ENOUGH RHETORIC, MORE REALNESS

I have a friend in New York who I knew worked in public policy but I had forgotten what area. I caught him on IM the other morning and asked, "what kind of policy do you work on?"

"Emergency preparedness/natural disasters with a focus on coastal storms and evacuation scenarios."

Like whoa.

I immediately started to hammer him with questions about what went wrong in NOLA on every policy level he knew of and he gave me a very calm and very honest assessment of the problems. I promised not to quote him since he was explaining this to me as a friend and not as an analyst but I want to relay some of the key points he touched upon, most of which I've been able to confirm after the fact through other research.

First of all, he mentioned an early FEMA study which I found mentioned in this Dec. 2001 Houston Chronicle editorial:

"Earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City."

(As someone who lives in S.F, I'm hoping this is one of those 2 out of 3 scenarios). So even FEMA, back in 2001, knew that this could be a danger, ergo, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff really needs to S.T.F.U.

The problem is that post-9/11, FEMA got swept under the Dept. of Homeland Security and as most of us should realize now (if not before), HS is about combating terrorism. It is not about natural disaster preparedness. FEMA has subsequently seen its budget siphoned off, much of it being diverted into anti-terrorism initiatives. This is one of those things that are really infuriating about public policy - it's so kneejerk. Public officials felt like we got sucker-punched on 9/11 (which we did) so in true, reactionary fashion, they went out and went crazy with anti-terrorism legislation, budgets, a false war in Iraq (let's not forget this), etc. And did it not occur to folks that, all things considered, we were more likely to get socked by a natural disaster than another large-scale terrorist attack? Expect to see much hang-writing and fist-poudning in the wake of Katrina where everyone will be saying, "we need to overhaul FEMA" (and we probably do) but will anyone admit, "yeah, so we kind of fucked up to begin with. Our bad."? Not likely. As Slate pointed out, we didn't learn from Chicago either.

By the way, just to break into my own post, but I just caught this: the National Guard was/is preventing the Red Cross from entering New Orleans. WTF?

And apparently, N.O. police shot and killed 5 people on a bridge.

More to follow...

--O.W.