Well I guess we can't trust this fool anymore. First response seems to be a lie out of these guys no matter what the event.
However, experts for years had warned of threat to New Orleans
Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years. Chertoff, fielding questions from reporters, said government officials did not expect both a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees that would flood the city of New Orleans. (See the video on a local paper's prophetic warning -- 3:30 )
"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff said.
He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise."
But engineers say the levees preventing this below-sea-level city from being turned into a swamp were built to withstand only Category 3 hurricanes. And officials have warned for years that a Category 4 could cause the levees to fail. (See video of why the levee's breech was devastating -- 1:53) Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it struck the Gulf Coast on September 29. Last week, Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN his agency had recently planned for a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans.
Speaking to "Larry King Live" on August 31, in the wake of Katrina, Brown said, "That Category 4 hurricane caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago. Last year, we exercised it. And unfortunately this year, we're implementing it." Brown suggested FEMA -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- was carrying out a prepared plan, rather than having to suddenly create a new one. Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."
He added: "There will be plenty of time to go back and say we should hypothesize evermore apocalyptic combinations of catastrophes. Be that as it may, I'm telling you this is what the planners had in front of them. They were confronted with a second wave that they did not have built into the plan, but using the tools they had, we have to move forward and adapt." But New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture. "We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.
Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.
In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city. (Read: "Times-Picayune" Special Report: Washing away)
Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario. On Sunday, a day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Ivor van Heerden, director of the Louisiana State University Public Health Research Center in Baton Rouge, said, "This is what we've been saying has been going to happen for years." "Unfortunately, it's coming true," he said, adding that New Orleans "is definitely going to flood."
Also on Sunday, Placquemines Parish Sheriff Jeff Hingle referred back to Hurricane Betsy -- a Category 2 hurricane that struck in 1965 -- and said, "After Betsy these levees were designed for a Category 3."
He added, "These levees will not hold the water back."
But Chertoff seemed unaware of all the warnings.
"This is really one which I think was breathtaking in its surprise," Chertoff said. "There has been, over the last few years, some specific planning for the possibility of a significant hurricane in New Orleans with a lot of rainfall, with water rising in the levees and water overflowing the levees," he told reporters Saturday. That alone would be "a very catastrophic scenario," Chertoff said. "And although the planning was not complete, a lot of work had been done. But there were two problems here. First of all, it's as if someone took that plan and dropped an atomic bomb simply to make it more difficult. We didn't merely have the overflow, we actually had the break in the wall. And I will tell you that, really, that perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight."
Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans.
"It wasn't until comparatively late, shortly before -- a day, maybe a day and a half, before landfall -- that it became clear that this was going to be a Category 4 or 5 hurricane headed for the New Orleans area." As far back as Friday, August 26, the National Hurricane Center was predicting the storm could be a Category 4 hurricane at landfall, with New Orleans directly in its path. Still, storms do change paths, so the possibility existed that it might not hit the city.
But the National Weather Service prediction proved almost perfect.
Katrina made landfall on Monday, August 29.
Tens of thousands of people in New Orleans who did not or could not heed the mandatory evacuation orders issued the day before the storm made landfall were left in dire straits.
"I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe," Chertoff said.
He vowed that the United States "is going to move heaven and earth" to rescue those in need.
Source
Chertoff: Katrina scenario did not exist
Moderator: S2k Moderators
What is so "scary" to me about so many of our elected/appointed officials in "high places" is not so much that they "did not know what they should have known" so much as their lack of the ability to change what they were doing in response.
I am absolutely sure that some historian/social historian could probably cite thousands of examples of situations in the history of the United States (let alone world history) when something happened that was not planned or where the plan went wrong or proved inadequate, needed changing on the fly, etc.
I believe, by the way, that one of the reasons it is so difficult to think of those examples is that there was someone who either had or assumed a leadership role who just stood up and said, "okay, it's time to abandon the plan and do something else"--but they did so in a timely manner... Because of those changes of plan, we in fact remember a sort of "heroic response" instead of a major disaster.
The story of the evacuation of Dunkirk in WWII is that sort of story, I believe. I do NOT think that the British Army expected to get pinned down on the French beaches by the Germans... Whatever mistakes and bad decisions led up to that are not what we remember. And I'm sure that the British government had some plan in place to "comandeer" civilian watercraft if needed for the war effort. And obviously there was some plan to send watercraft across the English Channel to try to rescue some of the British soldiers. But I truly do believe that if it had not been for the leadership of Winston Churchill and of many others (the attitude had a trickle-down effect) that so many civilian boat owners, including some who were very young, and including some very small boats, would have been able to secretly get to their boats, get their boats to staging areas and go across the channel and rescue something like 330,000 people in a 2-3 day period under heavy arial bombardment. Yes, there was a lot that was planned here, but I think the plan was very flexible, and there was a lot of thinking on the fly. Thus, what we "remember" about Dunkirk is not whatever mistakes were made that led up to it, but the heroism of civilians, many of them teenagers, who went across some of the roughest water in the world in tiny boats (that were not good targets for the Germans) to rescue soldiers off the beaches. Certainly this was bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon--think about taking an 18' open boat to rescue 330,000 people. You must say to yourself, "what good can my little boat possibly be?"
I can understand (if not condone) the ignorance of some who should have "known better." What I can't understand is why, once the magnitude of the disaster became apparent, why they did not alter their plans? There were things that could have been done--and that were "obvious" to even relatively small children--that would have alleviated a bunch of the suffering we were watching on TV.
We do have a history of "air dropping" stuff--we could have been dropping juice packs, water bottles, packets of "nabs" etc. almost immediately. No it would not have been "fair" distribution, etc. but I'll bet that it it had happened almost from the beginning that the people on the ground would have not have turned "feral" in the way they did... Similarly, I think they could have gotten satellite phones to the police/other officials, gotten in troops to establish and keep order, etc. a lot sooner than they did...
I think there was a bunch of decision-making that did not happen at all levels of government at the very point where leadership could have made all the difference in the world.
So in the end, I don't think the failure is in the "planning"--planning for disasters is never going to be that good because there is always going to be the unanticipated disaster. What CAN be fixed is the quality of leaders that we appoint/elect/hire in this country. My opinion is that what was most missing overall was immediate high level "get it done" leadership! And at lower levels there was perhaps a tragic ignorance of how to work through the bureaucracy.
One of the things that slowed initial efforts to mobilize charitable actions, for example, has been the government's message to those of us outside the area that the "only" response we could--and should have--is to "send money." In effect, the message to the rest of the country has been "we don't need your skills and talents, we don't need you to share what you have with victims, we don't need anything from you except money. Now that the attitude has changed at high levels, people are much more involved in finding ways to help--but unfortunately, a lot of people got the message that they could not help because they did not have money to send--but also that anything else they did would not be valued.
So I think that is the true tragedy. This country at its finest has always been a country that opened its heart and its homes... "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses..." is written on one of our major symbols--the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps we need to tell our leaders that they should be fostering what is great about us rather than trying to shut it down.
I am absolutely sure that some historian/social historian could probably cite thousands of examples of situations in the history of the United States (let alone world history) when something happened that was not planned or where the plan went wrong or proved inadequate, needed changing on the fly, etc.
I believe, by the way, that one of the reasons it is so difficult to think of those examples is that there was someone who either had or assumed a leadership role who just stood up and said, "okay, it's time to abandon the plan and do something else"--but they did so in a timely manner... Because of those changes of plan, we in fact remember a sort of "heroic response" instead of a major disaster.
The story of the evacuation of Dunkirk in WWII is that sort of story, I believe. I do NOT think that the British Army expected to get pinned down on the French beaches by the Germans... Whatever mistakes and bad decisions led up to that are not what we remember. And I'm sure that the British government had some plan in place to "comandeer" civilian watercraft if needed for the war effort. And obviously there was some plan to send watercraft across the English Channel to try to rescue some of the British soldiers. But I truly do believe that if it had not been for the leadership of Winston Churchill and of many others (the attitude had a trickle-down effect) that so many civilian boat owners, including some who were very young, and including some very small boats, would have been able to secretly get to their boats, get their boats to staging areas and go across the channel and rescue something like 330,000 people in a 2-3 day period under heavy arial bombardment. Yes, there was a lot that was planned here, but I think the plan was very flexible, and there was a lot of thinking on the fly. Thus, what we "remember" about Dunkirk is not whatever mistakes were made that led up to it, but the heroism of civilians, many of them teenagers, who went across some of the roughest water in the world in tiny boats (that were not good targets for the Germans) to rescue soldiers off the beaches. Certainly this was bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon--think about taking an 18' open boat to rescue 330,000 people. You must say to yourself, "what good can my little boat possibly be?"
I can understand (if not condone) the ignorance of some who should have "known better." What I can't understand is why, once the magnitude of the disaster became apparent, why they did not alter their plans? There were things that could have been done--and that were "obvious" to even relatively small children--that would have alleviated a bunch of the suffering we were watching on TV.
We do have a history of "air dropping" stuff--we could have been dropping juice packs, water bottles, packets of "nabs" etc. almost immediately. No it would not have been "fair" distribution, etc. but I'll bet that it it had happened almost from the beginning that the people on the ground would have not have turned "feral" in the way they did... Similarly, I think they could have gotten satellite phones to the police/other officials, gotten in troops to establish and keep order, etc. a lot sooner than they did...
I think there was a bunch of decision-making that did not happen at all levels of government at the very point where leadership could have made all the difference in the world.
So in the end, I don't think the failure is in the "planning"--planning for disasters is never going to be that good because there is always going to be the unanticipated disaster. What CAN be fixed is the quality of leaders that we appoint/elect/hire in this country. My opinion is that what was most missing overall was immediate high level "get it done" leadership! And at lower levels there was perhaps a tragic ignorance of how to work through the bureaucracy.
One of the things that slowed initial efforts to mobilize charitable actions, for example, has been the government's message to those of us outside the area that the "only" response we could--and should have--is to "send money." In effect, the message to the rest of the country has been "we don't need your skills and talents, we don't need you to share what you have with victims, we don't need anything from you except money. Now that the attitude has changed at high levels, people are much more involved in finding ways to help--but unfortunately, a lot of people got the message that they could not help because they did not have money to send--but also that anything else they did would not be valued.
So I think that is the true tragedy. This country at its finest has always been a country that opened its heart and its homes... "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses..." is written on one of our major symbols--the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps we need to tell our leaders that they should be fostering what is great about us rather than trying to shut it down.
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Part of the problem was not being able to change the plan they had in place and all of the terrorist prep.
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,"
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NastyCat4
How naive and stupid of him. Every professional and amateur met has known about this senario for years. They were supposed to strengthen the levees after Betsy, and never bothered doing so. If the Fed wants to claim ignorance on this one, it is a blatant lie, as this senario was known as the doomsday one for NOLA, and has been modeled for eons. Every department of emergency management nationwide knew of the danger to NOLA, and this has been written about in so many professional journals.
Horesefeathers to Chertoff, if he claims ignorance.
Horesefeathers to Chertoff, if he claims ignorance.
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GalvestonDuck
- Category 5
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southerngale
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thanks for the laugh this morning.-
wxcrazytwo
Even though the disaster plan was 'thought out' and was in the process of being implemented before Katrina hit, wasn't there several hurricanes before Katrina that caused horrible coastal and inland flooding... um Hurricane Lily, Hurricane Ivan. The federal goverment could have implemented the changes after those nasty storms, but they were so caught up in other filibuster actions/campaigns/war that no one cared to understand that a horrible disaster is looming and something needed to be done BEFORE a new disaster struck causing a situation like Katrina's aftermath. Louisiana government thought it was prepared for Katrina... Prepared for a furious cat 5... NOBODY, absolutely NOBODY, is prepared for a cat 5 landfall (Yes, I know it was cat 4 at landfall). A matter of fact, you can prepare all you want for a hurricane, but the destruction will be unknown until after the storm hits.
Everyone knew that catastrophic event was on the horizon, however, did city officials do anything about it... no. Sounds more of a neglect case than anything else. New Orleans was sideswiped by Katrina... imagine the city in the Northeast Quadrant... more levee breaks, more ferocious winds, even worse flooding, etc. The devastation would have possibly been worse than what it is now. Yes I do understand that it took the Louisiana government a few days to declare a federal emergency. Correct me if I'm wrong... you cannot declare a state of emergency BEFORE the storm hits and FEDERAL aid can take up to SEVERAL days to arrive. That's the process... sorry, I cannot change it.
Why does it seem that a devastating storm will bring the best to areas not affected by the storm....Everyone wants to help. Whether it be financially or physically, everyone wants to lend a helping hand. What is going to happen when the help and the money runs out... For example look at Africa. Do I need to explain that situation? Why didn't the government acknowledge the poverty/low class status of New Orleans prior to the storm... I knew from the beginning that New Orleans is a poverty stricken area. Its not that hard to see... just open your eyes and get out of the box.
People get this sense of security thinking nothing is going to happen to them. I know, I had it too... however, my change of scenery has changed that opinion quite drastically. Take nothing forgranted... live every day like you are being sent to wartorn regions... Once you see the conditions that people live in here... you'll understand how much privileges we have and how much we take forgranted.
Everyone knew that catastrophic event was on the horizon, however, did city officials do anything about it... no. Sounds more of a neglect case than anything else. New Orleans was sideswiped by Katrina... imagine the city in the Northeast Quadrant... more levee breaks, more ferocious winds, even worse flooding, etc. The devastation would have possibly been worse than what it is now. Yes I do understand that it took the Louisiana government a few days to declare a federal emergency. Correct me if I'm wrong... you cannot declare a state of emergency BEFORE the storm hits and FEDERAL aid can take up to SEVERAL days to arrive. That's the process... sorry, I cannot change it.
Why does it seem that a devastating storm will bring the best to areas not affected by the storm....Everyone wants to help. Whether it be financially or physically, everyone wants to lend a helping hand. What is going to happen when the help and the money runs out... For example look at Africa. Do I need to explain that situation? Why didn't the government acknowledge the poverty/low class status of New Orleans prior to the storm... I knew from the beginning that New Orleans is a poverty stricken area. Its not that hard to see... just open your eyes and get out of the box.
People get this sense of security thinking nothing is going to happen to them. I know, I had it too... however, my change of scenery has changed that opinion quite drastically. Take nothing forgranted... live every day like you are being sent to wartorn regions... Once you see the conditions that people live in here... you'll understand how much privileges we have and how much we take forgranted.
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