flarrfan wrote:I'm getting a little tired of the school bus picture. Unless and until someone can establish with evidence that the mayor or other civil city authorities had the legal power to use those buses, I think it's time to stop putting that picture up. In most places, the buses are owned and controlled by the school district, which is usually a separate government entity. Maybe that's part of the legalities the mayor talked about Saturday...they were trying to make arrangements for transportation. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I am a local government lawyer, and today on a list serve I'm on, other local govt. lawyers from around the country were talking about all the various legal issues that go into planning for and coping with a natural disaster. I'm thinking that's some of what was going on Saturday while the mayor waited (too long) to call for mandatory evacuation.
I would also note that I responded on the list serv by asking my local govt. legal colleagues why in the world you would worry about legalities when a Cat 5 is bearing down on the most vulnerable city in the country, or why anyone in any local, state or federal legal position would worry about legalities in responding to the most profound natural disaster in my lifetime. IMO the local govt. lawyer needs to get out of the way and tell the client govt. to do whatever needs to be done to save lives and sort out the legalities later.
The interview I heard Saturday night had the mayor saying the city attorney was reviewing the legalities of ordering mandatory evacuation, probably in view of the city's lack of any means to provide transportation and potential liability. If true, it's an indictment of the city attorney for insisting on legalities that should have been worked out in advance or left to later, in view of the situation. If the mayor was simply spinning an inability to make a politically charged decision, then the blame is his.
I sure would like to hear what the city attorney has to say about her role in the evacuation delay. I'd also like to know what if anything the school superintendent or subordinate school district bureaucrats had to say about using the buses. As a 25-year veteran of government on state and local levels, I tend to think there's entirely too much blame being assigned here to the top officials from mayor to President, and not enough being laid at the foot of bureaucrats and lawyers, but then that's only based on my experience and what would I know?
Every now and then I hear a reasonable assessment of what went wrong. Yours is one. Yes, what happened is most likely a cascade of bad, sometimes politically motivated, decisions on
many levels.
I suspect few of the bad decisions, taken in isolation, would be enough to create this catastrophe. But one bad decision has led to another and another and ... and now we have made a disaster into a national embarassment.
From my perspective (hazards research/emergency management), I see a failure either to plan for contingencies (of which the legalities are one, evacuation another) or a failure to execute the planning, coupled with a breakdown in the integrated emergency management system. The details of what went wrong are impossible to determine from a distance, but once the dust settles, many of the decisions that led to this will prove to have been taken by mid-level personnel.
