Contributed by: filbert Wednesday, September 07 2005 @ 12:02 PM CST
First, The U.S. military[*1] , personified by Lt. General Russel Honore:
Merely to get them here is a job, given that roads and airports are jammed with incoming cargo, and the troops must be sustained with food, water, communications facilities and medical care.
And their work must be coordinated with National Guard units and the dozens of other local, state and federal agencies at work. These include U.S. Border Patrol agents and Air Force security police in combat gear and federal and state civilian disaster workers from around the country.
On the air side alone, Army, National Guard, Navy, Marine and Coast Guard helicopters are swarming into a makeshift logistics base at the Superdome delivering boots, water and communications gear and evacuating sick and elderly refugees.
Honore is the commanding general of 1st Army, a headquarters based in Atlanta that oversees the mobilization and training of National Guard and reserve troops for Iraq. He has come to know hundreds of National Guard officers and commanders.
First Army’s secondary mission is to coordinate military support to civilian authorities in a crisis, and it is in that capacity that Honore plunged into work on Katrina days before the storm hit last week.
He has a personal interest as well: His grown daughter was among the tens of thousands evacuated from New Orleans, and his son is serving in Iraq with a brigade of the Louisiana National Guard.
“So we feel the pain,” Honore said.
And a sense of urgency. Over the weekend — during a long and hurried span that aides wearily described as typical — Honore rose at 4 a.m. Saturday and got back to bed at 2 a.m. Sunday for his typical two hours of sleep. His main sustenance seemed to be his ever-present cigars.
Put that man in charge of FEMA, now! Since Honore hit the ground, things happened and happened quickly. The Superdome was evacuated, the levees were repaired and the pumps began running after the U.S. Armed Forces were unleashed on the problem.
The utter debacle and vast human tragedy that is New Orleans has overshadowed the citizens and government of the State of Mississippi, which lost nearly 200 lives to Katrina. Geography played a big role–as I’ve pointed out before, New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Still, Mississippi took the direct hit of Katrina. Mississippi is picking itself up and getting on with things[*2] :
While some coastal cities are faced with the task of clearing wrecked buildings and piles of debris, much of Waveland from the coast to the railroad tracks about a half-mile inland simply is gone. Smooth concrete pads are the measure of homes that once stood there.
From the second floor of a building at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, about a mile away, Mayor Tommy Longo shouts into a cell phone, “I can’t tell the difference between public and private property in my town,” he said. “I’ve got debris 12 feet high.”
The rules and regulations of disaster assistance don’t work in a catastrophe of this size, he said. But Longo said he had made his peace with Gov. Haley Barbour and President Bush about the recovery efforts. He just wants to move on.
Mississippi is, relative to Louisiana, a success story. This in itself illustrates the enormity of the New Orleans disaster.