Beyond the ghastly deaths and the awesome heroism, what remains most in my memory from being at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and the days thereafter is the amazing truth that those people knew what to do -- after an unprecedented and unheard of act of horror. This, in contrast to the response to Hurricane Katrina, where they didn't know what to do about something that was seen coming and which happens two or three times a year, every year.
Seeing Donald Rumsfeld on the New Orleans scene is not exactly encouraging. This is a guy who sends our soldiers into an underplanned war with no clue on how to win it three years later nor how to get out of it; and then he disparages anyone -- within the military or not -- who notes that soldiers are dying because of bad decisions in Washington.
And he's the one looking at New Orleans? Looking for Weather of Mass Destruction, maybe.
A storm coming, you don't expect that they can fix the levees and dams and flood walls on brief notice. But it is not too much to ask that the mighty federal warrior government might take less than a week to get bottles of water and cans of food to victims of a storm that had been tracked for 2,000 miles.
Who knew what to do when planes crash into office towers? New York knew. They were organized in a flash. They lined the streets with rescue gear, ambulances, generators, bulldozers. People with a lot else to do were able to spring into organized action immediately in New York and for that Rudy Giuliani is a wonderworker. People with nothing else on their plate than manage emergencies, notably storm emergencies, went brain dead in advance of and after Katrina. And for that they should all be fired and their boss, the President, ashamed of himself.
There was nothing the government of New Orleans could do for those desperate people after the hurricane simply because there was no government of New Orleans and little enough New Orleans. The state was flattened, too. But the FEMA and its parent Homeland Security departments didn't see fit to have a plan, to have supplies or transportation or assistance ready. For a hurricane. A very big hurricane that we all watched for 10 days roaring around the area en route to New orleans tragedy.
Rudy Giuliani & Co. never had advance warning of the terrorists yet they were able to react and respond in way that is amazing to me even now four years later. There were no paper pushers in the way there, no turf-obsessed bureaucrats quite blinkered to the wretched truth that their ineptitude was costing lives. Costing lives. Costing lives. And making the nation look like some tinpot weakling power that doesn't give a hoot about anyone not making really huge amounts of money.
The clean up begins, after the Failure. The clean up should take place in Washington as well as New Orleans, Louisiana, Mississippi and wherever else the terrible hurricane and the terrible ineptitude did its great damage. This cannot be allowed to pass without action. There are lives at stake when the next storm hits, too.
crosslink: www.courant.com/horganblog