Katrina Aftermath: More Local Failure
The Bayou Spin Machine continues, blaming the Feds for being slow to pick up the dead after the storm. It's one more in a long series of cover stories that have successfully framed the storm's aftermath as primarily a FEMA failure. At least this time the Republicans are pushing back:
Bodies of people killed by Hurricane Katrina went uncollected for more than a week in the New Orleans area as the federal government waited for Louisiana's governor to decide what to do with them, according to memos released Thursday by a Republican-led House committee.The 38 pages of e-mail between FEMA representatives and Pentagon officials contradict the contention by Louisiana's Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, two weeks after Katrina hit on Aug. 29, that the federal government was moving too slowly to recover the bodies.
They also underscore ongoing political tensions between the Republican Bush administration and Democratic state and local officials over the botched response to Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people in Louisiana. They were released by a House panel that many Democrats have shunned, chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., that is investigating the government's sluggish preparations and reaction to the storm.
The memos indicate that morgues were not ready to receive bodies until Sept. 7 _ two days after the first memo complaining about Blanco's inaction, and nine days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it even as it costs me a friendship or two--Katrina was a devastating storm and the failure to respond to it adequately was primarily local. Bashing FEMA focuses energy on the wrong target and in the end won't help us learn the right lessons from the disaster. Local governments are first responders in our system. If they fail, as they did in Louisianastan, there isn't much FEMA can do to correct for it. It may be worth discussing making FEMA capable of correcting for gross local failure in the future. But as things stood when Katrina hit, FEMA was designed to be a support agency for local governments, not an overarching agency empowered to push local governments aside.
Additionally, I think the Katrina aftermath was a watershed in a very negative sense. The old American ethic of self -reliance in a crisis died and has been replaced by a blame-the-feds-first mentality. Everything that happens now--storms, bird flu, even an earthquake in Pakistan--now has a ridiculous blame Bush or blame the feds angle to it. We're seeing it even in Florida after Wilma, where people who failed to stock up when they knew the storm was coming and failed to evacuate before it made landfall blame the feds when there are long lines for food and services and it takes a few days to restore power. The feds didn't conjure up the hurricane, and the feds didn't tell anyone not to buy a few extra groceries, and the feds aren't primarily responsible for restoring electricity, but now the feds are to blame. This lack of personal responsibility isn't entirely new but has gotten amped up after Katrina. We have, among other things, distorted media coverage of Katrina to thank.
(t2 Chris)