The Blame Game

Rich Lowry wrote in National Review Online .... In the interest of balance, here are some questions that should be put to state and local officials: There is a document called the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan," which is a detailed strategy for a looming catastrophe like Katrina. City officials have now made it clear that they never had any intention of putting it fully into operation. So why did they write it in the first place?

Probably the same reason the State had it's own plan here and here

The mayor wasted precious time prior to the storm having his lawyers investigate whether he had the authority to issue a mandatory evacuation, when the city's own plan says that he can. Did anyone even bother to read the plan?

The plan said about 100,000 people wouldn't make it out of the city. Didn't that fact weigh on city officials' minds in the years they had to prepare for a killer storm?

Did they ever read their own plan?

Why was a fleet of several hundred buses, which could have been used by an energetic and imaginative government to evacuate people prior to the storm, left in a parking lot to be flooded?

According to the mayor, he preferred Greyhound buses because they had more comfortable seats. I wonder what the people in the Superdome would have said, hungry and thirsty because the Red Cross was not allowed to deliver food and water, if they had been given the option of riding out of the city in a school bus with uncomfortable seats.

Evacuating hospitals and nursing homes should have been the first priority of the city. How could they just have been left to fend for themselves? More than 30 people died in the floodwaters in St. Rita's nursing home alone. Why did the city fail to take advantage of what Amtrak says was its offer to take a couple hundred passengers on its last train out of New Orleans?

Good question. Amtrack has comfortable seats.

How difficult would it have been to stock food and water at the Superdome? Wouldn't that have been a sounder approach rather than tell people to "eat a full meal before arriving" and bring their own food and water?

The Astrodome even had cots, because they thought they would be needed if Galveston had to be evacuated.

Was it a good idea to try, in effect, to starve out the evacuees at the Superdome and the convention center? Local officials hammered the feds for not getting desperate evacuees at those spots food and water. But the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security explicitly prevented the Red Cross from delivering supplies on the theory that that would only encourage people to stay in New Orleans.

The buses were now flooded out, and the people were suffering. Could it be that this was what the City of New Orleans intended, so that when the poor people finally were able to get out, that they would not consider coming back to New Orleans when it had been rebuilt.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco didn't specifically request from the federal government what her state needed until the Thursday after the storm hit. Couldn't she have done that a little sooner?

She was afraid she would lose control (as if she was capable of being in control of anything)

The governor has control of the National Guard. Why didn't she send more troops immediately after the storm? According to Mayor Ray Nagin, in the initial days "we fought and held that city together with only 200 state National Guard." What kind of city police force has as much as 20 percent of its personnel go AWOL when it is needed most?

Well the looting opportunies were very good.

If the governor wanted active-duty military patrolling in New Orleans during the chaos, why didn't she accept the federalization of the National Guard that Justice Department officials say would have been necessary to make it happen? If funding for the levees protecting New Orleans was so inadequate, how could Louisiana Congressional representatives waste, as the Washington Post put it, "hundreds of millions of dollars" on "unrelated water projects"? Let the recriminations begin.