When the Levee Breaks

Think Progress has two separate posts, listed under their "Incompetent Establishment" subject heading, that play off of each other nicely. First, from an interview on ABC's Good Morning America with FEMA director Mike Brown:

GIBSON: Mike, with all due respect to you and with all due respect to the president, I was amazed to hear him say to Diane yesterday, We didn’t know the levees were going to break. We didn’t know the dams wouldn’t hold. We all were talking about that on Monday morning, that the levees were only built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. There’s batches of reports that say that. And you knew a 4 or 5 was comihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifng all weekend long. BROWN: I think we were all taken aback by the fact that the levees did break in so many places and caused such widespread devastation. And so we’re responding the best we can to help those people that are stuck in this ongoing disaster. So the new story is: that administration knew the levees would break but didn’t think it was going to cause so much devastation. How could the administration not know that the flooding of a major city would cause massive devastation?

It's then followed by :

In July 2004, just over one year ago, FEMA held a five-day exercise at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge to develop joint response plans for a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana. In the staged scenario developed by FEMA, a fictitious “Hurricane Pam” brought 120-mph winds and storms that “topped levees in the New Orleans area.” “More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune covered the FEMA exercise and reported that officials focused on six major issues. One of which was: “Removing floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.” The hypothetical specifically posited the following: The water would be high enough in parts of New Orleans to top 17-foot levees, including some along Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, Zileski said. Some of the water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain would flow through a gap in the hurricane levee in St. Charles Parish, flow across land to the Mississippi River levee and be funneled south into Jefferson and Orleans parishes. The fact is that FEMA anticipated the effects of Hurricane Katrina over a year before it actually hit the Gulf Coast region. There should be no excuse for the Bush administration’s incompetent management of the hurricane recovery efforts to date.

It can be said that all my angry griping about what's been going on--and how the BushCo administration and its federal departmental mismanagment and neglect--is akin to Monday morning quarterbacking. But I think it's important to call out BushCo on its incompetence now, rather than wait months or a year afterward for a reassessment. If the response to the tragedy of the World Trade Towers had been this badly mismanaged back in 2001, I and many others would have called bullshit quite easily. But it was handled gracefully and with a laser beam focus. And as Mrs. F pointed out last night, as we became whirling dervishes of anger and frustration while discussing the day's news, the city of New York and its surrounding communities still had a good deal of infrastructure available to take part in the search/rescue as well as delivery of food and shelter. New Orleans and the smaller towns and cities on the Gulf Coast have far diminished infrastructure, if any at all any more, so they needed the help from the outside--i.e., the National Guard and Army--from the get-go.

The mainstream press gave BushCo a pass during the run-up to the Iraq war (and for many, many months afterward), when it was obvious to much of the liberal and alternative press that there were serious questions about the truth behind the administration's reasoning for war. BushCo does not deserve to get a pass now. There needs to be accountability from an administration (and the individuals within it) that has lived its life, before coming to power and after accessing it, shirking accountability and responsibility--and attacking those whose public lives are accountably honorable.