Bush, Chertoff Warned Before Katrina

Blanco asks Bush to declare state of emergency ahead of Rita

BATON ROUGE, La. (CNN) -- Saying an effective response to Hurricane Rita is "beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco on Tuesday asked President Bush to declare a state of emergency ahead of the storm.

In a letter to the president, Blanco said the affected areas would be all the coastal parishes, including the Lake Charles, Lafayette and New Orleans metropolitan areas. She said it would also include the mid-state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor that are accepting the "thousands of citizens evacuating from the areas expecting to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Rita."

"I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments due to the continuing impact of Hurricane Katrina, and that supplementary federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster," Blanco said.

Forecasters' current projections indicate Rita will make landfall late Friday or early Saturday between Galveston and Brownsville, Texas. However, they have not ruled out the possibility of a strike on Louisiana. (Posted 8:53 p.m.)

Blanco seeks FEMA housing for Katrina evacuees

BATON ROUGE, La. (CNN) -- Louisiana's governor Tuesday asked the federal disaster relief agency to help find more permanent housing for thousands of residents who remain in emergency shelters three weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said President Bush agrees with her that people need "more stable, private housing," and asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help find locations for trailers that can house those left homeless by the Aug. 29 storm.

"We believe those shelters served their initial purpose, but now our people need that interim housing we talked about so much," Blanco said. "They need more privacy. They need real communities with vital services."

Blanco told reporters she is asking FEMA to move people already evacuated from shelters to motel rooms while her administration tries to find sites for trailers that can house displaced Louisianans on a long-term basis. (Posted 8:35 p.m.)
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I'm purdy sure Led Zeppelin summed it up lo these many years ago...
---------------------------------------------
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break,
When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay.

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.

Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
If you're goin' down South
They go no work to do,
If you don't know about Chicago.

Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.

All last night sat on the levee and moaned,
Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home.
Going, going to Chicago... Going to Chicago... Sorry but I can't take you...
Going down... going down now... going down....
 
flavio said:
Source?
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Post 15...it's somewhere in the past threads about katrina also.

in a nutshell said:
Despite Governor Blanco’s reluctance to coordinate the state’s efforts with federal assistance, President Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana two full days before Katrina hit the Louisiana coast. The move allowed FEMA to begin staging relief supplies for immediate distribution in New Orleans once the storm had passed. The president's emergency declaration also allowed FEMA to coordinate all disaster relief efforts and to provide appropriate assistance in a number of Louisiana parishes. All that was left to do was wait for Kathleen Blanco to request Federal assistance.
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flavio said:
You could just read this.
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So now it's hurricane Rita? Wasn't Katrina there before Rita? I believe Katrina was in August, so your post on Rita, which came by in September, is off by, what, 30 days? :rofl:
 
It gets better....

Documents Highlight Bush-Blanco Standoff

By Spencer S. Hsu, Joby Warrick and Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 5, 2005; Page A10

Shortly after noon on Aug. 31, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter (R) delivered a message that stunned aides to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D), who were frantically managing the catastrophe that began two days earlier when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. The governor should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get," Vitter quoted Rove as saying, according to handwritten notes by Terry Ryder, Blanco's executive counsel.

Thus began what one aide called a "full-court press" to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard -- a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration's terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor's aides said.

The standoff, illuminated among more than 100,000 pages of documents released Friday by Blanco in response to requests by Senate and House investigators, marks perhaps the clearest single conflict between U.S. and Louisiana officials in the bungled response to New Orleans's surrender to floodwaters and chaos.

While attention has focused on the performance of former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown, and communications breakdowns that kept Washington from recognizing for 12 to 16 hours the scope of flooding that would drive the storm's death toll above 1,200, the clash over military control highlights government officials' lack of familiarity with the levers of emergency powers.

Blanco's top aides relied on ad hoc tutorials from the National Guard about who would be in charge and how to call in federal help. But in the inevitable confusion of fast-moving events, partisan differences and federal/state divisions prevented top leaders from cooperating.

A Blanco aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the people around Bush were trying to maneuver the governor into an unnecessary change intended to make Bush look decisive.

"It was an overwhelming natural disaster. The federal government has an agency that exists for purposes of coming to the rescue of localities in a natural disaster, and that organization did not live up to what it was designed for or promised to," the aide said. Referring to Bush aides, he said, "It was time to recover from the fiasco, and take a win wherever you could, legitimate or not."
More..........
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But in the inevitable confusion of fast-moving events, partisan differences and federal/state divisions prevented top leaders from cooperating.

A Blanco aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the people around Bush were trying to maneuver the governor into an unnecessary change intended to make Bush look decisive.
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So they wanted Bush to look bad, and maneuvered the federal government into an unnecessary change to make Blanco look "in charge".
 
flavio said:
That's an odd thing to get from the article.
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Not really, when you take the above part into consideration...the part about
partisan differences and federal/state divisions.
 
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