No Confidence

John Barry has been on my mind a lot lately. He wrote an amazing book about the 1927 Mississippi River flood, called Rising Tide. It's an extraordinary look at that flood from all sorts of angles: political, social, racial, scientific. I read it about 7 years ago, and was riveted. It's especially timely today in the wake of the destruction of Katrina.

But that's not the only book Mr. Barry has written, and another book he wrote has also been on my mind as I watch the bungled response to Katrina, and as more stories emerge of cronyism and wasted resources. Mr. Barry wrote The Great Influenza, which is about the 1918 influenza pandemic. In it, he describes how it is that the influenza virus can change from a relatively mild illness to a killer, how it moves from animals to humans, and how it changes and adapts, so that previous exposure doesn't necessarily protect you from the now modified virus.

Why is this book on my mind? Avian flu. Avian flu is deadly; the death rate for humans infected with avian flu is 50%. Right now, the avian flu virus is not transmittable between humans; if someone has contracted avian flu through contact with diseased poultry, they are not contagious to other humans at this point. But as Mr. Barry explained, that can change, easily. Avian flu could combine with a less lethal, but human-to-human transmissable flu virus, resulting in a deadly, contagious flu virus.

It has been 36 years since the last influenza pandemic, the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69. That pandemic was caused by a virus that contained a combination of human virus and avian virus, and killed 34,000 people in the US. How bad would a pandemic be now? No one really knows, because it depends on many factors. But, unlike other natural disasters, flu pandemics last months, not days. First responders and medical workers would be at high risk of contracting the virus, thus limiting resources for treating the ill. Hospitals could be swamped, without nearly enough resources to care for the patients.

The federal government does have a plan for dealing with an influenza pandemic, but there was a plan for dealing with a hurricane in New Orleans, too. The good news is, at least the guy in charge of the agency that developed the plan doesn't seem to be a political hack. The National Vaccine Program Office, headed by Bruce Gellin, is responsible for the plan. Gellin is a doctor who has previously devised vaccination programs for developing countries.

The NVPO isn't responsible for the implementation of the whole plan, though. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for the non-medical aspects, while Health and Human Services is responsible for the medical response. HHS's activities will be coordinated by the Assistant Secretary for Public Health Emergency Preparedness, Stewart Simonson. Simonson is a political appointee; he's a lawyer, with no background or prior experience in health care noted in his bio. This does not mean that Simonson is incompetent or unfit, but in light of the FEMA fiasco, I am concerned. It's hard for me to have confidence at this point in someone whose resume consists mostly of political appointee jobs.

I believe a pandemic is coming; it's just a matter of time. I think it's more likely than bioterrorism, and more likely to have a more devastating impact. I wish I could say I had confidence in the ability of this administration to deal with this impending threat.

Truly Frightening

The Bush administration is trying to shift blame for the New Orleans tragedy onto local and state authorities. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether that is justified or not, what is truly frightening to me are the stories coming out of resources mobilized and ready to help, but not activated.

For days, I've been wondering why there weren't ships in the Gulf, ready to move in right behind the hurricane. Turns out there was one: the USS Bataan. It was out in the Gulf, because of Katrina, and moved in right behind it. And sat there, because there were no orders to do anything.

There were National Guard from other states ready to deploy; they, too, were waiting on Washington. The resources were there and ready to go; what was lacking was leadership.

Why wasn't anybody in Washington saying "go"? Why, they were all on vacation. It was August, after all, and August has always been vacation month in Washington. Good thing 9/11 didn't happen on 8/11.

Rove and company can spin all they want, they can try to blame the victims, the locals, and Saddam Hussein, but that doesn't change the fundamental truth of what happened here. Either Bush and this administration didn't care about what happened to poor, black New Orleans residents in a non-election year, or they were criminally negligent. Our military was ready to go; our Commander-in-Chief was asleep at the wheel.

Anger

This week, watching what has unfolded in New Orleans, I've felt such overwhelming anger. I know I'm not alone in that. I had to stop watching TV news a few days ago; I just couldn't watch anymore. It's not just watching people suffer, it's watching people suffer because of utter stupidity and incompetence that's doing me in.

This is what we get with an MBA President? It's one thing that I disagree with this administration on almost every substantive issue, but it's another to watch them destroy my country with their complete incompetence. As Casey Stengel once lamented, can't anyone here play this game?

Maybe that's the problem; it's only a game to them. It's only about power, not governing. It's about reaching and hanging onto power, so you can suck money out of the system. What we've seen this week is banana republic-level incompetence; normally, you'd have to have massive corruption to achieve this level of ineptitude. Maybe that's what we have; Michael Brown sure didn't get his job based on his sterling credentials in emergency response.

I'm angry because I hear my President claim that no one anticipated the levees being breached. I hear the head of Homeland Security claim that the problem is we had two disasters together, like flooding is something unusual after a hurricane. And can we change the name of that department now? From the moment I heard that name, I hated it; it has always conjured up an image of Nazi Germany for me. Now it's just an oxymoron.

I'm really angry because I don't know what to do about any of it. Bush will be president for three more years. The Republicans will control Congress for at least another year. I've donated money to the Red Cross. I've prayed. I've donated money to the Democrats, not because I think they have all the answers, but they're the best alternative I have. I've voted, and I'm represented in Congress by a Democratic congressman and two Democratic Senators, as well as a Democratic governor. None of that is enough; we're still spending billions for a war we can't win, and can't even say what winning is, and we can't even rescue our own citizens in a disaster we knew was coming.

There's a saying: first rate people hire first rate people, while second rate people hire third rate people. We've seen the hiring of this administration, and I think the verdict is pretty clear. Now they get to pick two Supreme Court Justices.

I'm angry. And I don't know what to do.

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?