Are You Safer?
As we approach the 4 year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I have one question, to borrow a turn of phrase from former President Reagan: Are you safer now than 4 years ago?
We’re fighting a war in Iraq that we’re told is to make us safer. We have to take our shoes off in airport screenings. We have color-coded alert levels. We have a whole new federal department, the Department of Homeland Security. We re-elected a “war president.” But are you safer?
The federal reaction to the hurricane disaster certainly isn’t inspiring any confidence in me. Why wasn’t FEMA already deployed? Why weren’t hospital ships and ships with supplies already waiting in the Gulf, ready to move in right behind the hurricane, as former FEMA director James Lee Witt suggested should have been done? We knew this was a big hurricane, and we knew it would result in disaster somewhere on the Gulf, whether New Orleans was the epicenter or not.
And in New Orleans, if the plan for dealing with a hurricane was evacuation rather than shelter, why wasn’t there a bus convoy already lined up and ready to go last Sunday? What good is a mandatory evacuation order, if people don’t have the resources to evacuate?
True, some people stayed because they chose to stay. But how do you evacuate if you’re poor? What do you do if you don’t have a car, can’t afford a hotel room out of town, don’t have friends or relatives to take you in? And what about the people who did evacuate, who have the resources to sustain that for a couple of days; how many of them have the resources to stay evacuated for a month or longer? What happens to them?
We’re hearing a lot about an early 2001 FEMA memo that laid out the three most likely catastrophes to strike the US: a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Such warnings and predictions seemed to be routinely ignored by the Bush administration. When the scenarios then come true, what we hear from this administration is that no one could have predicted them.
Our President is quoted on TV as saying, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breaching of the levees.” Mr. President, one of your own federal agencies did just that, and you cut their budget. It doesn’t take a degree in civil engineering to anticipate the breaching of the levees. Any levee can and will be breached; in the long run, water always wins. The levees in New Orleans were only designed to cope with at best a Category 3 hurricane; that’s like building a bridge in San Francisco only designed to deal with a magnitude 6 earthquake. Anybody who thinks about it more than two seconds can anticipate the breaching of the levees.
We’re running a federal deficit, and what are we getting for all that debt? No investment in infrastructure, that’s clear. Despite the massive amounts of money being spent on the war in Iraq, not enough of it seems to actually make it to the troops, as we continue to hear about ill-equipped soldiers and insufficient health-care resources for returning disabled soldiers. Repaying the donors seems to be the highest priority for government money in this administration.
One thing we know for sure, the money we’re borrowing hasn’t gone to FEMA to prepare for those three catastrophes. So I’m back to my first question: Are you safer now than 4 years ago?
We’re fighting a war in Iraq that we’re told is to make us safer. We have to take our shoes off in airport screenings. We have color-coded alert levels. We have a whole new federal department, the Department of Homeland Security. We re-elected a “war president.” But are you safer?
The federal reaction to the hurricane disaster certainly isn’t inspiring any confidence in me. Why wasn’t FEMA already deployed? Why weren’t hospital ships and ships with supplies already waiting in the Gulf, ready to move in right behind the hurricane, as former FEMA director James Lee Witt suggested should have been done? We knew this was a big hurricane, and we knew it would result in disaster somewhere on the Gulf, whether New Orleans was the epicenter or not.
And in New Orleans, if the plan for dealing with a hurricane was evacuation rather than shelter, why wasn’t there a bus convoy already lined up and ready to go last Sunday? What good is a mandatory evacuation order, if people don’t have the resources to evacuate?
True, some people stayed because they chose to stay. But how do you evacuate if you’re poor? What do you do if you don’t have a car, can’t afford a hotel room out of town, don’t have friends or relatives to take you in? And what about the people who did evacuate, who have the resources to sustain that for a couple of days; how many of them have the resources to stay evacuated for a month or longer? What happens to them?
We’re hearing a lot about an early 2001 FEMA memo that laid out the three most likely catastrophes to strike the US: a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Such warnings and predictions seemed to be routinely ignored by the Bush administration. When the scenarios then come true, what we hear from this administration is that no one could have predicted them.
Our President is quoted on TV as saying, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breaching of the levees.” Mr. President, one of your own federal agencies did just that, and you cut their budget. It doesn’t take a degree in civil engineering to anticipate the breaching of the levees. Any levee can and will be breached; in the long run, water always wins. The levees in New Orleans were only designed to cope with at best a Category 3 hurricane; that’s like building a bridge in San Francisco only designed to deal with a magnitude 6 earthquake. Anybody who thinks about it more than two seconds can anticipate the breaching of the levees.
We’re running a federal deficit, and what are we getting for all that debt? No investment in infrastructure, that’s clear. Despite the massive amounts of money being spent on the war in Iraq, not enough of it seems to actually make it to the troops, as we continue to hear about ill-equipped soldiers and insufficient health-care resources for returning disabled soldiers. Repaying the donors seems to be the highest priority for government money in this administration.
One thing we know for sure, the money we’re borrowing hasn’t gone to FEMA to prepare for those three catastrophes. So I’m back to my first question: Are you safer now than 4 years ago?
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