Federal Government fails Hurricane Katrina victims
By Jason Hochstatter
IV Leader Staff
I have a problem with the
federal government’s failure to adequately help the people in New Orleans
quickly.
I have heard all kinds of excuses. I have heard that they did
not expect that it would be this bad, that the real problem was that the
first-responders were victims, among other things.
That would be all fine and good, except that the officials in
charge, like FEMA, should have been expecting something like this to happen.
Katrina was not some kind of sudden super-storm that no one
could have predicted. Katrina was an eventuality.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock admitted that the
government had known that the levee system would never hold against a hurricane
more powerful than Category 3.
They should have known that there would be serious trouble as
soon as the storm had reached Category 3, and appropriate preparations should
have been made.
It took five days for food, drinkable water, and medicine to
reach the people in New Orleans. A person can’t live more than a few days
without drinking water.
It is possible to get from one corner of this country to the
other in less than a day, so why did it take five for the food and water to get
to New Orleans?
Additionally, claims made by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
that the Iraq war has not hindered rescue efforts are not true.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and the Iraq
war took a chunk out of efforts to protect New Orleans against flooding.
The Southeast Louisiana, Orleans Parish Flood Control
Project, or SELA, was created in 1996 to work on projects that would help
minimize flood damage. Unfortunately, it seems that much of their budget went
missing around 2003.
An official for emergency management in that area told the
Times-Picayune outright that most of that money was going to homeland security
and the war in Iraq.
This hurricane has truly been a disaster of inept
proportions.