The Big Lazy

Florida officials, who know a thing or two about disaster preparedness, are not sugarcoating their criticism of the lack of disaster planning in Louisiana and Mississippi:

One thing Florida knows is hurricanes.

Florida emergency planners criticized and even rebuked their counterparts -- or what passes for emergency planners -- in those states for their handling of Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Jeb Bush, the head of Florida AHCA and the head of Florida wildlife (which is responsible for all search and rescue) all said they made offers of aid to Mississippi and Louisiana the day before Katrina hit but were rebuffed. After the storm, they said they've had to not only help provide people to those states but also have had to develop search and rescue plans for them. "They were completely unprepared -- as bad off as we were before Andrew," one Florida official said.

And how Louisiana and Mississippi officials have handled Hurricane Katrina is a far cry from what emergency managers here would have done. Mississippi was in the middle of rewriting its disaster plan when Katrina struck. Officials there were still analyzing what went wrong during Hurricane Dennis earlier this year when Katrina overtook them. Search teams from Florida were rescuing Mississippi victims before law enforcement officers there were even aware of the magnitude of the disaster.

If New Orleans and the State of Louisiana had a disaster plan, it was woefully inept in both design and application. It reads more like wishful thinking than emergency planning:

But the most recent Louisiana emergency operations plan doesn't address how to evacuate in the case of flooding from storm surge, saying simply that "The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area represents a difficult evacuation problem due to the large population and its unique layout."

It continues, "The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating." (We all remember how well the bus thing worked out-HC.)

Buses were unable to transport New Orleans citizens for days following Katrina's landfall (mainly because they were under 4 feet of water and the mayor was holding out for cushier rides-HC.) The plan acknowledges that, in the event of a catastrophic hurricane, "the evacuation of over a million people from the Southeast Region could overwhelm normally available shelter resources." But it doesn't include a solution to the shelter issue.

Louisiana officials have chosen to play the blame game and assert that somehow this whole mess is FEMA's fault. Gov. Bush isn't buying it and echoed something that I said just the other day:

Louisiana officials could not be reached for comment this week. Mississippi and Louisiana officials, however, have increasingly decried what they called a slow federal response to the disaster, blaming the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Gov. Bush defended FEMA.

"If we weren't prepared, and we didn't do our part, no amount of work by FEMA could overcome the lack of preparation," he said.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I doubt if sixty years of corruption, croneyism and Democratic rule helped much either.