For days, federal and state authorities knew that an extremely violent storm was headed to one of the largest concentrations of poverty-stricken Americans in the country, living in an area known to be below sea level. Yet those authorities did absolutely nothing to get them out of harm’s way. Then, even after the extent of the devastation became obvious, it took the federal government more than a day to start mobilizing an effective response.
This may the single most catastrophic failure of our government to adequately protect its most vulnerable citizens. By Friday, it was obvious that a Category 5 storm was headed over very warm water directly for New Orleans; by Saturday, it was almost 100 percent certain that New Orleans was going to suffer a direct hit from a storm with sustained winds of 175 miles per hour (around a core more than 200 miles wide).
We also knew that tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people were going to be left behind in the evacuation, people with no transportation who were too poor and/or too sick to be able to leave. Federal and state authorities had plenty of time to order buses from cities all over the region to get those people out of New Orleans, but instead those people were left completely unprotected, right in the path of the storm.
We didn’t just fail to protect them; we then left them stranded in the filth and heat with no communication, no electricity, no drinking water, no sewage, and no way to get out. By Tuesday afternoon, real-time coverage on all of the major cable news networks clearly showed just how bad things were getting, and yet it took the government another 24 hours to fully respond. We knew for days that Katrina was coming, so why did it take so long for our government to provide an adequate, coordinated response?
Scott Tallal