Tomorrow’s NY Times front page has a blistering condemnation of the federal government’s foot dragging and political gaming of the Katrina disaster. It’s about time somebody in the major press put that together. Tomorrow of course is the 4th anniversary of the Sept. 11 2001 disaster. There’s particular sadness in that.
Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy
By Eric Lipton, Christopher Drew, Scott Shane and David Rohde
Published: September 11, 2005
The governor of Louisiana was “blistering mad.” It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500 vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
Ms. Blanco burst into the state’s emergency center in Baton Rouge. “Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?” she recalled crying out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before they found enough to empty the shelters.
The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a terrorist attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial examination of Katrina’s aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11 attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana, interviews with dozens of officials show….Read the rest . (user: sokref1@comcast.net, password: lrrfartblog)
(images are photos that appeared on Artblog a year ago. They’re shots my sister Cate took of the Creative Time Tribute of Light project commemorating victims of the Sept 11 disaster.)
fallon, cate
