Originally posted by bigMoneyRacing:
Originally posted by Phil Rohtla:
This a lack of foresight, pure and simple.


Putting your town's residents in the Superdome after the President pleaded for an evac is a lack of foresight, as is not using the city's 300+ buses to evac the poor and disabled.


The point is that three levels of government (local, state, federal) must come together to solve issues and by definition the LOCAL government is the MOST KNOWELEDGEABLE of issues effecting the area. It is the responsibility of the local government to know what is best for their city, not the state and certainly not the feds. Local officials should be THE experts on their city--that is what they are paid to do. FEMA deserves criticism for the timeliness of their response to be sure but to absolve the local government while blaming the feds for a lack of foresight is comical.

The mayor of NOLA should, at THIS moment, be like the citizens of his city--UNEMPLOYED.



I don't disagree that the city and state have to share some of the blame. But that funding was cut beginning in 2003, IIRC. If that funding was in place, we *might* not be having this discussion right now. But then again, doomsayers have been warning of this for years.

Here is a decent precis of some of the issues. It's short, but effective:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1125834981511&DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes

And it is one thing for the New Orleans government to tell the federal government that they need the money, but another thing for the administration to listen. Even Bush is saying that the federal response is, to use his word, "unacceptable."

That said, get people into shelters, receiving medical attention, and finish the rebuilding effort before assigning any type of blame (I include myself in that statement). I think that task is better left to historians in the future, with the benefit of time and emotional distance.

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