Disaster plan? What disaster plan?

this is a screed.

About two years ago, there was a Washington post editorial blasting FEMA for not having a plan to evacuate Washington D.C. in case of another terrorist attack...yes, I know: The Pentagon attack was actually across the river in Arlington, but even an overweight grandmother like myself can walk that far...

So what was wrong with this editorial?

Well, as I wrote the editor: The editorial writer hadn't checked the pages of the Washington Post...you see, the evacuation plan for Washington had been posted on it's website for over a year.

The seocnd problem was: The writer of the anti Bush editorial was....tada...a psychiatrist.

You see, psychiatrists are not involved in disaster planning. Now, if the writer was, say, an Emergency room physician in charge of the local Emergency Medical response team, and his planners couldn't get information from FEMA, it would have been a meaningful editorial...

But when it was written by a psychiatrist who had less knowledge of emergency planning in the Washington area than I did (and I was merely a small town doc in Oklahoma) then it makes one wonder about the priorities of the Washington post editorial staff.

So when the press writes something like: FEMA did not respond to our requests to help...well, such things take time...

And how many using the natural slowness of ANY bureaucracy to bash Bush have bothered to check the evacuation plans for New Orleans...

For example: why were the photos of the buses on Drudge, not on the front page of the BBC or NYT? Ah, but like the psychiatrist, they prefer to blame, and politicize their fingerpointing, than actually bother to check the facts.

In earlier posts, I pointed out the logistical problems for using the buses to evacuate, showing that it was difficult to do....but the whole point was that it was NOT impossible to do. I wrote the logistics in my earlier post...and I suspect someone had written the plan somewhere...but no one bothered to look it up...

The dirty little fact is that local officials "BET" the hurricane, like previous hurricanes, would miss them, so the easier, less risky and less expensive evacuation to the superdome was all that was needed...

But the reality was that although Katrina "missed" N.O. and there was not a 30 foot storm surge, nevertheless, hurricanes are associated with lots of rain, and when there is lots of rain, we have floods. My son was stuck in North Carolina for a week after they had a hurricane, due to floods...hello...it doesn't take a rocket scientist (0r a fema offical) to tell the governor of Louisiana that, does it?

That's her job...

But the press didn't notice that, any more than the editorial pages of the WaPo noticed that the "absent" evacuation plans were posted on it's website, or the psychiatrist "noticed" that there was a large and competent EMS system in place to cope with disasters.

But the bias will continue...the latest is that the NYTimes is busy bashing Texas...for taking in 400 000 homeless people... LINK

After all, you can't print something nice about Texas.