Well, its been a week since Katrina made landfall and it seems that more than anything, this has been a colossal failure of the State to meet its obligations to “protect the weak from the wicked” as Tom Paine would say, though in this case wickedness seems to be lurking in the aggregate of bureaucratic mire, politically directed ambitions, and general acceptance of mediocrity and incompetence rather than in the form of some sort of identifiable persona to which we may make an attribution of conscious malice. There is no one person, no vast conspiracy, no deliberate scheme to which we may assign blame.
Unfortunately, it is one thing to have a bloated, dysfunctional, parochial bureaucracy fail to stop a surprise attack conducted by fanatics but it is another thing all together for that same beast to fail, given the stated reorientation of focus to cope with large, complex, cataclysmic events, and given the occurrence of a number of such events since the 11th September attacks to learn from – the Bali nightclub bombings, the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Madrid train bombings, the series of hurricanes in Florida last year, the Tsunami, the famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the London transportation system bombing all come to mind – to deal with a hurricane that takes a week to make landfall and the subsequent flooding that has been a subject of discussion and concern for at least four years.
The utter failure to act with decisiveness after the landfall of Katrina and the breaks in the levees in New Orleans has painted a picture of control-centric government at all levels that is fundamentally broken and out of touch with reality. As we will likely see, there is enough blame at the local, state, and federal level to go around so that Democrats and Republicans will both be able to point fingers and try to assign blame. That exercise will waste time and be a diversion of attention away from the root causes of the failure, both in the long term work to prevent a flood of New Orleans and the short term work of responding to this flood once it happened, that have to do with incompetence, the acceptance of mediocrity, and the attempt to spread the responsibility for action across too many people on too many levels.
New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen but lost in all this was the failure to act on Monday to bring aid to the hurricane damaged areas that were _not_ flooded but were without power, water, gasoline, or food. The Flood of New Orleans merely exacerbated a failure to plan and respond that was already well on its way to being an exhibition of incompetence.
Some various thoughts:
- Why didn’t a category 4 hurricane in the North Central Gulf of Mexico trigger an automatic reaction focused – apart from the hurricane relief – on flood relief for New Orleans, given that it was well known that the levees in New Orleans were only intended to withstand a category 3 hurricane?
- Why didn’t the Commerce Department issue advisories to the Governors of states supplied by the Gulf Coast refinery operation that a large hurricane could damage or disable the refineries on the Gulf Coast and recommend that they be prepared to freeze prices of gasoline and diesel in the wake of the storm to prevent profiteering like we saw in Georgia?
- Why is a “lack of communications” an acceptable excuse for the failure to act in time when a cellular site, an emergency services radio central site, a tropospheric trunk node, and a satellite ground station all can be run by generator or solar panels, carried in the back of a Humvee or slung under a medium lift helicopter, and be up and operational within an hour of reaching their site?
- Why can I see 50 meter resolution satellite photos of the area on the Internet less than 24 hours after landfall but it takes 5 days for a convoy of trucks carrying food and water to make it into downtown New Orleans?
- Why, after all the many large, complex situations (see above) that involved the displacement of people, why isn’t there an Open Source missing person directory that can form a federated, distributed network of photos, names, locations, and identifying marks that can be set up and used by any agency at any location, and “sync’d up” when network connectivity becomes available?
- Who was the last President to have 15,000 American citizens die on his watch, 11,000 of them on American soil, because of failures of government? Who was the last President to have a total body count for the acts of omission and commission in the name of the American people during his administration that exceeded 25,000 people?
- Why is it that we will Impeach a President for lying about getting a blow job in the White House from an intern but we won’t Impeach a President for lying to Congress to solicit approval, but not a Declaration of War, to invade and violently overthrow the sitting rulers of a sovereign nation, or gross incompetence that leads to the loss of human life?