Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I burried this one last night, but it’s definately worth reading. CNN has collected a sample of what is either complete ineptness or outright obfuscation By HLS director Chertoff and FEMA driector Brown. Here’s just a little:

Violence and civil unrest

Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.

CNN’s Chris Lawrence:Brown:I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.

Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital:We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.

From here and from talking to the police officers, they’re losingcontrol of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of thepolice stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, verystrong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street.

The federal response:

Brown:Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans,virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relativelywell.

Homeland Security Director Chertoff:Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the processof evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that areafflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performedmagnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormousresources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.

Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton:They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits andpieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seenthem. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 11:21 am and is filed under General, Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.