All emergency planning and relief in this country is supposed to be locally based. From that point it spreads outward from municipality to county or state and then the federal government. The immediate responsibilities of the local (municipal) government in New Orleans were to evacuate, secure and then relieve or evacuate further. None of this was done. Stories coming out of NO seem to indicate that a large part of the municipal police force went AWOL. Some may have even been participating in the looting and mayhem.
Compare the situation with that of NYC during the horror of the attacks of Setember 11. As I recall there was no such insanity in NYC and NY actually lost scores of police and firemen.
Louisiana, since the time of Hewey Long, has been a text book example of what local and state-wide corruption can achieve. Philadelphia and the District of Columbia are two more. The situation in New Orleans is what it is because of a grossly corrupt city government. That corruption runs throughout the city government and is at its worst in the police force.
It will be interesting to see what our "blood hound" press report about this mess in the end.
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