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Mayor of New Orleans requests haste-People to write letters.
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an excellent article you should all read..... <br /> <br />APOCALYPSE NOW IN NEW ORLEANS <br />By Bryan Preston · September 05, 2005 12:13 AM <br /> <br />The JYB guy here, best known most recently for blogging about buses, specifically the hundreds and hundreds of buses that the city of New Orleans failed to use to evacuate its most disadvantaged citizens out of harm's way before hurricane Katrina hit last week. Tens of thousands of New Orleans' residents could have been spared the worst of the past week and many might still be alive today if the city had actually activated its plan to use its own vehicles--school and commuter buses--to give them a ride. But the plan was never activated, though the city was fully aware of the plight of its citizens after hurricane Ivan nearly struck it last year. And of course the city had known that it was sinking into the gooey soil of the Mississippi delta for decades. New Orleans knew that it was living on borrowed time. But it partied on, eating, drinking and being merry, knowing that tomorrow it might well die. <br /> <br />Instead of acknowledging the faults that lie at city level and stepping in to organize relief efforts, Louisiana and New Orleans officials spent most of last week lashing out at the Bush administration, though its response was three times faster than the response to hurricane Andrew just 13 years ago. Government actually got quicker at doing something, in spite of the massive increase in the number of lawyers on the public dime in the intervening years. The locals blamed the feds even though the administration, whatever its faults, was ahead of all local officials when it came to declaring a state of emergency and requesting a mandatory evacuation. A massive butt-covering exercise is underway in Louisiana as I write, so massive it is second only to the actual relief and law and order efforts going on in the vast Katrina destruction zone. <br /> <br />Here's Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, threatening to punch President Bush if local officials come under any criticism. <br /> <br />Here's a local New Orleans official bizarrely suggesting that the head of the government needs to be "chainsawed off." <br /> <br />These officials and dozens like them all across Louisiana are trying to shift blame to Washington for their own failures. <br /> <br />The buses I mentioned earlier and have blogged about extensively all weekend are evidence of and a symbol for those failures. They sit unused and waterlogged, their empty seats representing lives lost to the flood. Their useless presence in flooded parking lots demonstrate that the best plan is useless if it's never implemented. And they fact of their unuse demonstrates a deeper pathology at work in New Orleans government: The entire thing was rotted from the inside out. New Orleans' government was a disaster waiting to happen. <br /> <br />One of my readers at the JYB pointed this out in the process of bugging me about drivers. This reader wanted to know where all the drivers were supposed to come from to drive those buses full of people out of the city. I replied that the answer was obvious--they're school buses, use school bus drivers, contact them via a phone tree, make emergency driving part of their job. Turns out it's not so easy as that. The New Orleans school system is, to put it mildly, a basket case: <br /> <br />NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Students return to class Thursday in a school system in such turmoil that no one is sure how many employees it has, the new budget is millions of dollars out of balance, and the buildings are old and deteriorating. <br /> <br />The story, dated August 18, 2005, goes on from there to detail the fiscal horror show that is the New Orleans school system. Read it when you're not in the mood for a good laugh. Read it when you're in the mood to slug someone, and you'll slug them twice as hard. Sen. Landrieu should read it and then sit down chanting "serenity now." If you've ever paid taxes to the city of New Orleans, you've been had. And the fact is, through federal education programs chances are we have all paid tax dollars that have been disappeared by that awful system. We have all been had. <br /> <br />We can't lay all of the blame for this sorry state of affairs at Mayor Ray Nagin's feet (though he's almost entirely to blame for the city's pathetic response to the current crisis). He's only been in office for three years, and to his credit he has tried to reform the city's government. But the fact is that a school system that doesn't even know how many employees it has won't be in a position to reach bus drivers when they're needed to ferry thousands of people out of the path of a hell storm like Katrina. <br /> <br />New Orleans' city government was an abscess. I say "was," by the way, because for all intents and purposes it ceased to exist some time last week--probably at about the same time the local officials realized that their multiple failures were bound to lead to major loss of life. Its emergency management czar, one Terry Ebbert, squealed about an absence of command and control over the relief effort, when it was his job to establi***hat command and control. The police department is two-thirds gone after about 1,000 officers deserted in the face of the flood and the looters--some of whom were police officers themselves. Mayor Nagin sent up a profanity-laced diatribe against the federal government that should have been delivered in front of a mirror. The abscess at city hall failed its citizens. It is guilty of gross negligence leading to death for many of its most vulnerable citizens. As the wretched condition of its school system demonstrates, long before it collapsed last week, the municipal government of New Orleans was a total and unmitigated disgrace. <br />
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