Thomas Lipscomb, whose family has lived in New Orleans for 150 years, tells us:

Having been prodded on Saturday into ordering an evacuation by President Bush and the head of the Hurricane Center and then delaying it for seventeen crucial hours until well into Sunday, Mayor Nagin is directly responsible for the AP picture of over 200 unused New Orleans buses marooned in four feet of water that might have evacuated more than 15,000 in one trip alone. Those were the buses that in the Mayor’s own plan were to be used to evacuate 100,000 poor the city has long understood had no other means of transportation.

Nagin is also responsible for failing to pre-position generators, food and water, a medical presence and portable toilets for the two sites at the Superdome and Convention Center that he had proclaimed “emergency centers” for tens of thousands of the more than 30% of New Orleanians that lived below the poverty line. And then the Mayor failed to police them.

The rapes, murders, and needless deaths that took place in those “black holes” of New Orleans are his responsibility as well. Eighty armed policemen were too cowardly to enter the Convention Center after reports of the savagery inside as late as Sunday. Troops finally searching the Convention Center on Monday found an elderly man and a young girl, battered to death, among the corpses. New Orleans’s would-be reformers thought they had elected a responsible leader in former cable executive Nagin and instead they got a classic “cable guy” with a million excuses and the same lousy service.

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans’s “projects” trying to enforce the mayor’s evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his “mandatory evacuation” order.

Why do we think that there will not be meaningful hearings on all this?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 11:13 am and is filed under Democrats, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.