My best friend's mother was in Biloxi, MS. She tells a story much different than what you see here. She tells a story of neighbors and community getting together and helping the situation, not making it worse. Citizens taking action before government even made a move.
I understand that N.O. was a different set of circumstances with the flooding, however, the citizens reacted in a different manner in Biloxi. They took responsibility as citizens. That's where this all starts. No one should have been surprised, the storm was hyped for days. The most hindering factor here was the fact that so many chose to stay behind, for whatever reasons you can list. If my community was faced with a disaster, we would follow the warnings in the days preceding. We would not be waiting on the government, we would have already taken action in the days after.
Second finger pointed: Local government failed to provide a means to help get these people out of harms way. The worst of all, N.O.'s own emergency plan that local government failed to enact:
en.wikinews.org...
The 2000 edition of the southeast Louisiana evacuation plan on page 13, paragraph 5 states:
5. The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating.
Remember the busses sitting in a parking lot, flooded? Should they not have been used to remove the people of N.O.? Should they not have been moved to a safer location out of harms way to be used in the days following the disaster?
Government travels up hill, starting with local and state government. Even then, can any agency ever be prepared for a disaster of this magnitude? Even then can any one be blamed for the wrath of a Natural Disaster? It is the duty of the Mayor, the Governor, etc....a chain of command if you will.
What this video definitely gets across is the anger and desperation one would expect following one of the worst natural disasters of our time. What it really exposes is media bias and the glass half empty mentality. If you do enough research, you will find that the rescue effort was more of a success than failure, hindered by citizens that refused to lead under the shadow of a local government that failed it's people.
What it doesn't expose is the thousands of heroes, National Guard men and women, Coast Guard agencies, volunteers, and citizens that did act. What it doesn't expose is what did work in the days following Katrina.
The events of Katrina will be in our minds forever, especially those who lived in the heart of it. We can all debate and finger point all we want, but I think there were major lessons learned. Though smaller in scale, the last hurricanes seem to have been handled with much more expertise and have already disappeared from our TV screen.
[edit on 12-10-2008 by BeavX]
