of these type. We have spent $200+ billion in Iraq fighting people who were not involved in the attacks against our nation on 9/11. They had no nuclear weapons as did (and does) Pakistan and potentially (thanks to Pakistan and friends) OBL. And soon Iran. All of which were a bigger threat to the US than any others on the day we invaded Iraq. And while we continue to spend resources in Iraq (a nation whose new government has employed as a diplomat a man who assisted OBL in his terror against our nation), the very people that attacked our nation on 9/11 continue to train in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And they continue to finance that training with the largest productions of opium in the history of Afghanistan (which is in itself an attack of terror against our nation).
We have limited resources of money, goods and people. We must use them all wisely. And we must choose leaders that know how to do so properly, so that events like this have the resources they require.
It is beyond frightening to imagine the same level of destruction, but compounded by not even being able to enter the area to help people due to radiation. Or ever being able to reinhabit it for 300-400 years. The most telling comments from this tragedy were those of a Louisiana law enforcement officer who had spent 3 nights defending his police station from gangs of armed men. After describing the hell he had witnessed, he said just before breaking into tears “If this had been a terrorist attack, we’d all be dead”.
Our security and future depends upon getting better leadership than we have today.
Why did the drainage levees fail before the walls of Lake Ponchartrain? Did the levees have to fail at all?
http://solomon2.blogspot.com/2005/09/on-levees-of-new-orleans.html
bless all of you . you are in my thoughts and prayers every day.
The terrorist around the world must be wearing out their pencils taking notes on the failure of our government in a crisis. After 9-11 this was supposed to be fixed. From the mayor to the president this seems to be a collosal failure.
Saying that, the Liberals would have gone nuts if GWB had positioned the military to go into NO before the hurricane hit. They would have said “you are a racist. Do you think the blacks will riot and loot?” If you dont think thats true you are a fool.
GWB cant win. He is a racist if he sends them in and he hates blacks if he doesnt. Go figure.
Anyway, an American city has been destroyed and it could have been prevented if the right steps were taken to improve the levees and infrastructure and response. God help us if we have an attack on multiple citys at once.
I never thought I would say this but its time to bring our troops home from around the world and get our house in order and rebuild our systems to deal with this. As far as our leaders go its time to clean house. They are idiots.
Im stocking up on food and ammo. We now know we cant count on them.
Your comments although maybe well meaning, goes goes to show the lack of understanding of the setup of the Gov’t.
1 point only on this, a terrorist attack is an automatic National Defense system, of course Local is involved but immediately federal forces are engaged. At least that is my understanding. However communication failures no matter who is in charge sounds like a blip that keeps on surfacing and definitly needs attention.
Thank You so much for your kind words, as you can see on the site some of us are upset with failure of the State to prepare for it’s people. I know I heard different messages myself on the evacuation, it would be confusing to those trying to depend upon that. Also it is kind of a miff that some didn’t leave that could but that is water under the bridge now. I understand I grew up there.
Anyway thanks again.
Mike you start off by noting there is plenty of blame to go around for the obvious failures leading up to and in the aftermath of the hurricane, then you go straight into the liberal talking points about Iraq. BTW you forgot to mention there have been no WMD found.
It is nice you guys have become so bottom line oriented of late, why you even noted there are limited resources. That should be headline news. One question though, how much more do you want to spend going after the opium trade? I don’t think that’s what we are there for.
Radiation? Terrorist attacks? What are you talking about? Those are all Bush talking points.
You can rest easy now Mike, Democrat state and city leaders in La. failed their people miserably in the first response to a state emergency, but the grown ups are in charge now. In La. and the country.
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can’t blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city’s infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists–myself included–did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency–indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
“Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
“The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire….
“Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
” ‘These troops are…under my orders to restore order in the streets,’ she said. ‘They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.’ ”
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. “The projects,” as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night’s television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of “the projects.” Then the “crawl”–the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels–gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city’s public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city’s jails–so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations–that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit–but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals–and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep–on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters–not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American “individualism.” But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider “normal” behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don’t sit around and complain that the government hasn’t taken care of them. They don’t use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don’t, because they don’t own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
The welfare state–and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages–is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Source: TIA Daily — September 2, 2005
Aside from the issue of evacuating residents from New Orleans and saving many lives, the city had a fiduciary responsibilty to protect the buses from possible flooding. After all the Mayor issued a MANDATORY evacuation, which implied that he expected a catastrophy. If I were an insurance company I would be asking why a vehicle was in New Orleans at all. Both the private and public sector had a duty to remove this property from harms way.
The photo makes me weep. Thanks for posting the truth!
One of the primary reasons to create the Department Of Homeland Security was to coordinate and centralize responsibility for preparation and response to just such natural disasters. Jean I don’t think you mean to say that if this had been a terror attack instead of a natural disaster that the federal response would have arrived quicker, as that would be as un-American as it would be immoral. And unfortunately the case seems to be that we are simply not prepared enough for even worse possible scenarios.
Unfortunately Tim I am not a liberal, and I have always been concerned about the “bottom line” (which in this case I see as the security of our homeland and interests worldwide). And that is why I am concerned about our limited resources being tied-up. As for WMD, if you want to find them try Pakistan - they had them on the day we invaded Iraq. North Korea and perhaps even OBL (and soon Iran) may also have them thanks to Pakistan. And if you are concerned about them as terrorist weapons, then Google Dr. Khan/Pakistan and wonder why our government has not demanded that we can directly question him as regards terrorism. GW’s “talking points” just don’t address this issue as much as I think it needs to be highlighted. Maybe I just have a higher standard in “allies”.
The opium trade is a significant source of funding for worldwide Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Afghan opium production was more involved in the attacks on our nation of 9/11 than was Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/world/02/september_11/investigating_al_qaeda/money_trail/html/uncovering.stm
And drugs will continue to be involved in the funding of terror against the western world:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4117960.stm
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004758.php
I would suggest spending at least 5% of what we have spent in Iraq (or approx. $10 billion) on further enforcement, eradication and economic development for former poppie farmers in Afghanistan. That is a lot of money, but it would help eliminate the influence and protection of OBL and the Taliban in the region, as well eliminate a significant source of funding for the network and pay off tenfold on the money we spend mitigating the impact of the opium once it has already done its’ damage here in our homeland (crime, police, medical, court and prison costs). And not to mention secure an area where our attackers continue to train in, incredibly along with Pakistan. And I thought that was what we were trying to do - secure our homeland against the most immediate and dangerous threats. Iraq was not it. Maybe in Afghanistan we could finish accomplishing our original mission.
Understand, we cannot just withdraw from Iraq now. Which is why the invasion was such a poor decision to start with. And obviously we just are not prepared back home for the worst that can happen to us.
Tim I felt your final comment deserved a more direct response. Others can debate the deeper (or shallower) opinions behind your words, but that is the whole point with the larger criticism of this administration’s response to the catastrophe -
The grown-ups should have taken charge from day one.
It has been apparent that the Mayor, Police Chief, Fire Chief and Governor have been hiding from day one. They take no responsibility for their slow response. The lack of any real initial local leadership is disgraceful and the attempt by the locals to blame outsiders who came to their aid is inexcusable. The local community has refused to pass the necessary taxes to make the area safe from flooding even-though they knew it was apt to happen. Now the entire USA will have to pay for their neglect.
This photo should be given to every person in the Astrodome before Nagin visits them.
Having grown up in South Louisiana, I recall very well a routine that various civil defense agencies went through every year. Essentially, these individuals–from the local and state governments, I believe–would practice their response to a mock hurricane. (One year the “hurricane” was named after the head of the LA National Guard, but I digress.) This drill was always publicized in the news media, and the officials naturally patted themselves on the back for a job well done.
Looking back on this annual ritual, in light of the current situation, I can’t help but ask myself: Why did they bother conducting these drills? Also, if the local and state officials took the lead in conducting these drills, surely one would assume that the local and state governments–not the feds–would coordinate communications, etc. in the event of an actual emergency. There’s no excuse for the manner in which the local and state governments handled the matter. I believe that they were caught with their pants down, so to speak. New Orleans and Louisiana have long had reputations for governmental corruption and mismanagement. This tragedy clearly shows the dearth of leadership in Louisiana, and the response to Katrina sends the message to the rest of the country that Louisianians are incapable of running their own state. As heart-wrenching as this experience has been, I believe that some good will come out of it. Already, it has illustrated how generous and decent most New Orleanians, Louisianians, Texans, and many others really are. In addition, perhaps it will finally motivate the state’s voters to quit electing (and reelecting) “leaders” whose policies have long rewarded dependence and blunted initiative. The optimist in me tells me that Katrina will serve as a catalyst for a better, more forward-looking Louisiana. It’s tragic that so many will not be there to see it happen.
I get it bus pool! Do they have bus diving boards-a baby pool for Mini Coopers?