Timeline Outlining Fate of FEMA Under Bush Admin & Flood Control in NOLA

[beetbox]

CHRONOLOGY....Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration. Read it and weep:

•
January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.

• April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

• 2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

• December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy and former college roommate, Michael Brown, who has no previous experience in disaster management and was fired from his previous job for mismanagement.

• March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.

• 2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.

• Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

• June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

• June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

• August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.


So: A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php

[barbaraann]

1. Mitch Daniels:

Parker, in the magazine's on-line edition at www.govexec.com, said he showed Daniels two pieces of steel, one new and one corroded, that had been in a Mississippi lock for 30 years.

"I said, 'Mitch, it doesn't matter if a terrorist blows the lock up or if it falls down because it disintegrates. Either way it's the same effect, and if we let it fall down, we have only ourselves to blame,' " Parker said. "It made no impact on him whatsoever."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050903/NEWS01/509030383

[Spazito]

2. Thanks for this, bookmarked

*

[havocmom]

3. BUSHCO didn't make Katrina, but they assured the disaster that happened

when the levee broke and a horse breeder pretended to run FEMA = LIHOP

[havocmom]

4. "It's the Bush administration in a nutshell." Recommended!

Thanks for the timeline. Very helpful in getting the picture out to those who have trouble connecting dots.

[seemslikeadream]

5. Looks like MIHOP to me

The response, that is

:shrug:

[beetbox]

6. READ THIS ARTICLE

I just posted this in GD. 16 pages long. The details of the bureaucratic savagery bringing us to this slaughter. Privatization.



Among emergency specialists, "mitigation"--the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters--is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now, communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

As a result, some state and local emergency managers say, it's become more difficult to get the equipment and funds they need to most effectively deal with disasters. In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1999's Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer.

Consequently, the residents of these and other disaster-prone states will find the government less able to help them when help is needed most, and both states and the federal government will be forced to shoulder more recovery costs after disasters strike.

<>

"Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded," he wrote. "Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors."

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2004-09-22/cover.html

[beetbox]

7. And the result

The dispossessed of New Orleans tell of their medieval nightmare

By David Usborne inside the Houston Astrodome

Published: 04 September 2005


A brand new city has arisen inside the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, population 15,000. Not the best address in America - they gave it its own postal code, 77230 - but it offers some benefits to its residents. It is almost clean, more or less safe and entirely dry. No longer are these people clinging to the roofs of houses above swirling waters or squatting on elevated roadways in the sun unsure if they will live or die.

And, happily, they are no longer cowering in the New Orleans Superdome, a place that turned mad with murders, rapes, suicide, abortions and the ammonia fumes of human waste. Or imprisoned in the convention centre without food or water, in the company of corpses. Those two places of sanctuary became hell-holes of a kind unthinkable in the United States of America. Until last week.

"You don't want to know what it was like. We had killings, abortions, babies born, toilets stacked up and it was hot, hot, hot." Pressed for details, she doesn't hesitate. She speaks of two girls being raped and murdered inside the dome, one aged seven. The other was 16 and was "slit open" by a knife after she was raped in the woman's bathroom, she says. Much of what she tells is similarly described by several other dome evacuees. A boy aged seven was also raped by two men. (Mr Allen says the rapist was chased down by other men and beaten before being handed over to the soldiers. He claims they also beat him and then threw him from a terrace outside the Superdome to the asphalt, killing him.)

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310194.ece