Friday, September 02, 2005

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After Andrew, we just got to work!

MSNBC - Hope is Fading

With the blame-game in full force, everybody is wondering how to get New Orleans back on the road to recovery.

I am amazed at the commentary of the “unknowing”, those who have no military/recovery or disaster assistance experience, commenting on the "lack of preparedness" the "lack of help", etc.,

The fact is that in disaster recovering there are steps you take, that are taken in order, and they are taken for a reason.

Hate to say this, but I know what I'm talking about - it's going to take time. Shut up, and get to work.

I survived and worked disaster relief during Andrew.

From this article here is a little background for perspective:

"Fifteen people were killed during the storm and another 25 later died of indirect causes.

Andrew demolished more than 25,000 homes and damaged another 100,000. It flattened the air base. Of the 1,176 mobile homes in Homestead, all but nine were destroyed.

Five days after the storm, Maj. Gen. Richard B. Griffits landed in Homestead with 23,000 troops, the biggest peacetime domestic military operation in U.S. history. The devastation stunned him.
"I had never seen a place completely leveled in all directions," Griffits later recalled. "There was a smell to it. A smell of utter destruction."

On SW 294th, every home was damaged, but the change went deeper. Andrew had plunged the survivors into a primitive world with no air conditioning, no microwaves, no TV to show them what was going on in the other neighborhoods smashed by the storm.

Gwendolyn Sherman, now 23, has vivid memories of those jittery, pitch-black nights. With no way to cool the house, "we left the doors open, so I was nervous with all the looting that was going on."

When George Brown spotted some thieves, he chased them away at gunpoint. "They didn't want to talk to Mr. Twelve Gauge," he said.

Sunrise brought the rumble of portable generators, the pounding of hammers and the constant whir of helicopters that scared the migrant workers who thought they were about to be strafed.

From above, the battered cul-de-sac seemed to blend in with all the other battered neighborhoods. Andrew caused an estimated $30-billion in damage and left a quarter-million people homeless.

In the first few days, no rescue agency sprang to action fast enough to help the storm's victims. People went days without water. Hungry residents queued up for hours for food that never arrived.

By the time donations began pouring in from around the country, the survivors were ready to snap. As Mary Herzog stood in a line for free clothing, people around her started fighting. Weary, she lay down in a pile of clothes.

"I said the hell with it, I'm just going to take a nap," she said. For some victims, the prospect of the long struggle ahead was too much to bear."


While the MSM plays to the “Sensational – If it bleeds it leads” mantra and blames everybody and everything, the point is that “It happened”. I don’t care what kind of planning you do, what kind of exercises, when Mother Nature comes calling, she is going to do as she pleases.

One of the problems I see right off the bat – and living through Andrew I was guilty of it as well, is the thinking that “This shouldn’t happen here, to us!”

How silly, "Why not you?" "What makes US so special"?

This kind of devastation isn’t new or unknown. It happens all the time – all year long in other places, all around the world and in countries many of us can't even begin to pronounce. There are stories of destruction nearly every day that generally going unnoticed by the MSM.

But we think somehow, we’re immune to this, or ‘special’ and it shouldn’t happen to us.

But it did. It happened, it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better – so instead of bitching and moaning and blaming – how about let’s just get to work and rebuild.

That’s what we did after Andrew. It took five days to get potable water to drink, and food to eat. But we survived, South Florida rebuilt, and we moved on. But we didn’t do it because we complained about the fact it did happen, but when we decided to “grow up” and got to work in spite of it.

UPDATE:

Left wing nutbags like Eleanor Cliff use tragedy to bash Bush, calling the reponse thus far a "collossal failure of leadership". Granted, it was inadequate - but colossal?

Yet showing collassal ignorance Eleanor (something she made famous), she writes:

"Bush’s comment that nobody thought the levees in New Orleans would break is false, and he will regret those words just as Condoleezza Rice did her comment that nobody could imagine a plane flying into a building like a missile."

Eleanor, in the words of my dear departed Mother, is an ass.

Like a lot of asses we've seen come out of the wood work today, Democrats especially "howling" about the "Republican" response. Yet, give me one TV pic or Feed taken today that showed Pelosi, Nadler, Kennedy or any other loudmouth handing out water or hugging a victim. Come on... just one.

You know, I shouldn't say this, but I do believe that some Democrats and those of the rabid right relish disasters like this - so long as they can get a cheap shot or two at republicans. What a pathetic and sorry bunch they are.

No one could have foreseen the destruction this storm wrought.

Witness the NY Times:

"The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow.

They also said that evacuation measures were inadequate, leaving far too many city residents behind to suffer severe hardships and, in some cases, join marauding gangs."

No one who knows anything about the levees expected they would be breached - no one, even Eleanor's beloved Bill Clinton made that clear on a CNN interview.

More on this at Cpt Ed's and Especially Michelle Malkin.

Secondly, the reason you see such chaos in the Superdome is because some residents who "chose" to stay in the city after being ordered to leave thus to their peril they ignored the order to evacuate. They made the decision - their decision to "weather the storm". Bad decision. But in life, you make choices, "welcome to the consequences of your actions."

It's also sad that we constantly see this resistance by some in the populace during pending disaster who refuse to follow the warnings. As former law enforcement working in Florida I saw this time and time again.

People are warned, "Get out" But they don't, so they suffer. They suffer the consequence of their choice not to comply.

That's not the fault of the Government when they do. In Florida, especially in Broward County when you refuse to evacuate, you are not forced, you are asked to sign a form so that your next of kin can be notified if you don't survive.

Yes, you also had the poor, the sick, the old and affirmed who couldn't evacuate. Yet what Eleanor and the MSM won't tell you is that it is known that the City had literally hundreds of buses within a mile of the Superdome that were to be used specifically for the purpose of evacuating the poor and infirmed, yet they were left unused. A question the Mayor and the city leadership should be asking themselves instead of blaming the Government is "Why in the hell didn't we use the buses?"

But none of that means anything to the asses on the left like Eleanor who will continue spew their ignorance, play their blame game - use any excuse they can find - even a major disaster to take a partisan swipe at the President of the United States. They will continue this for the weeks and months to come. None of which will be of any help.

Like the Bible says, They are like "banging symbols", clanging only to hear the noise they make.

The rest of us will be getting to work - that's the only thing that matters now. Later, will come the examination of how things unfolded - now is not the time.

UPDATE II: From J. Drummond over at Polipundit, who has put together a timeline titled, "How we got here", which shows that the response is not as slow as the media would have us believe. For all those like Eleanor who want to find fault and lay blame, how about reading the timeline of what really happened, then compare it to the reporting you're seeing from the MSM, and then ask yourself - "Are these guys serious?"

UPDATE III: Want to see what happens when people stop whinning and start DOING? Read here!

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