Accountability

One of the drawbacks of using the machines for cardio at my gym is that they are set up in front of TVs that are tuned to Fox, MSNBC, ESPN or something similar. Watching network or cable news just makes my teeth ache, but I was giving my knees and hips the week off from jogging, so around 5:30 Eastern today I got to watch on MSNBC FEMA director’s Michael Brown giving a press conference about the disaster response in New Orleans, while I was slaving away on the exercise bicycle.

According to him, everything is going as well as can be expected, the refugees (I mean, displaced persons) in the Superdome are getting food and water, most everyone is being orderly and patient, and he’s not aware of any disorder, or bodies in the street, or anything like that. However, that’s not what CNN is saying tonight (even contradicting his press statement about violence in the street), MSNBC’s cameraman at the Superdome sure seemed to be showing little more than really pissed off DPs, and then there is this guy who stayed behind (it’s not clear what for – to safeguard his company’s data perhaps?) and has liveblogged the whole thing. If what he says is to be believed, conditions in NOLA are very chaotic and dangerous right now, and are not getting much better with time.

It’s difficult to know what’s really happening right now. I’m not going to be as naive as Brad Delong, who says:

I guess I was naive.

I thought that in the wake of Katrina's passing we'd see flotillas of helicopters, fleets of boats, and public health and public safety professionals from all over the country giving booster shots and restoring order within hours. I expected to see rapid, active, and aggressive disaster-recovery response from rescue assets prepositioned nearby but out of the reach of the hurricane.

However, I am now curious about what’s been the history of disaster response, especially with the Clinton-era FEMA, when it was being led by a professional emergency manager (James Lee Witt) and not some political hack. Maybe the response takes this long even when it’s run capably, and maybe it doesn’t. Looks like I’ll have some reading to do, to know for sure. . . . My point about Michael Brown’s public statements, and those of his boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, is that they appear to follow the Bush Administration standard operating procedure, which is to lie their asses off when they’re in trouble. At some point, we are going to need an accurate appraisal of what happened, no matter how painful, so that there are some lessons-learned from this sorry episode to help make improvements in disaster preparation and response. But will the Bush Administration, in an effort to save face, suppress the facts about how the federal government responded to this crisis?

Note to Kevin Drum – you make some good points about the cluelessness of Bush Administration officials. But you have to wonder, where is the Governor of Louisiana in all of this?

Postscript, September 2, 2005

If the relief effort is going so well, why are we now receiving reports that troops are being sent to New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders?

Oh, and for FEMA director Brown, who said:

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

Perhaps a lot of those people were poor, and had no access to the things to make an escape such as money and a car, unless there was help from the government. But that sounds too much like disaster preparation, which along with disaster mitigation, is not really FEMA’s mission now in the age of 9-11.