The Oil Drum | Interview with Mayor Nagin of NOLA

50 comments on Interview with Mayor Nagin of NOLA

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Halfin on September 2, 2005 - 3:45pm

Like everyone else, I have been affected deeply by the heartbreaking scenes of suffering on TV. The hurricane hit Monday morning, the flooding was apparent by Tuesday mid-day, and yet it seemed that there was not significant relief in place until today, or at best last night. Now we hear that most people are out of the Superdome area, and that food, water and medicine, plus troops to distribute them, have arrived at the Convention Center where there are several thousand people. Other large groups of people are also seeing their first significant help.

It took four days since the hurricane, three days since the flooding, three to four days of suffering for the victims. This seems like a long time; I'm sure it seemed like an eternity to those affected. It doesn't seem like it should have taken so long.

But how long should it have taken, really? Things take time, after all. How long does it take, or should it take, to get aid and transportation to people stranded in the middle of a flood, with communications down and difficult transport? How long do such things take?

It's hard for the layman to know. It's not like we have lots of other similar catastrophes to compare it with. If American cities were being flooded and destroyed constantly, and "boots on the ground" usually happened in two days but this time it took 3.5, then we might have good grounds to complain. But we don't have any such basis for comparison.

How valid are our uniformed layman's estimates of how long it "should" take? I doubt that they are particularly valid at all. How long "should" it take to fix a levee? How long "should" it take to fix a bridge? How long "should" it take to bring a mass of troops into a particular area with damaged infrastructure? For that matter, how long "should" it take to invade a country? Who would claim expertise on these matters?

The truth is, maybe it just takes three to four days to get significant aid into an area with the kind of instrastructure damage seen along the Gulf coast. How fast, after all, did significant tsunami aid arrive? I'll bet it took much longer than that.

The other thing about aid like this is that the flow has momentum. Today for the first time we see significant help coming to the city. Tomorrow, there will be more. The day after that, even more. In two weeks, the area will be crawling with aid workers and FEMA officials. Everyone who has survived these first few days on their own will be in much better shape by then.

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mikeB on September 2, 2005 - 3:58pm

Once again, your superior tone and callousness make me puke.

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Stuart Staniford on September 2, 2005 - 4:41pm

I agree that some of these things take time. I'm quite willing to grant that blocking those levees might have been impossible. But I'm completely unpersuaded that the federal government was doing everything possible. When I heard a few thousand national guard troops were being mobilized, my reaction was "We have a whole huge standing army, and most of it isn't in Iraq." We have huge numbers of C5 galaxy planes specifically designed for airdropping supplies. Where the hell where they? We couldn't manage to fill and launch *one* of them over New Orleans in *four* *days*? We have large numbers of Chinook helicopters How come we weren't airdropping supplies to hospitals and convention centers? How come we weren't using these things to transport troops and national guard into New Orleans on Tuesday/Wednesday? FEMA has stockpiles of food and water, and if they weren't enough, there is no CEO in the country that wouldn't take Bush's phone call, and I'll wager not one of them would have refused the contents of his warehouses with payment to be sorted out later.

No. It's not that we don't have the assets, it's that we were too disorganized to use them. The fault for that has to go to the leadership of the federal government.

The administration just hasn't shown a sense of urgency. Bush should have been on the job immediately. The regular military should have been mobilized immediately (particularly since they aren't as dependent on civilian communication infrastructure). There should have been a clear commander on the ground in charge by Tuesday evening. Yes, it would have been a mad scramble. Many would have died anyway. But at least we would have known that everything possible was done. That is certainly not the case today.

The need should have been completely obvious as soon as it was known that the levees broke on a city that still had hundreds of thousands of people in. And it's just appalling to see the administration still reciting statistics on how much they have done and assuring people help is on the way - they still don't get it.

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TJ on September 2, 2005 - 4:42pm

I, for one, have no difficulty whatsoever saying that a five day response for food and water is totally unacceptable when there are copters and C-130s six hours away. This is going to set the standard for incompetence for quite a few decades.

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MikeCapone on September 2, 2005 - 9:56pm

Indeed.

The strict minimum was randomly dropping crates full of drinking water around the city and let the victims find it for themselves. That's what would have taken a minimum of time and effort and given the biggest result as far as keeping them alive longer.

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odograph on September 2, 2005 - 7:49pm

I agree that we don't know how long it "should" take. It's painful to see, that's for sure.

I also think that we have to admit that any human operation on this scale will have mistakes. I'm not writing them off, just sort of establishing that there must be a dividing line between "normal" mistakes and collossal ones. And no, I don't know which side of that line we are on.

It does occur to me now that terms like "snafu" and "fubar" come of of this scale of mobilization and response. They got to be commical phrases, but I'm sure they were not funny at the time.

I've made one donation. I'll make more, but ... it drives home what you hear in sailing circles - by all means call the Coast Guard and activate your EPRIB, but don't expect them to show up. You are responsible for saving yourself and your crew.

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50 comments on Interview with Mayor Nagin of NOLA

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