"The plan was to let them die." -- Jeff Masters on Wunderground blog

[StefanX]

http://www.weatherunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=94&tstamp=200509

A horror unimagined by anyone, except by every hurricane scientist and government emergency management official for the past forty years and more. It was a certainty that New Orleans would suffer a catastrophe like this. Every 70 years, on average, the central Gulf Coast has a Category 4 or 5 hurricane pass within 80 miles of a given point. Sometimes you get lucky--for a while. New Orleans had gone over 150 years without a strike by a hurricane capable of overwhelming the levees. Sometimes you get unlucky. There's no guarantee that New Orleans won't get hit by another major hurricane this year. We are in the midst of an extraordinary period of hurricane activity, the likes of which has not been seen in recorded history.

The poor people don't make big campaign contributions, and those big campaign contributions are vital to getting elected. In all of the Congressional and Presidential races held over the past ten years, over 90% were won by the candidate that raised the most money.

So there was little effort given to formulate a plan to evacuate the 100,000 poor residents of New Orleans with no transportation of their own for a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. To do so would have cost tens of millions of dollars, money that neither the city, nor the state, nor the federal government was willing to spend. Why spend money that would be wasted on a bunch of poor people? The money was better spent on projects to please the politicians' wealthy campaign contributors. So the plan was to let them die. And they died, as we experts all knew they would. Huge numbers of them. And they keep dying, still. We don't know how many. Since the plan was to let them die, the city of New Orleans made sure they had a good supply of body bags on hand.

[iamjoy]

1. I Don't Think It Goes That Far

I don't think the plan was deliberately to let them die, as in, the government wanted them to die. I think they just didn't care enough to save them. A subtle difference.

The federal government didn't want to spend the money to improve the levees. The local and state government didn't want to spend the money on the evacuation. If the storm didn't hit NOLA they would look like chumps for "wasting" tax payer dollars.

So, they took the attitude, lets save our money - what is the worst case scenario? Well, the city will flood and potentially every one in it will die. But hey, 80% of the city should be able to evacuate. As for the other 20% :shrug: We can deal with those odds.

Everyone took their chances in this. As usual, it is the poorest who suffer the most.

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. Wrong.

There is nothing subtle about the difference.

And the multi-agency federal obstructionism, causing all the delays and all the slaughter, and possibly still in progress, has been unambiguously proactive. The time-lines of the federal embargos imposed on the various rescue agencies and on the timely international offers of assistance, are copiously logged in some detail on this board.