TOTAL INFORMATION ANALYSIS

Friday, September 02, 2005

This is from the FEMA briefing held Thursday afternoon. Here's the C-SPAN video. This bit starts at 24:17 --

REPORTER: Did you hear that today, people were refusing offers of rescue? We've heard over and over that today and yesterday that sometimes when approached by rescue teams in boats, some people say "No, we're staying." Do you know if that's still happening?

MIKE BROWN, FEMA DIRECTOR: I don't know if this is still happening. But I do know that it's happened some yes and it's happening some this morning... and I have no rationale to give you why that's the case....

Sometimes people just refuse to be taken away, and we may reach a point where we have to take them out.

REPORTER: That was my question. Do you force them out at some point?

BROWN: At some point if someone refuses to move, it will hamper the rescue effort, the clean-up effort, and at that point there will be a plan developed, a decision made, about how we will extract those people from the area.

Then at 31:42:

REPORTER: There's been some talk by some Parish presidents, specifically the one in Jefferson Parish, about encouraging people to come back Monday. Do you think that would be an unwise thing to suggest to people?

BROWN: It's really incumbent upon everyone to recognize that we shouldn't do anything that's going to hinder rescue efforts, we shouldn't do anything that's going to hinder the recovery efforts it's still a very dangerous situation...

We will actually send a lot of urban searech and rescue teams that have been identified as having been under floodwater and we will check the structural integrity of those homes. And some of them may be reflagged where they cannot go in except with a local official, or with one of the team members to get what belongings they can and get out of there. It's going to be that kind of tedious longterm process that we have to do house by house.


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This last part is particularly outrageous. Most of the houses that will still be standing have been flooded before, and FEMA is going to play code-inspection games while people to get back in the city and get on with rebuilding. State and local authorities should not stand for this. The beginning of Brown's response here is a not-so-veiled threat against local officials to back off. If New Orleans is to be saved, state and local officials need to stand up to these fed thugs and the rest of the country needs to back them.

| Posted at 05:27 | PERMA-LINK |

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