The Katrina Two-Step

Politicians. Hate them or loath them, you've got to hand it to them nonetheless that they haven't waited for the waters to recede before playing the blame game. Everyone on the Left, and many of the LA officials would like to blame the President. Some black leaders think that the slow response was racist. [Rev. Al, call your congregation publicist and get back to the Sheehanapalooza, they need their loon back.]

Of course, the sight of the Mayor Negin Memorial Motor Pool suggests a slightly different path - one that state and local officials disregarded the emergency response plan, one where local officials refused to declare emergencies or activate contingency plans until well after the disaster had struck. This article tells a different story:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."

Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the New Orleans Mayor, the Louisiana Governor are far more interested in engaging in a pissing contest than actually helping their citizens. They're worried about losing power and the idea that the feds could blame local authorities for failures.

Sorry, again as noted above, the Mayor Negin Memorial Motor Pool speaks volumes. There's plenty of blame to go around, but maybe those closest to the failure don't want to admit it, because to do so would be admitting that the local authorities did too little and too late to save the thousands that may have perished in New Orleans.

UPDATE:
Just why is New Orleans paying its workers for vacation while the search, rescue, and recovery efforts are ongoing? How are New Orleans officials going to explain that to those thousands of people who were first evacauted to the Superdome without provisions for more than a day or so, and then to the Houston Astrodome after the National Guard managed to get into the flooded city under fire from gangs because the law enforcement within New Orleans failed to maintain order. Paul from Wizbang suggests there is more to the story - I hope it's a satisfactory explanation, because police departments and fire agencies from around the country are rushing in volunteers to help stabilize the situation, and to hear this kind of story is a colossal misuse of resources.

It's also worth noting Brendan Loy's priescent comments before the hurricane struck and why we're hearing a revisionist history coming from folks who are looking to absolve New Orleans and Louisana officals from responsibility. Loy wonders

It is true, as some have pointed out in comments, that Katrina was not "likely" to hit New Orleans as of Saturday morning, or even Sunday morning for that matter. New Orleans was the hurricane's most likely target -- it remained in the crosshairs of the official forecast track all weekend -- but in terms of statistical strike probabilities, even the most likely target at 24-48 hours out still has a less-than-50% chance of getting hit, thanks to the uncertainties inherent in hurricane forecasting. However, given the technology that we currently have, you simply could not have a greater threat to a specific location, 48 hours before landfall, than the threat that New Orleans faced on Saturday morning. It was, as I said, a "high-confidence forecast," and one with enormously catastrophic potential. Thus, if an evacuation was not appropriate then, then it follows that an evacuation must never be appropriate at 48 hours. And that can't be, because really, 48 hours is already too late; studies have long shown that it would take 72 hours to completely empty the city of New Orleans. So unless the city's hurricane strategy was to throw up its hands and say, "there's nothing we can do," a mandatory evacuation -- school buses and all -- was most certainly called for on Saturday morning. As I wrote on Saturday afternoon, "If you knew there was a 10 percent chance terrorists were going to set off a nuclear bomb in your city on Monday, would you stick around, or would you evacuate? That's essentially equivalent to what you're dealing with here. I sure as hell would leave."

Finally, one last point. As horrible as the catastrophe has been, please realize that it actually could have been far worse. What occurred was not the long-feared "worst-case scenario," which involved not a levee breach equalizing the water level in Lake Ponchartrain and "Lake New Orleans," but rather a storm surge over-topping the levees and causing the water level in "Lake New Orleans," hemmed in by the still-intact levees, to rise substantially higher than the water level in the lake. If the storm had wobbled a meteorologically insignificant 20 or 30 miles to the west, and/or had not weakened from a Category 5 to a Category 4 at the last minute, that scenario would have occurred, and instead of a slowly developing 10-20 foot flood, New Orleans would have suffered a rapidly developing 30-40 foot flood. (Jackson Square would have been underwater, whereas in the real-world scenario it remained high and dry.) The whole thing would have happened Monday morning, and at the same time as the city was rapidly and massively flooding, the devastating winds that demolished the Mississippi coastline would have been tearing New Orleans apart instead. All of those attics where people took shelter would have been either submerged or shattered to bits. The French Quarter would have been swamped, instead of mostly surviving the flood. Second-floor generators in hospitals might well have drowned. Bottom line, there would be a lot fewer refugees and a lot more corpses.

UPDATE:
Paul at Wizbang posits that this is the kind of effort necessary to rebuild the New Orleans PD after essentially coming unglued during this crisis. No leadership from the top, popular police spokesperson committed suicide in the aftermath of knowing that he lost his family, and many police officers simply walked away from the job. Giving the remaining officers the ability to regroup is a good idea. (See my comment on the original Wizbang thread).