Unbelievable! (Katrina related)

[Eric5273]

The more I read, the more I get fed up with the way our government hands out contracts..... To think they would give the contract to fix the evacuation plans to the same company that messed it up the first time....

Hurricane Expert Threatened For Pre-Katrina Warnings

by GREG PALAST

Monday, August 28. From New Orleans--Don't blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east.

It wasn't the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.
Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.

Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.

Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: no one can find it.

That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work.

I know, I worked on the hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume dossier.

Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago, by a company called "Innovative Emergency Management."

Weird thing about IEM: their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.

IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out.

Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM.

So I asked Dr. van Heerden what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.

"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses."

Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."

Van Heerden had other disturbing news. The Hurricane Center's computer models showed the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half too short.

After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.

He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response: the university's trustees threatened his job.

While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan.

An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team. That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it. When I asked IEM point-blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that."

Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.

Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached... They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center." Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.
It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. "The City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II. It would be more accurate to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot."

Should they come home? Rebuild? Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM.

[blondboinsd]

My dad actually went back and built homes in New Orleans and he said many of the poorer neighborhoods have returned

[Wagner]

The government is very much a buddy-buddy system, where if you know the right people, you can get anything you want.

Similar to Brownie (former head of FEMA) running an Equestrian center before running FEMA, yah those two are related.

[Thunder22]

Originally Posted by blondboinsd

My dad actually went back and built homes in New Orleans and he said many of the poorer neighborhoods have returned

huh? you must be joking....

[blondboinsd]

Originally Posted by gresch

huh? you must be joking....

Yeah from what he said, they went back for a week in April and built houses and I made a comment last week about all of it still destroyed and he said that wasn't true and that many people had returned

[Eric5273]

Originally Posted by blondboinsd

Yeah from what he said, they went back for a week in April and built houses and I made a comment last week about all of it still destroyed and he said that wasn't true and that many people had returned

They still haven't even finished searching all the wreckage. Just a few days ago they found 8 more bodies.

[6to]

Originally Posted by WagnerX5

The government is very much a buddy-buddy system, where if you know the right people, you can get anything you want.

Sounds a lot like all other Governments on planet Earth... Republican, Democrat, right-wing, left-wing, democracy, dictatorship, this is one common trait among all..(the ones I've come in contact with, and that I've read about, at least)

[Thunder22]

Originally Posted by blondboinsd

Yeah from what he said, they went back for a week in April and built houses and I made a comment last week about all of it still destroyed and he said that wasn't true and that many people had returned

He must be referring to a very specific and small part of the area because a vast majority of the area affected by the storm is still a serious mess.

[cmyX6go]

Small hijack....

Confetti everywhere.....

Gresch, you missed your 3000th post!

Signed -
The post count monitor

[blondboinsd]

Originally Posted by cmyX5go

Small hijack....

Confetti everywhere.....

Gresch, you missed your 3000th post!

Signed -
The post count monitor

Yay Good Job! On what you said: I have no idea where he was, I wasn't there, you may very well be right, I was looking at the before and after pics today and it doesn't look much different