A Potential Nightmare Scenario This Summer
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What happens when we have to start relying on this administration for information about hurricanes and/or other dangerous weather-related events? Here are some numbers to keep in mind from the Obama years:
Over the past eight years, Fugate [FEMA Director from 2009-2017] has dealt with 910 disaster declarations, far more than any FEMA director in history. In 2011 alone, FEMA responded to a record-shattering 242 disasters (the previous record had been 158 in 1996). He battled big storms made bigger by climate change, managed to earn praise from both parties in Congress, and restored public faith in the federal government’s ability to respond to natural disasters, taking it from 33 percent after Katrina to 75 percent after Sandy, according to Gallup.
That last number is a reminder that, when things are handled competently, most of us don’t notice. But nothing shatters the trust of the American public more profoundly than a poorly handled natural disaster.
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The public now faces three challenges from the Trump administration related to these concerns: (1) the lack of leaders in place in critical agencies, (2) the fact that public service experience is not a priority for this administration, and (3) the lack of trust the president has garnered from the public. Any one of those three alone could lead to a real disaster for Americans. But all three together signal a potential nightmare-in-the-making this summer.
Read More: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/06/05/a-potential-nightmare-scenario-this-summer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+washingtonmonthly%2Frss+%28Political+Animal+at+Washington+Monthly%29
The unprecedented incompetence of this administration is truly frightening. It's not just terror attacks we need to fear...natural disasters can be just as deadly. Do you trust them to handle these situations as they arise? Yeah, I didn't think so.
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They drowned and died and an inept admin left them alone.
'Five Days' Of Ambiguous Morality At Katrina-Hit Hospital
If we didn't experience Hurricane Katrina ourselves, we saw it: the ominous red pinwheel on the radar, the wrecked Superdome, the corpses. And certainly we saw our shame — America's inequality, negligence and violence were all laid bare by the storm.
But one tragedy went largely unwitnessed. And this is the subject of Sheri Fink's provocative new book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer examines what happens when people make life-and-death decisions in a state of anarchy.
On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm. The windows at New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center shattered. But the facility itself remained functional. The staff exhaled. Wow. "We dodged a bullet," they said.
Then the levees broke. Memorial's back-up generators were located at ground level.
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/08/216838132/five-days-of-ambiguous-morality-at-katrina-hit-hospital
