Michael D. Brown (2) (1954–)
Autore di Deadly Indifference: Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Disease Pandemics and the Failed Politics of Disasters
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Opere di Michael D. Brown
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome legale
- Brown, Michael DeWayne
- Data di nascita
- 1954
- Sesso
- male
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 1
- Utenti
- 44
- Popolarità
- #346,250
- Voto
- 2.9
- Recensioni
- 17
- ISBN
- 6
Bearing the brunt of Brown’s abuse are New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, both for their ignorance regarding FEMA’s abilities and their unwillingness to take the lead in emergency readiness, what Brown refers to as “NIMBI” tactics (Not In My Best Interest). According to Brown, Blanco, seeing that New Orleans was to bear the brunt of the storm, passed the buck on evacuation decisions to Nagin who, unwilling to risk the political fallout of prematurely ordering an evacuation, at first declared a voluntary evacuation of the city’s low-lying wards, only ordering a mandatory evacuation once the storm was less than a day away. One particularly effective, though unsourced charge is that Nagin was still meeting with the city’s legal counsel less than twenty hours before Katrina hit, trying to determine the city’s legal liability if a mandatory evacuation was ordered.
Further compounding the lack of preparation was a misunderstanding of what FEMA could do. FEMA could not control the National Guard. FEMA could not send first responders into the storm nor could they provide supplies. They could pay for them, certainly, but it was the responsibility of local officials to procure buses for evacuation, which neither Blanco nor Nagin did. Then, the city of New Orleans began funneling people to the Superdome and convention center without provisioning any food, water, or supplies to care for them, apparently assuming that such supplies would just magically appear from federal coffers.
The most outrageous anecdotes are left for the political grandstanding that followed the storm. Brown tells of following Governor Blanco and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu through what was supposed to be a tour of the hardest-hit areas. Instead, Blanco drove them to relatively unaffected Jefferson Parish to do some politicking while Senator Landrieu co-opted a rescue helicopter to find her family at their summer home, ensuring they were okay. The most brutal assault, however, is left for Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, who went over Brown’s head to Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, diverting the USNS Comfort—a naval vessel reequipped for medical support and intended for New Orleans—to the Mississippi Coast, where it was not needed.
There is much blame to go around regarding the response to Hurricane Katrina. Brown’s is yet another voice eager to lay that blame on somebody’s shoulders other than his own. His account is a decidedly one-sided affair in which his own failures are usually the result of the misunderstandings and failings of others. But his larger argument, that political shortsightedness and opportunism can turn into “deadly indifference,” is worth considering and developing the means to counteract in the future.… (altro)