I don't know... if I had a loved one drowned, rotting body in sewage... I don't want to see my grandmother like that front page of the NY times.

Coast Guard's Chief of Staff To Assist FEMA Head Brown

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 7, 2005

With Michael D. Brown, the embattled public face of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, taking harsh criticism for the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the secretary of homeland security this week assigned a top Coast Guard official to help bail him out.

Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard's chief of staff, was assigned on Monday to be Brown's deputy and to take over operational control of the search-and-rescue and recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast. The unprecedented task of coordinating the massive effort was handed off to a leader and expert who was described by colleagues as unflappable, engaging and intensely organized.

Allen is also familiar with the inner workings of the Department of Homeland Security, where the Coast Guard has landed alongside FEMA as one of the designated main protectors of the United States. Allen has been one of the primary shepherds of change at the Coast Guard since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has been praised for his ability to reach out to other agencies to develop "big-picture" approaches to homeland defense.

Retired Adm. James M. Loy, former commandant of the Coast Guard and former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, said yesterday that Allen has the experience to help steer the federal response to the Katrina catastrophe in the right direction after early shortfalls. When Loy was the Coast Guard chief of staff from 1996 to 1998, Allen was his resource director, and Loy said he "always brings a new idea per minute to the table as far as how to grapple with difficult situations."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...v=rss_politics

Brown is in so far over his head , he would need a glass plate installed to replace the skin over his abdominal wall just to see anything .

For most part , I would agree .....

But , what I would really hate to see is this scenario repeat itself in a few years because someone knew how to divert the attention of the people to some staged events made to bring joy joy happy thoughts .

WASHINGTON - Some 200 New Orleans school buses sit underwater in a parking lot, unused. That's enough to have evacuated at least 13,000 people. Why weren’t those buses sent street by street to pick up people before the storm?

A draft emergency plan, prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and obtained by NBC News, calls for "400 buses to ... evacuate victims." Yet those 200 buses were left in Katrina's path.

"That's a real tragedy that these resources weren't employed," said Greg Shaw, a disaster management expert at George Washington University," because it would have been good to get those people out of the city."

Tuesday, the mayor of New Orleans would not comment.

On the federal level, clearly the arrival of the military has helped. But why did it take so long?

Last Wednesday, an Army officer said the nation's elite rapid deployment group, the 82nd Airborne, had 3,500 soldiers and 30 helicopters ready to be in New Orleans within hours. Yet they arrived only on Labor Day.

Tuesday, the Pentagon was defensive.

"Not only was there no delay," said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, "I think we anticipated in most cases — not in all cases, but in most cases — the support that was required. And we were pushing support before we were formally asked for it."

A persistent unanswered question is, why didn’t the military just drop pallets of water to those stranded in various locations?

"This was an inexcusable failure of the government," said Gunnar J. Kuepper with the International Association of Emergency Managers.

One huge bottleneck in the evacuation — the New Orleans airport. Officials say flights were delayed while screeners and air marshals were flown in to comply with post-9/11 security requirements, and then further delayed because screening machines weren’t working. Finally, someone at Homeland Security signed an order to allow evacuees to be screened by hand.

So far, there are many more questions than official answers about the delays and failures on the state, local and federal levels that, critics say, made this catastrophe even worse.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9231926/

It's sickening. I don't know who deserves the blame for it, or who does not. I really don't know. At this point, I almost really don't even care anymore.

All I know that people died, and the police and national guard and regular troops were not there when we needed them the most. So more people died than had to.