First I'd like to say a heart felt hat tip to:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/4/11430/17556#91
I have taken time out from my career to care for my elderly parents. My father is a double amputee diabetic in the final phase of Congestive Heart Failure and my mother was stricken with motor neuron disease last fall.
As I have watched the pictures from NOLA and the convention center I have been perhaps more attuned to seeing the wheel chairs, oxygen concentrators, the dying diabetics, and the elderly on gurneys than most.
I can not tell you how difficult it is in the best of times it is to transfer them to get to doctors and hospitals, much less in a hurricane. It has really destroyed me to hear the stories of men coming up to reporters pleading with them to help rescue their invalid parents, "there half a mile away at a gas station... he's a diabetic and needs insulin."
Even in the best of times the elderly are forgotten at best and preyed upon at worst. I'm sure that NOLA will be awash in their bodies and it breaks my heart.
CNN just aired the clip but cut out all of Aaron Broussard's remarks about FEMA.
Here is a working link for his full remarks as well as Chertoff's interview:
http://dissent.blogspot.com/#112584694461770423
What we know now is:
- The order to send in the National Guard was not given until 72 hours after the levees had broken.
- FEMA officials prevented a five mile long convoy of small rescue craft from entering the area. The official that turned them back said that "they would not be needed.
- FEMA prevented the Red Cross from entering New Orleans to provide food and water because it was feared that it would encourage people to stay in the city.
- FEMA turned back three trucks full of water that had been sent a week ago by Walmart because they said it would not be needed.
- FEMA prevented the Coast Guard from giving 1000 gallons of diesel fuel that the Coast Guard was ready to off load to them. This was fuel that was needed for the emergency generators at the cities hospitals.
- FEMA cut the emergency communication lines for the city's law enforcement and emergency personnel.
All of this goes beyond incompetence; it is criminal negligence that demands criminal action to be taken against those officials who are responsible for this. They are responsible for untold deaths.