Sherry Chandler

In her comment to the post below, Georgia suggested that I look at the Lexington Herald-Leader for its article on local emergency plans. These plans are the responsibility of the county and here is the description of Bourbon County’s plan:

More common is the sketchy evacuation plan kept at the Bourbon County courthouse: a local road map and a two-page list of simple instructions, such as “Sources of Manpower are a. City of Paris, b. Bourbon County Road Dept., c. Volunteers with Vans.” There is a “d.” listed as well, but it’s blank.

Billy Rice, Bourbon County’s 78-year-old emergency management director, said he’s “fairly confident” he could get his 20,000 residents out of harm’s way on short notice. He’s grateful he hasn’t had to test that theory.

“I’ve been in this job more than 20 years, and we’ve never had to do any kind of mass evacuation,” Rice said in his tidy, quiet office atop the Paris city building. “Most of the bad weather seems to miss us.”

Rice’s cautious optimism is shared by officials in other counties. While their formal plans might be modest, they said, local government leaders know each other’s home and cell phone numbers. They know who holds the keys to the dump trucks and school buses, if such equipment is needed to clear a street or empty a neighborhood.

We live within sight of Mallinckrodt-Baker, Inc., a biopharmaceutical manufacturing plant. In fact, their banks of lights blight our night. One hot summer day when my children were small, we were puttering in the garden when a police car–the sheriff or a deputy– came by with a bullhorn warning everyone to get indoors and close the doors and windows because Mallinckrodt had had an accident with hazardous chemicals.

So we gathered up our pre-schoolers, went in the house, closed everything up, shut down the air conditioner because for fear it would bring in polluted air and spent several sweltering hours fretting about our own health and that of our livestock and pets. No all-clear was ever given. Local media had no information about what was going on.

After a while, feeling that our situation was intolerable, we started making phone calls. Nobody at Bourbon County’s Emergency Management office seemed to have any idea what was going on, nor did the switchboard operator at the Mallinckrodt plant, who wouldn’t pass my angry husband through to anybody in authority.

Asked to help me with my memory, my husband says, “We finally reached a new chirpy little twit at Mallinckrodt who seemed unaware there had ever been a problem.” So we decided, if birds weren’t falling out of the trees, we were probably safe – and we were. We later found out that the plant had had some kind of acid spill that did not present an airborne hazard. Sometimes I think I may have imagined that cruiser but if so, I guess it was a group hallucination.

Here’s more from the Herald-Leader article:

Kentucky, similar to Louisiana, is a comparatively poor and rural state, dependent on government aid. One in five people claims to be disabled. One in 10 households has no vehicle, and one in 20 has no phone. Hispanics, some of whom speak little English, are quickly moving into cities and farming communities.

“The poverty, and all of the exacerbating problems related to it, are quite similar between New Orleans and Eastern Kentucky in particular,” said Ron Crouch, director of the State Data Center in Louisville. “Getting the word out would be hard enough. Getting the people out would be a monumental effort.”

High-ranking state officials have an evacuation plan — for themselves, to Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, which would serve as the capital if Frankfort were badly damaged or destroyed. Copies of records needed to run the state already are stored there.

For the rest of the state’s 4 million people, the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management serves in a supporting role for the counties’ emergency management directors, who take the lead in evacuation planning.

[...]

Unfortunately, Shaw said, local officials seldom spend much time studying the evacuation plans, practicing them, improving them and explaining them to the public. Do they know where disabled residents live, so they can provide appropriate transportation? Do residents who can drive know where they are supposed to go? Are the plans updated regularly?

“I’ll see these lists of local governments and non-profit and faith-based organizations, with names and cell phone numbers, and I’ll ask, ‘Is so-and-so still here?’ And they’ll say ‘Oh, no, he’s been gone three years,’” he said. “So that doesn’t do us any good, does it?”

A conservative friend from Texas sent me an impassioned e-mail yesterday about flooded buses.

I don’t watch much tv and I’ve never had cable or dish and talk radio gives me the jitters, so I was a little blind-sided. This was the first I’d heard of any drowned buses. What was that about?

An article in this morning’s Washington Post, “New Orleans Mayor Faces Tough Questions,” sheds some light on the subject:

On conservative talk radio, especially, Nagin has been characterized as an irrational and incompetent local official who lost control of his city, his police force and, ultimately, his senses when he publicly dressed down the president. Even some of his underlings think the critics may be right.

Ah, sez I, the right-wing smear machine has chosen Nagin as their scapegoat and “buses” is one of their talking points. For once, the right is in favor of busing.

I know practically nothing about C. Ray Nagin. I’d never heard his name until about last Wednesday when he did his famous “dressing down” of the president. As far as I know, Nagin could have got everybody loaded on those buses and avoided the entire post-Katrina debacle (in New Orleans anyway). Though Jeff Hess at Have Coffee, Will Write argues that such busing would not have been a Big Easy.

What I do know is that an element of the right addresses every criticism by smearing and silencing the critic rather than considering the problem. I also know that there is always a degree of hysteria that accompanies events like this, so that we probably won’t know the truth about the degree of crime and looting, the number of the dead, etc., for some time. Responsible citizens should be calling for a de-escalation of the rhetoric and cool heads.

I’ve noticed a tendency in the last week for putting Rudi Guiliani forward as a sort of positive leadership beacon against the leadership vacuum on the Gulf Coast. The implicit comparison to Nagin distresses me a bit. The two situations were not very much alike. Disregarding any problems with the Department of Homeland Security and four years of time to prepare for another disaster, here are the ways I see that New Orleans in August 2005 is not like New York City on September 11, 2001:

—80% of New York City was not disabled. 80% of New Orleans was flooded.
—New York City did not go dark. New Orleans was completely dark at night. Few of us experience that kind of darkness, even if we live in the country. Darkness and water tap into primal fears. Think of Genesis: “And the earth was without form and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
—New York’s city hall was not disabled. Ray Nagin had to break into an office supply store and “find” equipment to keep his government operating.
—New York City lost many brave policemen and firemen but its police stations and fire stations were not destroyed.
—New York City’s telephone systems were not disabled.
—New York City’s television stations were not disabled.
—New York City’s newspapers were not disabled. The Times Picayune has somehow managed to keep reporting in spite of having lost staff and offices to the flood. (Speaking of heroes and leadership.)
—New York’s hospitals were not disabled.
—The area around New York City was not devastated.
—Nobody had to evacuate New York City.

In today’s NYTimes online, “The Preservation Hall Band, Far from Preservation Hall:”

One by one, the musicians in the Preservation Hall Jazz Band landed at New York airports last night.

[...]

The whereabouts of the trumpet player, John Brunious, might still be unknown if not for a woman who sat next to him on a bus from New Orleans to Texas. She later contacted the bandleader, Ben Jaffe, who tracked him down in Conway, Ark. How Mr. Brunious ended up there was not yet known.

[...]

Though [Preservation Hall in the French Quarter] appears to be undamaged, concerts there are out of the question with the city evacuated, so Mr. Jaffe [the bandleader] has started a fund to raise money for the other musicians. “They’re not carpenters,” Mr. Jaffe said. “There’s not a lot of need for jazz trombone players in Shreveport, La.”

This story may be emblematic of what is happening to the culture of New Orleans in the best of circumstances. The worst are incomprehensible.

Where is Fats Domino? I heard he’d been rescued but then sort of disappeared among the evacuees in the Superdome. Update: here’s the story on The Fats Domino pages

Berkeley Breathed, creator of Bloom County and Opus, on censorship in Editor & Publisher:

Q. Have you done any strips that took up, in any form, the misleading pre-war reporting on WMDs?

A. Yes, and they weren’t appreciated by my clients a year ago. It’s a different time than it was in my prime years, for sure. I can’t even print the word “gay” in my strip without losing clients. To say the least, editors are weirdly on edge right now. I think they’re all worried that they may have to become religious pamphlets in order to survive.