good news, bad news, & indifferent

the half-bad news is i found out i have some inaccurate info in some recent posts re katrina.

the good news is i learned some new stuff i can use to correct some and, perhaps, eventually all of it.

the still bad news is that more than a few big-time journalists appear to believe quite a bit of the inaccurate stuff, & polls indicate the public has swallowed it too.

one area of error—a relatively minor one—is about the louisiana national guard. the facts as i now understand them are that the organization has 6500-7000 members, and about 3000 of them are in iraq, not a majority as i reported. an unfortunate sidelight is the ones in iraq took all of the group's water treatment equipment with them.

more important is what officials did:

on thursday august 25 katrina was moving up along the west coast of florida and didn't appear headed toward new orleans. one meteorologist analyzed conditions and saw what was about to happen. he was respected enough to persuade others to take another look. when they confirmed it, they notified louisiana.

on saturday governor kathleen blanco came to the conclusion the state didn't have the resources to handle it. she contacted president bush and got him to declare an emergency. she also got in touch with other states and asked them to send their national guard troops right after the storm passed. then mayor ray nagin ordered the evacuation.

katrina turned aside but struck a glancing blow on the big easy at 7:10 monday morning. the first levee breach occurred that night.

when state officials tried to phone the other states' national guards to establish command and control, they found that both land lines and cell phones failed. they went to their emergency backup system, but it didn't work either. even ham radio operators couldn't make contact. thus the delay in bringing in out-of-state national guard.

i heard the above yesterday on npr's all things considered. i thought their website was supposed to have a more detailed timeline, but i can't find it. here's salon's from AP.

misinformation continues to circulate, and some journalists are not yet up to date. some participants last night on washington week and the journal editorial report were still repeating the pro-bush spin that the city and state governments failed to do their jobs properly.

in fact they really were swamped, as they knew they would be, which is why the governor called the president two days before the storm hit.

far as i can tell, all they failed to anticipate was the triple whammy of the phones. everybody assumed at least one of the three systems would function.

i've also heard that the governor wouldn't agree to bush's offer to federalize the guard.

what nonsense! did he get her consent before sending louisiana's guard troops to iraq? if so, then he already had it. if not, why would he need it after katrina?

if bush believed he should take command, he didn't need the governor's "permission slip."

as for the claim that the mayor is "no giuliani": it's true.

the evacuation he ordered, tho perhaps on shaky legal authority, undoubtedly saved far more lives than rudy ever saved.