But Gulfport was still without help three days after the storm, and Warr's control over the situation was slipping. Looting broke out downtown. When Warr drove a utility vehicle down U.S. 90, he watched as his longtime family business, Warr's Men's Clothing, was ransacked.
Worst of all, the city was running out of fuel. Generators were about to fail, rescue vehicles were running out of gas. One local hospital radioed that it was on backup power and had no water, and that looters were circling.
Warr turned to his chief of police, Stephen T. Barnes. There was a private fuel transport vehicle -- Warr doesn't remember whose -- parked in a lot behind a chain-link fence. Warr had the lock cut. "Can we hot-wire it?" he asked.
A Republican mayor, in a Republican state is forced to steal to try to maintain order. Where was the support he was supposed to have gotten?
In the three weeks since the storm, Mississippians have in some ways felt as cut off as they did on the day it struck. Sen. Trent Lott (R) says Mississippians "are disenchanted" with the federal response in their state.
So when you hear somebody blaming the locals in New Orleans, please ask them why the screwed us response in Mississippi. The one big difference is, much of Louisianan was under 5-15 feet of water, and Mississippi had the advantage of being dry. In both cases, it is clear the response of the Bush administration was a abject failure.
UPDATE
From the LA Times, also in Mississippi.
Robert Williams tried to contact the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the county about removing two 60-foot pine trees that threatened his mother's home here.
No one responded, so Williams borrowed a chain saw and brought the trees down on his own.
After a while, the 32-year-old church janitor got through to FEMA. "They gave us a case number and said someone would be out as soon as possible," he said, standing beside the fallen trees, which crushed a utility shed. "We have no idea when that will be."
Half a mile away, James Meeks, 54, found a large portion of his mobile home's roof in a tree, crumpled like an accordion. Meeks' wife, Betty, 57, called FEMA to find out about emergency compensation.
"To be honest, it has taken FEMA quite a while to get back to us," she said. "I called them more than 10 days ago, and they said they would be right out. Nobody has come yet."
James Meeks hauled out a ladder and crafted a makeshift roof. He worked without electricity, which did not return to his neighborhood until two weeks after the hurricane.
The one piece of good luck for those is Mississippi is they were not underwater, if they had been they would have been able to do as much for themselves as they have.
For other tales of local response and FEMA's efforts, visit Badtux, for a very good collection.
8 comments:
In 1995, a heat wave hit Chicago for 5 days during Clinton's turm and killed over 700 people, mostly elderly, poor, and black. Clinton did nothing. Does anyone believe the liberal press anymore? What happened to unbiased reporting?
hhhh the untimate weapon of a uninformed republican.
Blame Clinton.
Just one real bit of trouble for you Mr(s) anonymous.
The heat wave was not a national disaster, check the FEMA web site.
Since it was not a national event, Clinton could do nothing about a response.
Katrina was named a national event by Bush, at the request of the Govs. 2 days prior to the storm hitting land.
At the point by federal law the response is a federal issue.
Nice try, but you fail in your effort at spin
Liberal Press?
See http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/43/deadline-finke.php
Mississippi was dry? Maybe parts of it.
"In Gulfport's Turkey Creek neighborhood, residents expect to fend for themselves, because that's what they have always done, ever since emancipated slaves established the inland community along a winding canal during Reconstruction. When flooding from Katrina reached the attics of the shotgun houses, some of which dated to the 1880s, the residents rescued each other. Two men filled air mattresses, threw them in a boat and began plucking the elderly from their roofs and floating them to safety." - from the article you linked.
FEMA's slow response is nothing new:
The Hurricane Floyd disaster was followed by what was judged by many to be a very slow Federal response. Fully three weeks after the storm hit Jesse Jackson complained to FEMA Director James Lee Witt on his CNN program Both Sides Now, "It seemed there was preparation for Hurricane Floyd, but then came Flood Floyd. Bridges are overwhelmed, levees are overwhelmed, whole town's under water . . . [it's] an awesome scene of tragedy. So there's a great misery index in North Carolina." Witt responded, "We're starting to move the camper trailers in, It's been so wet it's been difficult to get things in there, but now it's going to be moving very quickly. And I think you're going to see a -- I think the people there will see a big difference over within this next weekend."
Hurricane Floyd was in 1999, you know, under Clinton's watch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Floyd
Big Government is a Big Behomoth. It just can't move that fast.
Well, it can't move that fast *now*. However, the last time a city in America was destroyed by a natural disaster, government worked just fine. The disaster occurred at 5am. Within three hours, federal troops were on the scene and their commanding general said to the mayor of the city, sitting in the ruins of his city hall, "Mr. Mayor, we are at your disposal." By noon the city's hospitals had been evacuated to safety. By early afternoon the now-deputized troops had shot their first looter. By the end of the day, an urgent message had been sent to Washington D.C. and every tent and ration in the U.S. Army inventory was on the way.
That was 1906, and the city destroyed was San Francisco. This is 2005. We've come a long way in the past 100 years. The wrong way, that is.
- Badtux the History Penguin
we can also build some pretty swank hospitals in a short amount of time in iraq ...
e+
If you wish to change the subject, fine, but the point made was the Clinton's FEMA moved just as slowly, or slower, than Bush's.
Big Government never could move as fast as you say it responded to the SF earthquake if hampered as ours is by liability issues and a certain entitlement mindset. In 1906 the federal government was nowhere near as large as it is now, there was no FEMA, no welfare state, and the solution to those whose homes were destroyed by earthquake was a huge tent city.
FEMA was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, so a comparison with disaster response some seventy years before the agency existed is hardly a fair one.
I'm also not sure that was the last time an AMerican city was destroyed by a disaster:
Great Okeechobee Hurricane in Florida, 1928, estimated 2,500-plus dead
Great New England Hurricane, 1938, 720 dead
Tri-State Tornado in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, 1925, 695 dead, 2,000 injured, 15,000 homes destroyed, 19 communities suffered devastation. The small town of Parrish was destroyed and never rebuilt. Another town lost 40 percent of its structures to the tornado and another 30 percent to fires after the tornado.
Labor Day Hurricane that hit the Florida Keys, 1935, 405 dead
Err, *major* city. San Francisco in 1906 was a city of approximately 380,000 people, or roughly 100,000 fewer people than New Orleans was back in July. Yeah, small towns have been wiped off the map since then.
Finally: Anybody who refuses to act when people are DYING because of fear of getting sued is not an American. I don't know what they are -- scum, maybe, or anti-American terrorists -- but they are not Americans. An American, if he sees a man drowning, does not stop and ask whether he will get sued if he rescues that drowning that man. He does not stop and ask whether he has permission to save that drowning man. He simply does it. And if the result is that he gets sued or gets arrested, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, regardless of the consequences.
Of course, by-god MEN are rare nowdays. Mostly what you got nowdays is a bunch of pansies who've never worked a real job a day of their life, have never been up to their knees in mud in 35 degree weather burying conduit carrying signals to an oilfield wellhead, never pushed wheelbarrels full of gravel all day long in 100 degree heat, never done a damned thing except blather all their lives and think that's real. And those are our leaders. A bunch of pussy wimps, every single one of them. So it doesn't surprise me that not one of them had the guts to say "I'm gonna do what's necessary, and if someone sues me for it, let them." But that'd require being a by-god *MAN*, instead of a Bush administration official.
- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
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