WHAT THE FUCK

[fluffy]

WHAT THE FUCK

WHAT THE FUCK

WHAT THE FUCK

<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/26 ... /683">WHAT. THE. FUCK.</a>

[fluffy]

But seriously. What the fuck?!

[Future Boy]

Rove was all, "Mikey, baby, you kinda screwed up in New Orleans there, so we really need to have you replaced as head of FEMA. I mean, I can let a few blackies die, but I can't just totally disregard that hellhole of a city. So, you step down from FEMA, saying that it's in everybody's best interest, which it is, and we'll replace you with that coastguard guy. Then, we'll just rehire you as a consultant to lead the investigation of how you fucked up in the first place. Now, listen, this is a win-win because not only will you make more money as a consultant, you don't actually have to discover anything in your investigation. You know, people just want to hear that these things are going on and they're happy. We'll just make up some complicated language about how everybody failed in wacky ways and it added up to catastrophe. You know, like there was nothing that anyone could have done different."

[mico saudad]

...(A terrifyingly believable rendition of a conversation that probably happened )...

[erik]

"Hey Brownie, here's some hush money so that you won't blab about how awful FEMA is. To cover up why we would give you all this extra money, we're going to call you a consultant."

[WeaselSlayer]

I think there was more dry-humping than that.

[NeilThrun]

Hes the perfect man for the job. Who else should evaluate the relief effort than the man who did it. I think he was kicked out too quickly, I doubt anyone really saw this coming. Don't say that he should have, hindsight biais is always too easy to get behind.

[fluffy]

Actually, lots of people saw this coming. Reports from the last several years have predicted that the levees in New Orleans could not withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and requested more federal funding to fix them (all denied, because that money had to go to Iraq and tax cuts for the rich <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ed ... x.htm">and building $500M worth of bridges in Alaska which all of 50 people would use instead of a perfectly-good ferry system</a>). FEMA had been totally reorganized after 9/11/01 with the reasoning that it could make the response faster to a crisis of this scale (when FEMA had been fine at responding to major crises before), and instead it just became a ginormous blame-game.

FEMA's procedures for dealing with things has become bureaucratic and asinine, what with only allowing people to request a grant check using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows or by mail, both ways only allowing people to provide their home address, which usually ceases to exist in the sorts of things which FEMA is called in to deal with.

FEMA <a href="http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/091 ... l">blocked surgeons and doctors</a> from trying to help people who were dying, because they didn't want to be open to litigation in case the people were saved but "not well enough" or whatever.

Nobody saw the particular hurricane coming, but his actions didn't exactly help to prevent it from causing the problems that it did. Obviously there's plenty of fuckuppery at <em>every</em> level here, but saying he couldn't see the hurricane coming is an excuse for him not seeing it coming is a huge cop-out -- <em>it was his fucking job</em> to prepare for these exact situations!

[fluffy]

"Sure, that broken lock you'd been asking me to fix for a year made it possible for someone to easily come into our home and steal everything, but how could anyone have seen that coming?"

Would that be a reasonable response to something on such a (relatively) small scale? No? Then why is it acceptable for this?!

[mkilly]

Hes the perfect man for the job. Who else should evaluate the relief effort than the man who did it.

People aren't good at evaluating themselves, they bring in bias. To use an analogy this is like having the foxes launch an investigation of what went wrong when a fox was assigned to guard the henhouse.

I think he was kicked out too quickly

He didn't get kicked out. He resigned.

[erik]

Hes the perfect man for the job. Who else should evaluate the relief effort than the man who did it. I think he was kicked out too quickly, I doubt anyone really saw this coming. Don't say that he should have, hindsight biais is always too easy to get behind.

So is talking about things that you know nothing about just a hobby, or do you get paid for it somehow?

[Denyer]

I think people in Alaska deserve bridges as much as everyone else.

[fluffy]

$500M for bridges which 50 people will use, when there's a perfectly-adequate ferry system which works just fine for their current commuter load, is pretty hard to justify, especially when those $500M could have gone to reinforcing the levees in New Orleans and saving <em>thousands</em> of lives.

[mico saudad]

I doubt anyone really saw this coming.

(= enormously incredibly so far from correct that I'm dumbfounded)

FEMA itself new it would happen in 2001!

___________________________

"KEEPING ITS HEAD ABOVE WATER
New Orleans faces doomsday scenario


By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Science Writer


New Orleans is sinking.
And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Mississippi River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city perilously close to disaster.
So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country.
The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all... (article continues)"

http://www.hurricane.lsu.edu/_in_the_news/houston.htm

Two out of three so far, looks like we're next out here...

[Mogosagatai]

See the thing is, they've known Nola was perilously close to disaster since 1927, when there <i>was</i> a terrible disaster, the Great Flood. They rebuilt the levees after that, but they knew they weren't strong enough to withstand a sufficiently large hurricane. And even though they slightly strengthened them over the years, they've always known it wasn't enough.

So the big question is, has the gov't been right, all these years (not just since 2001, since 1927) to withhold the money necessary to build the levees up to an almost completely unpenetrable strength? Mind you, this would cost billions of dollars, not $500M. Are thousands of lives worth billions of dollars? It's a calloused thing to ask, but there are other things that the gov't could be spending money on that improve or save many more lives than that. (I'm not saying they <i>do</i> spend it well--I don't really know about all that.)

Not to mention, the probability that a big disaster like this would hit New Orleans <i>at any particular time</i> has always been very, very low.

I'm just trying to offer some perpective on why the gov't wouldn't give Nola the necessary money, and on how they might not actually be complete blockheads (in this context, purely! I have no doubt that the collective mindset of the american gov't is wallow in idiocy).

[erik]

there are other things that the gov't could be spending money on that improve or save many more lives than that. (I'm not saying they <i>do</i> spend it well--I don't really know about all that.)

Yes, there are probably lots of things that the government <i>could</i> be spending billions of dollars on, but there are also billions upon billions of dollars <i>actually</i> being spent on things that have nothing to do with improving or saving lives. Some of that money could have been spent in New Orleans.

Not to mention, the probability that a big disaster like this would hit New Orleans <i>at any particular time</i> has always been very, very low.

The chances are very low that the next time I play roulette, my single bet will hit. If I was to play roulette from 1927 to 2005, chances would be very, very good that my number would hit at least once. Only looking at the immediate future when assessing risks is a blockhead thing to do.

[Mogosagatai]

Yes, there are probably lots of things that the government <i>could</i> be spending billions of dollars on, but there are also billions upon billions of dollars <i>actually</i> being spent on things that have nothing to do with improving or saving lives. Some of that money could have been spent in New Orleans.

Agreed.

The chances are very low that the next time I play roulette, my single bet will hit. If I was to play roulette from 1927 to 2005, chances would be very, very good that my number would hit at least once. Only looking at the immediate future when assessing risks is a blockhead thing to do.

If something is likely to happen about once over a period of, say, a hundred years, and the cost of repairing the damage is considerably less than the cost of preventing it, then why not just suck it up and get ready to take it? Of course, be sure and have a good emergency response system in place, like FEMA (yes yes, I know that they didn't <i>actually</i> have a good, or as good as it could have been, emergency response system set up--that's beside the point).

And <i>is</i> the cost of repair less than the cost of prevention, in this case? Monetarily, I think so. Does anybody know how much has been spent so far? I'd like to know. Of course, that says very little about repairing people's lives, but, well... This leads us back to the argument that the gov't could be improving or saving lives elsewhere, and moreso. Again, I'm not claiming that the gov't <i>does</i> do this, just that the people who make the decisions about giving money to Nola for levee improvement might have believed that they did or would.

I'm all trying to do here is put us in the place of those people, the decision-makers about the Nola levee situation. I'm not saying they made the right decision over all those years, because I honestly don't know. But I do know that a lot of people are being really quick to judge, when they don't quite understand the depth of the situation. And hindsight, like Neil said, is indeed very easy to get behind. Just consider that maybe the decision-makers had this hurricane in <i>fore</i>sight, and still made the decision not to give the money, because they thought (correctly or not) that there were more worthwhile places to spend it.

[erik]

If something is likely to happen about once over a period of, say, a hundred years, and the cost of repairing the damage is considerably less than the cost of preventing it, then why not just suck it up and get ready to take it? Of course, be sure and have a good emergency response system in place, like FEMA (yes yes, I know that they didn't <i>actually</i> have a good, or as good as it could have been, emergency response system set up--that's beside the point). And <i>is</i> the cost of repair less than the cost of prevention, in this case? Monetarily, I think so. Does anybody know how much has been spent so far? I'd like to know. Of course, that says very little about repairing people's lives, but, well... This leads us back to the argument that the gov't could be improving or saving lives elsewhere, and moreso. Again, I'm not claiming that the gov't <i>does</i> do this, just that the people who make the decisions about giving money to Nola for levee improvement might have believed that they did or would.

In this New York Times piece (use bugmenot), Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof New Orleans had this to say:

It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system, and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over...

Congress has already approved 62.3 billion dollars for Katrina aid, and estimates are as high as 200 billion as to how much money will be spent after everything is said and done. The price of reinforcing the levees is dwarfed by the price it will cost the American taxpayer to rebuild New Orleans up to a Disneyfied approximation of the actual city it once was.

The argument that the government could have been spending that 2.5 billion on hypothetical awesome things is meaningless. If they were spending 2.5 billion on cancer research or whatever, I doubt you'd find a person who would say to take the money from that part of the budget to pay for levee reinforcing. But hell, 500 million dollars for unnecesarry bridges? That's 20% of your budget right there. Money could have been found for this project that would not have jeopardized any other noble projects (real or hypothetical) that were already being funded.

[JonPorobil]

Actually, lots of people saw this coming. Reports from the last several years have predicted that the levees in New Orleans could not withstand a Category 3 hurricane, and requested more federal funding to fix them (all denied, because that money had to go to Iraq and tax cuts for the rich <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ed ... x.htm">and building $500M worth of bridges in Alaska which all of 50 people would use instead of a perfectly-good ferry system</a>). FEMA had been totally reorganized after 9/11/01 with the reasoning that it could make the response faster to a crisis of this scale (when FEMA had been fine at responding to major crises before), and instead it just became a ginormous blame-game.

FEMA's procedures for dealing with things has become bureaucratic and asinine, what with only allowing people to request a grant check using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows or by mail, both ways only allowing people to provide their home address, which usually ceases to exist in the sorts of things which FEMA is called in to deal with.

FEMA <a href="http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/091 ... l">blocked surgeons and doctors</a> from trying to help people who were dying, because they didn't want to be open to litigation in case the people were saved but "not well enough" or whatever.

Nobody saw the particular hurricane coming, but his actions didn't exactly help to prevent it from causing the problems that it did. Obviously there's plenty of fuckuppery at <em>every</em> level here, but saying he couldn't see the hurricane coming is an excuse for him not seeing it coming is a huge cop-out -- <em>it was his fucking job</em> to prepare for these exact situations!

Sure it was a misappropriation of funds, but the fact of the matter is that nobody - not Maureen Dowd (who wrote a scathing article complaining about the bridge), not Fluffy, and not even the people of New Orleans - nobody cared about the levees until they broke. And then it was all "Why'd we waste so much money on a bridge in Alaska when New Orleans needed levee funds?"

Because the "big one" had been so long overdue to hit New Orleans that we'd all stopped believing it would ever hit. Facts worthy of note: levee funding was not denied outright, it was slashed from a proposed $25 million down to about $5 million. Anyone with any business smarts is gonna ask for more than they need anyway. Also, even if the full $25 million had been granted and somehow miraculously all contributed in the end to actual levee reinforcement, it wouldn't have been able to stand the force of Katrina, which was a strong Cat-5 for most of its life, and was only demoted to a Cat-4 when it hit NOLA because it was in the midst of a reconstruction phase.

So in short, please please please don't get on a high horse about that frickin' Alaska bridge. Nobody cared until it turned out the money was needed elsewhere. And there are plenty of other fuck-ups to bitch and whine about, anyway.

[Egg]

As an interesting sidenote about appropriation...

The government, through its policy decisions, makes imlicit and sometimes explicit statements about the monetary value of individual human lives. Do you know what individual profession has been granted the highest value per life by US government policy? It's not politicians, which is a most common answer. It's astronauts.

Back in the day, there was actually an argument for sending them up and not figuring out a way to get them back (since that way usually costs exorbitant sums of money and we're only talking about a handful of people no matter how brilliant or highly trained they are). I think this is something they do in that movie Gattaca, but I'm not sure. Either way, that's just an interesting story to think about.

That NYT article does make a pretty clear case for the fact that funds were misappropriated since people studying the issue should have realized that the potential loss of productivity was so enormous and that Congress' immediate disaster relief response would be far greater than 2 and a half billion dollars. That's not so reliant on foresight since people can see how much disaster response regularly costs in areas as vulnerable as New Orleans or slightly less vulnerable on an annual basis.

[JonPorobil]

Egg, check your PMs.

[erik]

So in short, please please please don't get on a high horse about that frickin' Alaska bridge. Nobody cared until it turned out the money was needed elsewhere. And there are plenty of other fuck-ups to bitch and whine about, anyway.

Oh, this is so wrong. People have cared about it since the idea was first proposed. I heard about Alaskan politicians trying to get money for bridges for jobs for Alaskans a long time before Katrina hit, like over a year ago on "60 Minutes". People dislike waste. It wasn't like if Katrina never hit, then that bridge money would have been a wise use of that much money. $500,000,000 is ALWAYS needed elsewhere.