Explanations, Not Excuses

This morning, on Meet the Press, Tim Russert was in full outraged war cry mode over the federal government's inadequacies in the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff was able to outline at least some of the factors that impacted relief efforts.

As to the larger point, there's no question that people have known for probably decades that New Orleans sits in a bowl surrounded by levees. This is a city built on the coast in an area that has hurricanes in it that is built below sea levels and that is a soup bowl. People have talked for years about, you know, whether it makes sense to have a city like that, how to build the levees. So, of course, that's not a surprise. What caught people by surprise in this instance was the fact that there was a second wave, and that, as The Times-Picayune article makes very clear, creates an almost apocalyptic challenge for rescuers.

The fact of the matter is, there's only really one way to deal with that issue, and that is to get people out first. Once that bowl breaks and that soup bowl fills with water, it is unquestionably the case, as we saw vividly demonstrated, that it's going to be almost impossible to get people out. So there is really only one way to deal with it, and that is to evacuate people in advance.

Later, he added:

[T]he way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials. . . . .

Now, ultimately the resources that will get people who don't have cars and don't have the ability to remove themselves has to rest with the kinds of assets a city has--the city's buses, the city's transportation.

This is not a justification of what sounds like logistical logjams and problems in the hurricane's aftermath -- however typical those are. But what it does is help everyone understand amid the hysterical fingerpointing what some of the issues at stake are.

And when Chertoff appeared on Fox News Sunday, we learned that it was the President who persuaded New Orleans to call for a mandatory evacuation -- apparently, state and local officials weren't even going to require people to leave the city until the President intervened.