by Starman » Sun Sep 04, 2005 2:36 pm
Heyia Fearless:<br><br>Ya -- I caught that segment too, and esp. when Broussard broke-up when he described the agony of an associate (who was responsible for Emergency Managment in Jefferson Parish) who was in daily-contact with his straned mother by phone, assuring her day after day after day that help WAS coming, desperately TRYING to inform officials at the same time, but to no avail as she succumbed before she could be rescued -- What an appalling, unforgiveable clusterfuck.<br><br>I'm not sure, but I think it was that after FEMA had cut their communication lines, locals reconnected it and the local sherrif then set-up armed guards to prevent FEMA from cutting them again -- here we have a clear example in the starkest terms of the Feds directly interfering with local eforts to help themselves -- this reflects not only lack of coordination and communication, but an inexplicable confrontation in which the Federal Government is sabotaging people's self-empowerment and self-reliance.<br><br>Some additional info, observations (and venting):<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/">www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> -- Sept. 3<br>St. Bernard death toll possibly hundreds<br>By Jan Moller<br>Capital Bureau<br>While several days passed with little or no federal assistance, state and local officials set up their own improvised search-and-rescue operations, with the Mississippi River serving as a lifeline to safety for residents in the close-knit parish who rode out Katrina. <br>When the wind died down but the floodwaters remained, local government was forced to improvise. While firefighters work from the BellSouth building, the parish council set up temporary quarters at the Exxon-Mobil Chalmette Refining and the sheriff's office is operating from the Cajun Queen riverboat that's moored next to the Domino's sugar refinery in Arabi. <br>. . .<br>While Navy helicopters were shuttling people to hospitals who needed medical care, local officials are angry at the slow pace of the federal government's relief efforts. “We never had any communication from anybody,” said Parish President Henry P. Rodriguez. “Anything that has been done in St. Bernard has been done by local people.We never had any goddamned help.” <br><br>Boasso, whose homes and businesses were badly damaged by the wind and floods as was just about everybody's home in the parish, said he's frustrated by the pace of the federal government's efforts - which he said he's made clear to Federal Emergency Management Agency officials in Baton Rouge.<br><br>“I don't care about finger pointing,” Boasso said. “I'm hollering and screaming and you know what? If they can't help us we're going to help ourselves.” <br>*<br>Saturday, September 03, 2005<br>Evacuees forced to wait outside bus station<br>By Allen Powell II<br>River Parishes bureau<br>Several dozen New Orleans residents seeking transportation out of Baton Rouge Saturday were denied entrance to the Greyhound bus station on Florida Street. Instead, the would-be travelers say they were forced to wait outside on the sidewalk for hours.<br><br>The travelers, many of them recent evacuees from New Orleans, waited for the chance to buy tickets to Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and northern Louisiana. <br>Several of them said they had been waiting at the station since the early afternoon and by 7 p.m. hadn’t been allowed to wait inside, use bathroom facilities or get water. Many of the travelers said they only wanted to purchase tickets or pick-up tickets that had already been purchased by family members.<br><br>Terrance Pierre, who said he was evacuated from Xavier University on Wednesday, said he had been waiting outside of the station for more than five hours to purchase a ticket to Texas. Pierre said he was just trying to reunite with his family and friends.<br>“I’m just trying to get a ticket with my own money,” he said.<br><br>Through security guards at the station, the bus station’s manager declined to discuss why the people were not allowed inside. <br><br>Travelers said they were told that there had been a disturbance at the bus station on Friday, but that could not confirmed with station employees. In addition, they said they were told that the bus station’s booking system was not operating. <br><br>Officials from Greyhound’s national office could not be reached for comment on Saturday night.<br>Although the crowd appeared orderly, six Baton Rouge police cruisers arrived at the station at about 7:20 p.m... A security guard at the door told officers that some people in the crowd had been banging on the station’s doors, a claim all of the travelers vehemently denied.<br><br>No one was arrested, and the officers left after instructing travelers to line up along the front of the building. After the officers left, bus station employees began allowing some people to enter the station to use the restroom, but most were forced to remain outside. <br>**** <br>Landrieu slams FEMA<br>WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., Saturday accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of failing to accept offers that would have eased post-hurricane problems in New Orleans -- including a plan for the Forest Service to douse fires in the city with aircraft used to fight fire.<br><br>On Friday, Landrieu asked President Bush to appoint a cabinet-level official to oversee Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts. She reiterated that request on Saturday.<br><br>"Yesterday, I was hoping President Bush would come away from his tour of the regional devastation triggered by Hurricane Katrina with a new understanding for the magnitude of the suffering and for the abject failures of the current Federal Emergency Management Agency," Landrieu said. "Twenty-four hours later, the President has yet to answer my call for a cabinet-level official to lead our efforts. Meanwhile, FEMA, now a shell of what it once was, continues to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.<br><br>Landrieu said that FEMA has inexplicably failed to take advantage of offers of help.<br>"I understand that the U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims - far more efficiently than buses - FEMA again dragged its feet," Landrieu said. "Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency.<br><br>Landrieu said that her "greatest disappointment" is the lack of progress fixing the breached 17th Street levee.<br>"Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young and old - deserve far better from their national government," Landrieu said.<br>**** <br>U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters: Rescue delay shows "class division"<br>Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005 8:00 p.m.<br>U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, arrived in Baton Rouge on Saturday with one message to President Bush and federal rescue agencies: <br><br>"Get it done," Waters said. "I thought I'd seen a lot. Don't forget, I'm from Los Angeles," where there has been a documented history of rioting. "But nothing like this. To see dead bodies on the street just unnerves me." <br><br>Waters said she came in response to the vast scope of the catastrophe, and was flanked by her friend State Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge. At about 4 p.m. on Saturday, Waters said she was leaving to ride a bus with evacuees from New Orleans. "To give them water, to give them comfort," she said at the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.<br><br>Waters said the delay in rescuing the stranded masses of people in the New Orleans region shows "a class division."<br><br>"There are a lot of naïve people," Waters said. "This is America. This should be illuminating about what we need in terms of dealing with poverty." <br>The poorest of the poor make up so many of the people stranded in New Orleans and the outlying areas, she added. "The United States has just been seen in a light that many people in the world never thought they'd see." <br>****<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html">www.wwltv.com/local/stori...3fcea.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>5:25 A.M. - BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) --Emergency officials in Louisiana say they are still getting calls from people trapped and in need of rescue. Officials say they received a thousand such calls just yesterday, with some people saying they are still trapped in their attics. <br>Authorities are using color-coded maps to locate anyone in need of rescue. They plan to go door-to-door if they have to, in order to find all remaining survivors. <br>**<br>2:11 A.M. - ATLANTA (AP) -- As Valerie Bennett was evacuated from a New Orleans hospital, rescuers told her there was no room in the boat for her dogs. She pleaded. "I offered him my wedding ring and my mom's wedding ring," the 34-year-old nurse recalled Saturday. <br>They wouldn't budge. She and her husband could bring only one item, and they already had a plastic tub containing the medicines her husband, a liver transplant recipient, needed to survive. Such emotional scenes were repeated perhaps thousands of times along the Gulf Coast last week as pet owners were forced to abandon their animals in the midst of evacuation. <br><br>In one example reported last week by The Associated Press, a police officer took a dog from one little boy waiting to get on a bus in New Orleans. "Snowball! Snowball!" the boy cried until he vomited. The policeman told a reporter he didn't know what would happen to the dog. <br><br>At the hospital, a doctor euthanized some animals at the request of their owners, who feared they would be abandoned and starve to death. He set up a small gas chamber out of a plastic-wrapped dog kennel. <br>****<br>Health Issues:<br>Food containers with screw-caps, snap-lids, crimped caps, twist caps, flip tops, and home canned foods that may have come in contact with flood water. <br>-- Don't use contaminated water to wash dishes, brush teeth, wash or prepare foods, wash hands, make ice or make baby formula. <br>Infant feeding: <br>-- Breast-fed infants should continue breastfeeding. <br>-- Be sure safe water is used to clean feeding bottles, nipples. <br><br>NOTE: Among the 30-80,000 stranded survivors in New Orleans and other flooded areas such as Biloxi and the greater Gulf Region who were forced to endure filthy, contaminated conditions, how many mothers were able to wash their nipples before breast-feeding their children? How many bottles of water and drink containers were cleaned before placed the containers to their lips and drank, or washed cups/glasses before using? How many children's hands were cleaned before every time they touched their lips or eyes? <br><br>The number of people probably contaminated by parasitical bacteria and disease pathogens and organisms is incalculable, it could be many tens of thousands -- this is an additional foreknown consequence of the inexplicable delay in providing relief activities, in FEMA's spurious (and IMO, criminal!) refusal to allow Red Cross to provide services in New Orleans and esp. the major refuge points, and their refusal to 'allow' volunteers from contributing their services, esp. boat-owners who could have saved untold hundreds or thousands of lives, and the National Forest Service Fire-fighting services, and which didn't take effective control in either ordering bus drivers to where transport was urgently required and/or provide armed protection (or replace them with Rescue personal or National Guard troops or even volunteers who were willing to assume the duty -- as I'm sure hundreds of thousands of Americans would have readily volunteered), and FEMA's and other officials negligence in not minimizing rumours and unsubstantiated reports of 'rioting' and dangerous violence, which only contributed to provoking reactionary fear which directly impeded rescue efforts in dozens of ways -- <br>This mismanagement of resources and actively confounding volunteerism is one of the most egregious examples of the failure of officials to perform their duty.<br><br>It seems the reports of violence were deliberately promoted and NOT minimized because it aided the official's agenda to stall and delay the evacuation, simply because they had failed to prepare for transient refugee safe-camps or secure sufficient shelters, and instead used their too-few busses to transport survivors on long bus-rides, tying up those resources in grossly inefficient practices -- <br><br>It REALLY burns me up that for five days at LEAST, there was little or NO use made of national Guard and Army/Military trucks to get people moved out of the severely contaminated zones, just movng them several miles to where bus and alternative transport could be arranged -- Officials could have, should have, provided rental-trucks and impressed them into shuttle transports<br><br>Aaron Broussard --President, Jefferson Parish La, described FEMA officials actually cutting their communication lines -- he also described an associate who assured his mother day after day after day that help was coming, but who, after four days of no help, succumbed -- a horrible, senseless, criminal tragedy which is MUST be placed on the grossly negligent FEMA officials who were NOT capable of fulfilling their obligation -- IMO, Mike Brown MUST be prosecuted for derilection and the person who appointed him, lacking ANY disaster-relief experience, out of purely political-favoritism considerations SHOULD BE FIRED!!! ('President' Bush).<br><br>And oh CHRIST Chertoff should be jailed -- I'm sick of hearing him lie and weasel and misinform and mislead and excuse so many incidents of gross incompetance and idiocy -- He's SO incompetant -- Even news reporters on CNN and NBC have pointed out Chertoff's statements don't reflect reality -- I can't STAND to hear his mealy-mouthed pathetic excuse-making -- what a toady 'I'm here to tell you, even if the truth is hard to take, that the buck finally stops .... uh, somewhere else...' -- reflecting the whole rotton, filthy, morally-corrupt Bush model of failed, pass-the-buck, -avoid accepting responsibility-, All Show and No Substance (or, All Hat, No Cattle), dead-end pretend-leadership -- <br><br>And this idiot STILL insists the 'Federal Government' didn't know that there were 15,000 to 20,000+ people at the Convention Center, when LA police had been dispatched to the site (and repulsed by angry crowds) and roving mounted SWAT and Military troops had been driving by repeatedly, and the dozens of helicopters flying by -- was there such a TOTAL breakdown in communication between these military and law-enforcement assets and those putatively 'managing' the relief efforts?? The major fault is in wholly failing to establish public information networks to keep people apprised of the situation, to coordinate help and establish needs -- How can this immense failure NOT be held up for accountability? <br><br>And it's OBVIOUS to anyone not wholly brain-dead that local US Gulf-region National Guard troops and equipment tied-up in the Middle East were desperately needed to provide a timely response to this disaster, not just in New Orleans but throughout the entire region -- where there are STILL whole communities and isolated neighborhoods that haven't been assisted YET, some 6 days after Katrina struck!<br><br>The Federal Goverment under corrupt Repub/Demo subversion have managed to create a monolithic entity via Homeland Security and FEMA that not only has squandered vast financial resources and indbted future generations to astounding levels of debt-obligations, but has succeeded in destroying vital local and state networks and communication, impeding and preventing commuinities from making the best use of resources -- making people dependant on an inefficient bureaucracy managed by grossly incompetant, toadying political appointees whose main function seems to be providing layers of accountability-diversions to shield responsibility.<br><br>Starman <p></p><i></i>