Been busy. I'm in Baton Rouge, the largest city in Louisiana. With the traffic to prove it. This has been such an odd time here. To be so close. To be so affected. I don't know what to make of it all. It is terrible. The Nawlineans break my heart. I can't imagine their situation really. Not even this close to the city. It seems so odd. There are so many changes. There were so many failures. I know many of these first hand. I used to work for the company that helped with Hurricane Pam. I'm sure they didn't do anything wrong. They just did the typical consultant thing. Consultants are perfectly captured by that commercial where the consultants say something like " . . . and that's what you should do." And the CEO/customer says, " then make it happen" or something to that effect. The consultants are like " we don't actually do any of this, we just tell you what you should do." I'm sure that is exactly what happened.
So it goes. Now we are busy blame storming. It ain't that complicated.
- The levees failed. The levees are the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers. The federal gummint failed here.
- No plan to evacuate those that were unable to evacuate. Blame them all. All the gummints.
- The response. The city was non-functional, destroyed by the flood. The state lacked capacity. The feds were too slow and perfectly bureaucratic ("You can't save lives until you've had 2 days of training on sexual harassment." Genius.)
- "What's the magic word?" I guess no one in NO or LA asked right for help. That seems to be the consensus when criticizing the city and the state. That works with my kids, but I'd hope that someone watching the 24 hour news coverage would have gotten a clue on their own and taken the Mayor's and Governor's request seriously, even if they didn't say please. Please!
My two cents. We definitely live in interesting times.
