I think my saddest image/story from Katrina was watching Matt Frei on the BBC TV newsfeed yesterday evening racing round New Orleans with his cameraman, pointing out the many dead bodies he encountered and pleading, pleading with any emergency personnel he met as to when somebody would do something to deal with them.
Many of the bodies were very bloated and visibly decaying. Elementary principles of public health– not to mention human decency– would indicate they needed dealing with, respectfully, as a matter of prime urgency.
All the “first responders” Frei spoke to– maybe four or five different groups of them– said they had either “no orders to deal with the bodies”, or that they had orders not to deal with the bodies.
At times, Frei looked like he was about to lose it on the air. I kind of wish he had done.
I looked for a link to this reporting on the BBC website today, but found none.
Where is “the plan”? Surely any emergency-management plan worthy of the name has a section on the effective, respectful, and speedy steps to be taken to deal with corpses? These would include, I should imagine, identification and documentation of the corpses, bagging them, and getting them to a refrigerated holding-space a.s.a.p.
I see that FEMA chief “Brownie” has now been reassigned elsewhere.
But I wonder if he or others responsible for emergency management in this country has ever thought for a moment how they would feel if it were their beloved aunty who was trapped in the nursing-home or otherwise unable to evacuate… or their dear old Dad who ended up face-down and bloating in the stew of water/ industrial pollutants/ crap that will be swirling through the city’s streets for many days to come.
Lord save us all.
12 thoughts on “Saddest image of Katrina”
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I think the whole handling of Katrina points out one thing – we are on our own if a disaster strikes and our local/state government cannot handle it.
The Federal government, under Bush, will not or cannot help us.
I made my weekly calls to White House/Burr/Dole/Taylor today and pointed out to them that if their mother was in a nursing home in say, Raleigh, and disaster strikes, she is on her own. We are all on our own.
I am now reading horrible stories of how the Katrina victims are being treated in OK. And I hear a group of the victims are going to camp out in DC:
http://www.bushville.org
It is a very sad day for America. Our country is being ruined right in front of our eyes.
I thought I saw this (Brown’s “reassignment”)coming when V.Adm Thad Allen was brought in to direct operations in the zone. I started my timer then. They had to walk Brownie out silently, and he still doesn’t get how kindly they treated him. Has a chip on his shoulders, and an urgent need for Margaritas.
I guess it’s good news that competent military folk have taken over. Lt. Gen Honore, who even got props from Mayor Nagin in the midst of the Mayor’s righteous blast on the federal response, is heading the military side, with the V. Adm. taking over from Brown. The USCG hasn’t had the kind of institutional meltdown that FEMA did; reports are that the Coast Guard’s performance has been the “bright spot to an otherwise dismal early government response”.
Susan: More like sad decade so far, isn’t it? I’ve been listening to conspiracy theories for a while about how the cabal on the Right has been planning to do exactly what we’re seeing for decades. I myself am not one for conspiracy theories. It usually takes me about 15 min max to dismantle them. This one, I have been working on for five years and it just keeps getting more convincing, the basic institutions of American life keep unravelling, and the corpses keep piling up.
Yes — having the military in seems to be doing more good than having FEMA fumbling to assert control, though helping few. However, I find it scary that some parts of the military seem to view their job in NOLA as fighting an insurgency or occupying a hostile city.
There’s the usual US racism in this (NOLA is a foreign country to some of those white guys) but also I’m sure it is a product of a military culture formed by an imperial war.
Janinsanfran –
I notice that the guys quoted in your post are Louisiana National Guard! So, maybe it’s not so foreign a country. Also, given the historical “over” representation of African Americans in the army/USAR/ARNG ( a good thing, during my watch ), they might not be so overwhelmingly white either … I’m thinking also that there is a difference between rhetoric and reality when the military is deployed. For what it’s worth (and all of this is, I hope, somewhat reassuring), their military culture was formed long before the imperial war.
All that said, I hope they follow the orders from cooler heads like Gen. Honore, and go softly. If I’d been stuck in the city for a week and abandoned by my government, I would be in no mood to be manhandled by the “boys”, or anyone else wanting to remove me from my house.
Sorry, can I sneak in one more comment here? Janinsanfran, your reference to military culture just crystallized something important to me about why I’m having such a hard time stomaching what I’ve seen the past couple weeks. In my decade in uniform, a few elements of military culture were quite common, which have been absent here:
1. Meritocracy: It’s literally unthinkable to most military folk that someone would become anyone senior in FEMA without having years of training and experience running disasters like this; if you brought something else to the table besides this experience, then you got trained up to fill in the gaps. The very idea of political cronyism in such an important position is hard, very hard, to even process;
2. Accountability: No matter how well trained you are, or how experienced, or what you did before, if you screwed it up, it’s your ass. Human nature to protest otherwise, but understood as complete BS. Double penalty if people died on your watch because of something you screwed up. End of story.
3. Preparedness: Also literally unthinkable that resources would not have been mobilized well in advance to have people & gear in place, communications worked out, command & control worked out in advance to get started within an hour of landfall. We have invaded countries on less notice than this, mobilizing far more in the way of resources. Similarly to FEMA’s history, we would have trained to do all of this well beforehand.
4. Strategy: There is a lot of forgiveness in the civilian world for a lack of real strategic thinking, or a weak substitute where strategy should be. It isn’t forgiveable in the military, where people die unnecessarily when it isn’t there or isn’t good enough. See ‘Accountability’ above.
5. Logistics: There is an old saying about how amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk about logistics. Both are important obviously, but this is the harder part. Under James Lee Witt, this had been largely worked out; during Bush’s tenure, what was before substantive, well thought out and reasonably provisioned has been replaced with a lot of ideological bullshit. Logistics is about substance; what goes where, when, in what quantity, what time does it arrive, who does what with is, etc. And how does all that work when all your assumptions have been thrown out the window? (Again, see ‘Accountability’ above; “Things are worse than we thought they would be” is not an excuse).
So: among the NGs and active duty personnel on the ground, not to mention those in the NG who in their civilian lives have become ‘first responders’ in police forces, fire departments and EMS in abundance (consistent historical trend for separating service people), and who probably thought someone else was looking after the home front while they were off in Iraq, there has got to be a strong undercurrent of thinking … “WTF”?
wind – all excellent points, but the whole thing makes me very uneasy in another way. You know, Tommy Franks warned a couple years ago that we are one major terrorist attack away from martial law in this county, and I think he was exactly right. I really wish there was a way we could deliver essential services to people in need without calling in the 82nd Airborne. It’s too easy for people to conclude that the military is just better at running things than the civilian government, so why not put them in charge?
Then there is today’s 4th Circuit decision in the Padilla case that “the president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil in the absence of criminal charges, [because] such authority is vital during wartime to protect the nation from terrorist attacks.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090900772.html
This is no longer the country you and I grew up in. Frankly, it scares the s*** out of me.
Locals believe New Orleans Levees were Intentionally blown
by Steve Watson Friday, Sep. 09, 2005 at 10:01 AM
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/135121.php
AP reports today that fewer bodies than expected are being found, according to military sources. Of course, this discovery was made after military control was established and the media were prohibited from photographing the bodies. Not very many civilian casualties in Iraq either, right?
John C., I’d be lyin’ if I said I did not share your uneasiness. On the one hand, the above concerned with Louisiana National Guard, which is under the Governor’s control. Also on that hand, I count a consistent set of military values, more carefully ingrained in generals than in me, about civilian control of the military, about the importance of Posse Comitatus, and so forth.
But then, when I see the deployment of AD troops in NOLA the hair stands up on the back of my neck, too. You are one accidental shooting away from rendering the constitution null and void. While many have been commenting about Governor Blanco having ‘played politics’ with not handing over federal control of the recovery (conveniently handing over spin control to the white house), I think it is a real concern, and I would have recommended to the governor that she demonstrate the same resistance. Maybe it’ll turn out to be heinous politics while people died, but I don’t see it that way so far.
Having watched Rumsfeld politicize the promotions process for three- and four-star generals, I see the levy that protected the senior officer corps from “selling out to careerism and venal self interest” (Officer Corps professional survey, 1970) coming under serious stress.
There’s no reason that the 82d (for god’s sake!) should be better at disater relief than FEMA. FEMA’s old setup was something that anyone with ‘military standards’ would be proud of, and in some cases in awe of. The displacement of those capabilities is ideological.
Here’s another ghastly hoped-for; if MSM shows video of the military forcefully removing people from their houses in NOLA, right or wrong, people are going to get a lot more interested in their civil liberties and presidential powers of detention, real quick-like.
Dear John C.,
this discovery was made after military control was established and the media were prohibited from photographing the bodies. Not very many civilian casualties in Iraq either, right?
These guys well and highly trained in Iraq and they knew what to do, no one allowed to Photograph, No…one
The ‘martial law’ that is in effect does not seem to have any legal basis — it is simply the military and police taking any power deemed necessary. The NYT today reported that the military and police are confiscating all firearms (except from the rich or the private security guards/mercs). I guess now that we torture people and lock them up indefinitely without trial, I shouldn’t be surprised that the 2nd amendment is out the window too . . .
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