Conflicting Accounts
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the...
Category: Uncategorized
Pride: Considered Harmful
America yesterday appealed for aid from the EU and Nato to help the hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the disaster … the US has asked for thousands of blankets, 500,000 prepared...
Economies of Scale
Some of the cities and states neighbouring New Orleans have warned that they are struggling to absorb the hundreds of thousands of exhausted refugees pouring in on buses, planes and trains in need of...
Where’s Dick?
[Cheney’s] spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, doesn’t call it vacation. “He’s working from Wyoming today,” McBride told me this morning. So what is his day like in Jackson? Any fly-fishing on the Snake River during...
She Likes To Push The Pram A Lot
Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, toured her home state, Alabama. She had been criticised for watching the Broadway musical Spamalot as New Orleans became swamped. On returning to Washington, she denied that the...
Promises To Keep
“The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming,...
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Defending the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur. But in fact, government officials, scientists and...
Pudding Basin
It isnt the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, its the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from...
Emergency Response
By Friday, these exhausted doctors, nurses and administrators were running one of just three fully functioning medical centers in the city … We are very disappointed, to be quite honest, in the federal and...
Poor Communications
“When the President’s travel details stop us from putting the helicopters in the air that will deliver help, we’ve got problems. When, after an hour and a half of waiting at the instructed location...