Sherry Chandler

The NYTimes online today has a fairly long article about the things that went wrong in the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina. This section about buses leaves me more puzzled than ever:

As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the need for buses.

Someone said, “We should be getting buses and getting people out of there,” recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA and president of an employees’ union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.

“We could all see it coming, like a guided missile,” Mr. Bosner said of the storm. “We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken.”

Drivers Afraid

When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug. 30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began resisting.

Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, “got afraid to drive. So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses.”

FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, said Natalie Rule, an agency spokeswoman, only after a request from the state that she said did not come until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led to the governor’s frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday night.

She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

Notice, in the section about FEMA and the buses on Friday, there is no trace of any responsible actor: “We knew steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reason, they were not taken.” Or “Someone said.”

The entire tenor of the article is like this, no clear command lines, no central authority, everybody just sort of making it up as they went along. It is most distressing to read.

I went over to Louisville last night to celebrate Ernie O’Dell’s 70th birthday. Seven women, only one under 60, and admittedly it was about 3 o’clock in the morning and the wine had been flowing freely, but we decided we all better be looking around for ways to take care of ourselves when disaster strikes because it looks pretty sure our government is going to give us much help.

[Update at 7:20 pm: And then there’s this interesting statement from the Washington Post:

Nagin also announced that the city had set up 10 refuges of last resort, and promised that public buses would pick up stragglers in a dozen locations to take them to the Superdome and other shelters.

But he never mentioned the numbers that had haunted experts for years, the estimated 100,000 city residents without their own transportation. And he never mentioned that the state’s comprehensive disaster plan, written in 2000 and posted on a state Web site, called for buses to take people out of the city once the governor declared a state of emergency.

In reality, Nagin’s advisers never intended to follow that plan — and knew many residents would stay behind. “We always knew we did not have the means to evacuate the city,” said Terry Ebbert, the sharp-tongued city director of emergency management.

Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me
paucis, si tibe di favent, diebus,
si tecum attuleris bonam atque magnam
cenam, non sine candida puella
et vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis.
haec si, inquam, attuleris, venuste noster,
cenabis bene; nam tui Catulli
plenus sacculus est aranearum.
sed contra accipies meros amores
seu quid suavius elegantiusve est;
nam unguentum dabo, quod meae puellae
donarunt Veneres Cupidinesque
quod tu cum olfacies, deos rogabis,
totum ut te faciant, Fabulle, nasum.

You shall dine with me, Fabullus, in a few
–if gods smile on you–days,
if you should happen to bring with you
dinner–good and plentiful food,
a radiant serving wench, wine and wit
and all things amusing, so shall it be
dear friend–bring only these: dine well.
’cause the purse of your Catullus is full of
spiders’ spend. In return you shall receive
Love’s true essence, than which nothing
is more pleasing or elegant. I shall give
you some of that scent, which the Venuses and Cupids
gave my girl. One whiff: you’ll
beg the gods to memorphose–
to make you wholly nose–
and nothing else, Fabullus.

Participants in today’s Freedom Strut n’ Fret will allegedly be given replicant dog tags, but only the pre-registered are welcome. The Press may only stand in designated areas, not march with the Elect. No word if the gummint’s pet country superstar plans to metamorphose into any appropriate body part while performing his hit tune Iraq ‘N Roll at the concert.