Looting the Big Easy
In any plan, no matter how diligent the crafters, some details will be overlooked. The unforeseen will rear its ugly head and there will invariably be those demand vehemently WHY this is so?

I believe the decline in literacy, might be in part responsible for a lack of understanding of the concept known as "unforeseen".


One detail overlooked was, how DOES a Drug Addict get a fix during a Major Disaster. There appears to have been no contingency plan to address this issue.

New Orleans regrettably appears to be singularly vulnerable to this problem.

New Orleans teems with crime, and the NOPD can?t keep order on a good day. Former commissioner Richard Pennington brought New Orleans? crime rate down from its peak during the mid-1990s. But since Pennington?s departure, crime rates have soared, to ten times the national average. The NOPD might have hundreds of decent officers, but it has a well-deserved institutional image as corrupt, brutal, and incompetent.

Thousands of opportunistic vultures have looted stores all over the city, and shot in the head one police officer who tried to stop them. The New Orleans Times-Picayune has posted photos on its website of other police officers joining in the widespread theft from unattended stores. Looters have picked clean Wal-Mart?s gun department downtown. This anarchy is regrettably not all that surprising. Disaster does not make a weak peacetime civil and social infrastructure strong. Unfortunately, New Orleans must now ask for deserved billions in recovery money even as Americans see images of a city that loots itself on its worst day.

Still despite all the negative stories thanks to lessons learned from the last few major hurricanes,
about 80% of the 1.4 Million from New Orleans. We can do better, we must do better, we shall do better.

Too bad the bad eggs get all the publicity and all the hard work and sacrifice of those doing what needs to be done is overlooked.

One of the best articles I have seen was in the WSJ Marketplace Aug 30. But you will have to find an old hard print copy or subscribe to read it online.

$$] Escape From the Big Easy

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Katrina could be a blueprint for authorities elsewhere. But the relatively smooth departure was little solace to thousands who lacked transportation.

The looting of the Big Easy was not confined with ripping off hospitals and drug stores and the like.

The media looted the attention away from those who were working miracles in an impossible situation, because stories of what is going wrong always sell better than those about what is going right.

I was sickened this evening to hear while I happened to walk by a Television some NBC talking head ranting about it being "Amateur Time" there. You see he had seen Hurricane Recovery operations in Florida he had been there and knew all about it.

Who among us has experienced the complete destruction of a City of over 1 million in the US before? Are there any still alive who lived through the Civil War? Because I do think that was the last time we had a Catastrophe of this magnitude inside our Borders.

If some Recovery Worker who had been pulling dead bodies out of shattered buildings and from the stinking water that covers New Orleans now had laid that full out cold on Prime Time TV? I would have clapped.

There is responsible journalism and there is whipping up crowds into hysteria. They are not the same.

|