So Cuba can manage to evacate 600k people for a hurricane

[LynneSin]

and we had our heads up our collective asses with trying to evacuate New Orleans

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060828/ts_nm/weather_ernesto_onshore_dc_4

Cuba, facing its first big storm in decades without its ailing leader, Fidel Castro, at the helm, evacuated more than 600,000 people from eastern provinces.

Tens of thousands of Cubans were transported from coastal and mountain areas in buses and trucks. Cattle and crops were protected and domestic flights to eastern Cuba suspended.

I mean geez, Cuba is economically lower than the United States and the bulk of their vehicles are like from fricking 1950 and yet they were able to get out even those without cars when faced with a hurricane.

I'm not sitting here cheerleading for Cuba or communism. I'm just pointing out the obvious - Cuba managed to evacuate those in harms way by providing buses and we couldn't do the same thing in New Orleans.

Something is totally messed up here

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. And we only had to evacuate 500,000

Exactly. Regardless of one's feelings about Castro, and I am no fan of his - somehow his government manages to deal with a recurring event that our government has repeatedly failed at.

[LynneSin]

4. Hell all the schools were closed - they could have used school buses

put a call out to all the bus services out there to help out the cause.

But you know what it is - it's called the bottom line. Someone would have to pay for the gas to drive those buses and the salary of the driver for the bus. Obviously no one was willing to see the importance of dealing with this cost BEFORE the hurricane, which would have been much more cost effective than the money spent with trying to rescue those who could not flee from New Orleans because of lack of transportation.

How many lives were lost because the person had no other viable option of getting out of New Orleans

:shrug:

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. One of my biggest complaints last year

was reading about a Baptist church that had faith based funds available and evacuated their congregation via a phone tree. While I have no issue with the fact that they used those funds to evacuate, it certainly seemed as though those funds "saved" them and only them rather than the community at large. The neighborly thing would have been for those funds to be used for a door to door campaign in their community - not just a phone tree for church members.

[cyclezealot]

11. I get impatient with Castro Bashing.

Not because he is a saint. But, because we befriend The China gulag and they are far worse than Castro. And certainly no worse than Bush's friends in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Azberbaijan

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

14. Exactly

[Kajsa]

16. And while we're at it,

let's get rid of that damn trade embargo
with Cuba!

We can do business with China but not Cuba?

[Horse with no Name]

49. Amongst the MANY evils of China

http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

>>>>snip
According to Peter Stockland, "Years of population engineering, including virtual extermination of 'surplus' baby girls, has created a nightmarish imbalance in China's male and female populations." (Stockland, "China's baby-slaughter overlooked," The Calgary Sun, June 11, 1997.) In 1999, Jonathan Manthorpe reported a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, claiming that "the imbalance between the sexes is now so distorted that there are 111 million men in China -- more than three times the population of Canada -- who will not be able to find a wife." As a result, the kidnapping and slave-trading of women has increased: "Since 1990, say official Chinese figures, 64,000 women -- 8,000 a year on average -- have been rescued by authorities from forced 'marriages'. The number who have not been saved can only be guessed at. ... The thirst for women is so acute that the slave trader gangs are even reaching outside China to find merchandise. There are regular reports of women being abducted in such places as northern Vietnam to feed the demand in China." (Jonathan Manthorpe, "China battles slave trading in women: Female infanticide fuels a brisk trade in wives," The Vancouver Sun, January 11, 1999.)

[cyclezealot]

51. and i thought freepers got upset about

the sanctity of life. Bull. WOnder if China practices stem cell research. What bs. Freeper markets rule.

[Igel]

17. From NOLA.

Don't forget there are suburbs and other towns there, and the number of evacuees was far higher than 600k.

On edit: And NOLA had about 12 hours of mandatory evacuation. And used an evacuation plan that was drawn up with full knowledge that it left 20-40k NOLAers in the city, with no recourse.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

18. Either way...we had much greater resources than does Cuba

and no commitment on the part of our leaders to administrate them effectively.

[Igel]

21. We do.

I rather assume that somebody could have overriden the NOLA planners and decided on a feasible evacuation plan.

Blanco could have ignored Nagin and ordered a mandatory evacuation. I'm not sure the federal government could, but I'm willing to assume that * could have overriden Nagin and Blanco to order an evacuation.

There are times when we sincerely hate the idea of consolidated powers. There are times we hate the idea of not having consolidated powers.

In a small country, the 'consolidation' is easier, in so many ways.

[markus]

24. No, we had to evacaute 1.5 million people.

In Orleans, 90% of people were gotten out. The reaminder stayed because they chose to, or because they had not way to get themselves out.

It wasn't about the evacuation. It is about the failure of the levees, and the failure of FEMA to deliver on their clear responsibilities to provide aid to the people both displaced and those still in teh city.

[jobycom]

31. Exactly. We need to debunk that "failed evacuation" myth.

The reason 1500 people died rather than 15000 or more was because of an unprecedentedly successful evacuation. Compared to Cuba, where 600K in an entire region had to be evacuated, the local officials in the Greater New Orleans area had to evacuate almost three times the number from a more densely populated area.

BushCo has successfully framed the NOLA evacuation as a failure to alleviate his own blame in the number of post-Katrina deaths. Democrats should not buy into that.

[w4rma]

34. Big donor to Republicans gets contract to write evacuation plan for FEMA.

HURRICANE EXPERT THREATENED FOR PRE-KATRINA WARNINGS - Palast
A Greg Palast special investigation for Democracy Now!

Monday, August 28. From New Orleans.

DON'T blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east.

It wasn't the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.

Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.

Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.

Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: no one can find it.

That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work.

I know, I worked on the hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume dossier.

Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative Emergency Management."

Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.

IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out.

Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM.

So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.

"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses."

Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."

Van Heerden had other disturbing news. The Hurricane Center's computer models showed the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half too short.

After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.

He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response: the university's trustees threatened his job.

While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan.

An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team. That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it. When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that."

Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.

Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached… They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center." Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.

It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. "The City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II. It would be more accurate to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot."

Should they come home? Rebuild? Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM.

******
Watch this special investigative report about Katrina on Democracy Now! this morning or hear it on your local Pacifica or NPR station. You can also download it at DemocracyNow.org.

And catch the one-hour special report, "Who Drowned New Orleans?" on LinkTV, with Greg Palast in New Orleans plus an exclusive interview with Amy Goodman. (Get it on Direct TV channel 375 and Dish TV channel 9410. Or check your cable listing at LinkTV.com.)

And for more on IEM and Katrina, read Greg Palast's new NYT bestseller, "Armed Madhouse" (Penguin 2006).

A Jacquie Soohen BigNoise Films Production, produced by Matt Pascarella.

And very, very, special thanks to our Associate Producers on this particular story -- without their generosity and financial support this report would not have been possible.

******
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/28/1342209
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1995878

[chat_noir]

60. K&R - for this Palast post

……….


www.awolbush.com




DESERTER: THE STORY OF GEORGE W. BUSH AFTER HE QUIT THE TEXAS AIR NATIONAL GUARD http://www.glcq.com/bush_at_arpc1.htm















$10,000 reward was never collected




Cheerleader action doll hahahaha

[Brotherjohn]

37. Agree w/ Jobycom and Markus 100%. Evacuation was one of the few successes

... in the entire Katrina episode... For a myriad of reasons anyone informed on the subject would know. They could not have done much better.

I will try to repost my thoughts on the evacuation (from a post earlier this year) later in the day.

[babylonsister]

2. Exact same scenario as last year; Cuba has the evac down pat,

no doubt because they've been through the drill so many times. But when they offered their assistance to the US, they were turned down flat.

[sasha031]

3. Happened last year too

They got hit with Katrina also, not a single causality, even the chickens were safe.

[stop the bleeding]

5. Cuba has their shit wired tight when it comes to evacuating for storms

they even cut down trees and whatnot that may fall down during the high winds - we could take some notes from them on how to do this correctly.

[The Deacon]

6. Not A Fan Of Communism or Castro

But on some level, every government or system is evaluated on its ability to deliver to its citizens on their most basic needs. A communist philosophy inevitably leads to the philosophy that evacuation is the responsibility of central authorities. Official U.S. policy is that evacuation is the responsibilty of the individual - with local authorities deciding whether evacuation is necessary.

[redirish28]

8. it just shows...

the incompetence of these fools in office. Castro isn't perfect, but he didn't play a guitar and ignore what was going on with this hurricane. Castro and his goverment actually saved lives. More than Bushco ever did or ever will do. I wonder what would have happened if Katrina came bearing down on Crawford Texas? Hmmm... makes you wonder if things would have been different.

[slackmaster]

9. Most of them had the good sense, and ability, to evacuate themselves

They know that when their government says a storm is coming, they mean a storm is coming.

[Selatius]

10. You want to know why so many died in LA/MS?

Because we have no bussing plan in place for...PEOPLE WITHOUT CARS. Nagin et al. ordered a mandatory evacuation, but they didn't have a damn bussing plan to get out everybody who didn't have a car.

The fact that those levees failed shows incompetence/willful incompetence all the way up to the federal level.

We see here the Cubans actually used trucks and busses. In this case, they actually were competent in planning and execution compared to the US, but you shouldn't expect to see this widely reported in America's corporate-owned news media, would you?

[jerry611]

22. Disaster planning is a state responsibility

Florida was hit with storms much worse than Katrina over the years. Yet their death tolls are substantially low.

In New Orleans, they had no plan at all. They didn't know what to do with the people. They didn't know how to get them out. And they waited too long before trying to figure it out.

Could the feds have done more? Possibly. But it isn't their job to do more. The state is responsible for getting the people out. The feds assumed the state was doing their job. Obviously they were not.

[markus]

25. B.S.

You do not know what you're talking about.

Would you like a copy of the plan, so you read it first and then point out the parts that weren't executed?

[Kickoutthejams23]

43. Doesn't change the fact

That it is a state and city responsibility to evacuate and to have evacuation plans. Every other state seems to be able to handle this. I'm not saying FEMA wasn't a screwed up mess and the Bush reaction wasn't scandalous but that doesn't excuse the complete incompetence of local politicians.

[cyclezealot]

50. America's transportation infrastructure is so lousy

This problem would have happened anywhere. In the US car is king. Don't have a car, its either sink or swim.

[Kickoutthejams23]

53. Bull

When Hurricane Charley threatened my county the local sheriffs with buses in tow evacuated seniors from venerable areas. Needless to say seniors complained that the government was trampling their rights by forcing them to leave mobile homes in the path of the hurricane and also that the evacuation was conducted in late evening scaring the old people. (You can't make this stuff up) This was in 2004 so there was no Katrina mindset just complaints about the bus service being shut down early so they could be used to evacuate venerable residents.

http://thepinellaspassenger.blogspot.com/ (last item)

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/05/Northpinellas/Issue_evacuation_orde.shtml (first letter complaining of the late evacuation)

http://www.pinellascounty.org/emergency/Local.htm

Notice that it is the local counties in coordination with the state that handle hurricane evacuations. FEMA is in charge of rebuilding and clean-up. It doesn't seem involved in evacuation at all.

[markus]

57. FEMA requires air conditioned buses to evacuate seniors

which is why the school buses sat.

The RTA bus routes ran up until tropical force winds to 1) get carless people home from work and reunited with their familes and 2) to transport people to the Superdome and other shelter points.

If you hate us so much to spread this right wing nonsense, please stop using our gasoline.

[Kickoutthejams23]

58. I don't hate "us" or really anyone for that matter (certain republicans

excluded)

But I think Progressives and Democrats in general fail to admit that neither Blanco or Nagin handled this well.

Yes FEMA dropped the ball on post storm actions such as recovery and rescue and long term aid.

But I feel we look like fools for not admitting that Nagin and Blanco and other Louisiana elected officials simply bungled the evacuation. Incompetence know no political boundries.

In many municipalities the buses stop running a day or two before the warnings so they can begin preemptive evacuations from low-lying nursing homes etc.

A hurricane hitting NOLA isn't some surprise freak thing. They should have had plans for years complete with evacuation test runs etc.

The fact that other states and counties have evacuation plans for ALL their citizens is not right wing propaganda. If anything it should be obvious that we should hold all those responsible that includes the President and Brown but it also includes the people on the ground.

[markus]

61. If you're going to assert they bungled the evacuation

you're going to have to be more specific, or point to an instance of the evacuation of 90% of 1.2 million people occured successfully somewhere else.

To be taken seriously, do you have to admit to weapons of mass destruction? Kerry's fabrication of his service in Vietnam? That the moon is made of cheese.

I'm not prepared to admit the evacuation was bungled because it wasn't. Lots of other things were bungled, but that was not.

Now, Nagin and his chief of police were losing their cool and telling eveyrone the wild rumors about crime in teh city, which did lead Blanco to refuse to federalize the guard, because they would have to disarm if they did. Yet the right paints this as a turf war. Do I have to admit this was a turf war, too, to be taken seriously.

If that's the basis of the debate, then we have lost.

Hell, I think we've already lost, but that's from the perspective of New Orleans.

[cyclezealot]

64. Guess, you made your point.

But, I say, if lets say there was a nuclear attack on London and Chicago. With London's transportation system, I bet London would do a much better job of evacuation. In the US car is king and the car is not an efficient mover of people.

[markus]

56. Yes, Houston did such a terrific job during Rita

No, other cities don't handle this well. This is probably the first time that 1.2 million people have been evacuated from a coastal city, where there are severe contraints on the number of roads out. It was, in the estimation of the two Wall Street Journal reports who wrote the book Disaster the most successful exercise of it's kind in history.

We got out over 90% of the people, and provided shelter in place for everyone else who needed it.

However, according to the plans of the city and state, signed off by FEMA, relief should come in 72 hours.

That did not occur.

[Kickoutthejams23]

59. I understand and agree with your point.

FEMA dropped the post recovery ball big time. Most of the deaths however were not at shelters but with non-evacuated people. Who is responsible? (Besides FEMA)

[cyclezealot]

28. Look at the LEbanon evacuation last month.

First the Fed's were the laughing stock of the world, by aksing evacuees to pay a fee to move them to Cyprus. No other country consiered such a redicilious fee. It's what the military does.
Take exception. We support a military for such actions. In the past we have evacuated civillian populations ,such as we sadi, Lebanon, the Indonesian tsaunmi. But, not New Orleans. Don't agree. What else should we maintain a military for. A battle ship certainly can evacuate far more people than a fleet of school buses.

[Stargazer99]

12. this shows where the RW values really are

If you are poor or born poor, the RW doesn't give a damn about your life after your born. Pro-Life my arse

[enigma000]

13. It's also a totalitarian police state - evacuations are mandatory

No riding out storms, no half-baked personal plans for clearing out, everybody gets evacuated. Plus, if the authorities in charge screwup they don't get "you've done a heck of a job" and a push out the door.

[sandnsea]

33. mandatory evacs, important difference

I believe many people would have left if there had been transportation available, but there would have been many who chose to stay behind too. We'd have still had people drowning, no doubt.

[Kajsa]

15. 'HURRICANE EXPERT THREATENED FOR PRE-KATRINA WARNINGS'

I received this in an e-mail this morning.
Sorry I couldn't link it without my e-mail
address showing.

I am still shaking, I'm so angry!

:grr:

HURRICANE EXPERT THREATENED FOR PRE-KATRINA WARNINGS


A Greg Palast special investigation for Democracy Now!



Monday, August 28. From New Orleans.
DON'T blame the Lady. Katrina killed no one in this town. In fact, Katrina missed the city completely, going wide to the east.

It wasn't the hurricane that drowned, suffocated, de-hydrated and starved 1,500 people that week. The killing was done by a deadly duo: a failed emergency evacuation plan combined with faulty levees. Behind these twin failures lies a tale of cronyism, profiteering and willful incompetence that takes us right to the steps of the White House.

Here's the story you haven't been told. And the man who revealed it to me, Dr. Ivor van Heerden, is putting his job on the line to tell it.

Van Heerden isn't the typical whistleblower I usually deal with. This is no minor player. He's the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He's the top banana in the field -- no one knew more about how to save New Orleans from a hurricane's devastation. And no one was a bigger target of an official and corporate campaign to bury the information.

Here's what happened. Right after Katrina swamped the city, I called Washington to get a copy of the evacuation plan.

Funny thing about the murderously failed plan for the evacuation of New Orleans: no one can find it. That's right. It's missing. Maybe it got wet and sank in the flood. Whatever: no one can find it.

That's real bad. Here's the key thing about a successful emergency evacuation plan: you have to have copies of it. Lots of copies -- in fire houses and in hospitals and in the hands of every first responder. Secret evacuation plans don't work.

I know, I worked on the hurricane evacuation plan for Long Island New York, an elaborate multi-volume dossier.

Specifically, I'm talking about the plan that was written, or supposed to have been written two years ago by a company called, "Innovative Emergency Management."

Weird thing about IEM, their founder Madhu Beriwal, had no known experience in hurricane evacuations. She did, however, have a lot of experience in donating to Republicans.

IEM and FEMA did begin a draft of a plan. The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn't know that 127,000 people in the city didn't have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were -- they mapped it -- and how to get them out.

Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn't touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden's position. This official now works for IEM.

So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.

"Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That's the bottom line." The professor, who'd been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. "They're still finding corpses."

Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won't. The deaths weigh on him. "I wasn't going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down."

Van Heerden had other disturbing news. The Hurricane Center's computer models showed the federal government had built the levees around the city a foot-and-a-half too short.

After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been "overtopped" for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.

He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush's doorstep. "I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House." The response: the university's trustees threatened his job.

While in Baton Rouge, I dropped in on the headquarters of IEM, the evacuation contractors. The assistant to the CEO insisted they had "a lot of experience with evacuation" -- but couldn't name a single city they'd planned for when they got the Big Easy contract. And still, they couldn't produce the plan.

An IEM press release in June 2004 boasted legendary expert James Lee Witt as a member of their team. That was impressive. It was also a lie. In fact, Witt had nothing to do with it. When I asked IEM point blank if Witt's name was used as a fraudulent hook to get the contract, their spokeswoman said, weirdly, "We'll get back to you on that."

Back at LSU, van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.

Van Heerden said, "FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o'clock that the levees had breached… They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew ...I was at the State Emergency Operations Center." Because the hurricane had missed the city that Monday night, evacuation effectively stopped, assuming the city had survived.

It's been a full year now, and 73,000 New Orleanians remain in FEMA trailers and another 200,000, more than half the city's former residents, remain in temporary refuges. "The City That Care Forgot" -- that's their official slogan -- lost a higher percentage of homes than Berlin lost in World War II. It would be more accurate to call it, "The City That Bush Forgot."

Should they come home? Rebuild? Is it safe? Team Bush assures them there's nothing to worry about: FEMA won't respond to van Heerden's revelations. However, the Bush Administration has hired a consulting firm to fix the failed evacuation plan. The contractor? A Baton Rouge company named "Innovative Emergency Management." IEM.

[laundry_queen]

20. Just when I think I can't be any more outraged.

There it is.
:mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr: :mad: :grr:

[The Wielding Truth]

23. Even if none of this were true. * is responsible for not coming to the aid

of the victims stuck in that area,dying and suffering for days. In a day when cell phones send images in micro-seconds,it is a sin and unbelievable that * did not know that this was happening. How can he and his administration not be held responsible and be stripped of all decision making power?

[damntexdem]

19. Sure, but you have to understand: there's a big difference here.

The Cuban government CARED about getting those people out of harm's way.

Why, the U.S. could have done that twice over in New Orleans last year -- had it cared to.

[deaniac21]

26. Anybody know how much of Cuba is built below sea level?

[cyclezealot]

29. when the winds are pushing water at 90 mph

sea level rises about 10 feet. That would be much of Havana.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

38. Heh, clutching at straws there, huh?

:rofl:

[deaniac21]

41. No, actually it is my dream to live in the workers paradise.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

42. j00 r t3h phU|\||\|y -nt

[deaniac21]

54. Now you are making sense!

:toast:

[malaise]

27. Cuba is light years ahead of most of the

planet re hurricane management.

[Blackthorn]

30. The thing is,

If Dubya wanted New Orleans evacuated, don't think for a second they couldn't have done it, and done it quickly. But they didn't want to. Don't compare incompetence with sheer evil.

[EFerrari]

65. I have to agree with you. They knew the levees would fail

and they decided to let it happen.

[Broken_Hero]

32. Glad, to be the fifth rec....:) nt

[mom cat]

35. Cuba cares about its people. Some other countries do not!

[Brewman_Jax]

36. Couldn't be done for Houston

with Hurricane Rita bearing down, thousands of cars ran out of gas on the interstate highways trying to leave.

[tblue37]

39. They also evacuate pets and livestock. (eom)

[RB TexLa]

40. Property rights play in as well, you can not force a property owner

here to evacuate, I bet the same is not true in Cuba.

[donsu]

44. China seems pretty good at evacuation too

nt

[Marnieworld]

45. I remember last year

reading about Cuba's evac plans and history. They even take care of the pets too.

[bluedog]

46. they get their farm animals inland.....crops picked

trees trimmed and all people go to evacuation centers.......damn right they got it together........

[Sailor for Warner]

47. I have to jump in here

1. CUBA does not give its people the option of staying or leaving. They tell you to evacuate by a certain time and if you do not, you are forcibly moved.

2. CUBA is an Island that gets hit by hurricanes all the time, America is has a much higher population of idiots who refuse to leave until the last minute.

3. CUBA also has alot of practice at this, much the way Florida has. Which is why Florida gets hit by 8 hurricanes in 2 years and barely bats an eye and one big hurricane hits the gulf coast and three sets of state and local governments flailing around like jackasses.

[Sailor for Warner]

48. Also

Theyre Army and Home Guard isnt doing anythign else, might as well evacuate people.

[bullwinkle428]

55. If half the National Guard wasn't being exploited...oops, I mean

"deployed" in Iraq, maybe they could have been used to assist in the evacuation as well.

[satya]

52. China evacuated 790,000 last year while * was eating cake & playing guitar

China evacuates 790,000 as typhoon slams into coast 2005-Sept-02

China evacuated more than 790,000 people as powerful Typhoon Talim slammed into its east coast yesterday after barrelling across Taiwan, where it left three dead and dozens injured.

Talim was forecast to be the strongest storm to hit China this season and the observatory in Fujian province issued its highest-level alert, warning of potential landslides, flooding and widespread damage.

<snip>

Most flights from Fujian's capital Fuzhou were cancelled yesterday and schools province-wide have been ordered to close until Monday, state television said.

<snip>

Offices, schools and financial markets closed in Taiwan, all domestic flights were cancelled and many trains and international air services were delayed.

Meanwhile, the company paid $500K to come up with an evacuation plan for the Gulf Coast has yet to produce one...so much for "privatization".

[bdamomma]

62. The Cuban government cares about their citizens

[Sailor for Warner]

63. Its not about caring

I disagree with your statement as well. Cuba is a government of people, some give a crap some dont, just like america. It is all about their methodology. You would never see US National Guard evacuating people by force from their homes. It is also about pratice, as I said above.

[Hosnon]

66. I think it has a lot to do with Federalism. Without a clear chain of

authority (which I don't think existed) the states and the feds FIRST had to figure out who was in charge.

[Sailor for Warner]

67. I dont think that it is a question in this case

The federal government is not able to be the first responder due to the size of the organization. By definition, the state and local governments are the first responders, because they are already there and it takes less time to mobilize them. This is one of those times when the blame can go all around but the people already on the ground hold the most blame in their hand.

[Hosnon]

68. The state and local governments are, by definition, the first responders

in "normal" situations. When the state and local governments are overwhelmed, the federal government is to take up the task.

In my opinion, there wasn't consensus regarding the magnitude of the disaster, especially since the levees didn't initially break and the brunt of the hurricane hit Mississippi and Alabama.