Washington DC’s response to Hurricane Katrina 19 years ago today was very alienating to Louisianans. We’d seen the US show more concern and quicker support for countries all over the world than they showed for us. But Louisianans helped each other.
Although helicopters and troops arrived before long, the bulk of the needed provisions didn’t arrive until several days after the event. Contrast this with Washington DC sending aid to Pakistan a single day after a major earthquake. We saw that the federal government was incompetent, unworthy of respect, and felt no urgency about our crisis as our situation descended to Third-World conditions. Part of the delay is explained by Washington DC requiring many volunteers, before they were allowed to help, to travel to Atlanta to attend training on diversity, sexual harassment, and the “history of FEMA.”
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, only positioned 3 days’ worth of supplies in New Orleans before the hurricane made landfall, leading to people dying of thirst. But as FEMA didn’t realize how many New Orleans residents don’t have cars or another means of evacuation, the 3-days’ worth was soon gone.
Worse than this, forces under US Army General Honoré confiscated guns from law-abiding citizens when citizens needed them most, as criminality skyrocketed due to the lack of law enforcement. The states were quite explicit that they wouldn’t have agreed to the US Constitution if the Bill of Rights, including the 2nd Amendment, were not to be included. Louisianans were shocked to see Washington DC ignore this foundational principle of Western society: the right of self defense. 40% of Louisiana’s National Guard was deployed on Washington DC’s nation-building misadventure in Iraq when Katrina hit, which was peak hurricane season, and the National Guard bureau in DC delayed by 48 hours the governor’s requests for other states’ Guards.
For this reason, DC’s troops appeared to be the occupying force of a foreign enemy. Actually there’s a second reason: DC invited NATO partners, foreign countries such as Germany, to send their troops to Louisiana to gain experience in peace keeping in a lawless environment. Some of them recklessly aimed their weapons at citizens at close range, just for the fun of it, or as a show of superiority. DC also hired private mercenaries, such as Blackwater, to guard priority FEMA sites. They came down with a heavy hand.
FEMA’s role is to coordinate, organize, and provide logistics for state officials and locals to do the work of providing aid, and later recovery. The problem is that the one thing FEMA is supposed to provide, organization, was completely absent. Louisiana would have been better off if Louisiana had known ahead of time that FEMA would not provide adequate coordination. New Orleans’s emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert blamed the inadequate response on FEMA: “This is not a FEMA operation. I haven’t seen a single FEMA guy”, he said. “FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.”
The FEMA aid that taxpayers pay for was dwarfed by the aid provided by churches, private individuals, NGO’s, and state & local government. But the federal delays caused death to thirst, exhaustion, and crime.
When it came time for rebuilding, Washington DC’s aid was wasted on corruption: inflated contract awarded to friends and financial allies.
Some argue that Louisiana benefits from being in the Union because of FEMA assistance. But subsidies combined don’t come close to paying for the way DC holds back our economy through regulation, including our oil & gas industry.
What do we do about it now?
Louisianans understand that no one cares about them as much as fellow citizens of Louisiana. We helped each other. The best people to take care of Louisiana are Louisianans. We prefer to keep our taxes in-state. That may be why 50% of Louisianans told a top-rated pollster that they prefer Louisiana be a self-governing and independent state. You can help this become a reality by joining Free Louisiana.
For more of FEMA’s outrages, read the rest of this article, which is just an excerpt from Wikipedia:
FEMA also interfered in the Astor Hotel’s plans to hire 10 buses to carry approximately 500 guests to higher ground. Federal officials commandeered the buses, and told the guests to join thousands of other evacuees at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.[37] In other instances of FEMA asserting its authority to only ultimately make things worse, FEMA officials turned away three Wal-Mart trailer trucks loaded with water, prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the Jefferson Parish emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA.[38] The Wal-Mart delivery had actually been turned away a week earlier, on Sunday, August 28, before the hurricane struck. A caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor-trailers was reported in New Orleans by September 1.[39] Additionally, more than 50 civilian aircraft responding to separate requests for evacuations from hospitals and other agencies swarmed to the area a day after Katrina hit, but FEMA blocked their efforts. Aircraft operators complained that FEMA waved off a number of evacuation attempts, saying the rescuers were not authorized. “Many planes and helicopters simply sat idle,” said Thomas Judge, president of the Assn. of Air Medical Services.[40]
It was also reported that FEMA replaced the hospital identification bracelets on some patients being evacuated or transferred with FEMA ID bracelets, causing hospital personnel to lose track of their patients. One hospital CEO stated that three months after the storm, the hospital staff still could not locate some of their patients who had been evacuated.[41]
Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), was particularly critical of FEMA’s efforts in a statement: “[T]he U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront, but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims—far more efficiently than buses—FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment, and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency…
The New York Times reported that 91,000 tons of ice ordered by FEMA at a cost of over $100 million and intended for hospitals and food storage for relief efforts never made it to the disaster area. Federally contracted truck drivers instead received orders from FEMA to deliver the ice to government rented storage facilities around the country, as far north as Maine. In testimony to a House panel, FEMA director Michael D. Brown stated that “I don’t think that’s a federal government responsibility to provide ice to keep my hamburger meat in my freezer or refrigerator fresh.”[43] This ice problem recurred later in Texas multiple times.
In a September 15, 2005 New York Times opinion column about the privately-owned Methodist Hospital in New Orleans, Bob Herbert wrote, “Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at the airport by FEMA.”[44]
A September 16, 2005 CNN article about Chalmette Medical Center stated, “Doctors eager to help sick and injured evacuees were handed mops by federal officials who expressed concern about legal liability … And so they mopped, while people died around them.”[45]
