Katrina

Katrina was one of the worst, if not the worst, natural disasters ever on American soil. The destruction, the flooding, and the death toll were beyond the comprehension of most American citizens.

The media and a majority of liberla politicians, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin are blaming the Bush Administration and the Federal Government for all of their problems in evacuating after the storm and treating the sick and dying. The problem is that before the refugees, before the storm, before the flood, before Nagin's tirades, the City of New Orleans could have averted many of the casualties and a great dealf of this situation.

• Blogger Brad DeLong discusses a video the City was creating telling the poor of New Orleans what their station was in life if the big one came. A story published in the July 24 Times-Picayune:

• City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans' poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you're on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm's way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.

  In the video, made by the anti-poverty agency Total Community Action, they urge those people to make arrangements now by finding their own ways to leave the city in the event of an evacuation. "You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to you," Wilkins said in an interview. "If you have some room to get that person out of town, the Red Cross will have a space for that person outside the area. We can help you. "But we don't have the transportation."

  Officials are recording the evacuation message even as recent research by the University of New Orleans indicated that as many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes in the event of a Category 3 hurricane. Their message will be distributed on hundreds of DVDs across the city. The DVDs' basic get-out-of-town message applies to all audiences, but the it is especially targeted to scores of churches and other groups heavily concentrated in Central City and other vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, said the Rev. Marshall Truehill, head of Total Community Action. "The primary message is that eachperson is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends," Truehill said.

• The New York Times yesterday printed a story about blogger Brendan Loy, who suggested the evacuation of New Orleans on August 26th. The evacation order came down on August 28th.
• Then there are the infamous busses, with a picture on Junkyard Blog. At minimum, there could have been 17,000 people evacuated on those busses.
• A third of the New Orleans police department has defected since the storm? And a lot of it, according to some reports, involved lowered morale before the storm. Why did this happen?
  

So why did the Mayor not order the evacuation earlier? Why was city transit not used to evacuate people? Why was the Superdome used at the shelter of last resort if it did not have the facilities to be used as one? Why was the DVD never released to the public. And why are Nagin and others playing the race card if even the Nagin himself told the poor of New Orleans that they were on their own?

There are more people to blame right now than the Feds. When the Katrina Commission is convened before the end of the year (and a lot of good THAT will do), I hope that the response of the City and the State of Louisiana are also looked at critically.