Credit Where Its Due for Heroes
Posted by Andy on February 24th, 2006
Amid all the blame for Katrina (which was a bleeping hurricane that hit a city below sea level what did you expect?) there were people doing exactly what they were supposed to and then some.
Yesterday, the White House issued its history of Katrina, but some of the most interesting findings in the 228-page report are in Appendix B — “What Went Right.”
It’s on Page 129 that we learn that Coast Guard Petty Officer Jessica Guidroz returned to work after the hurricane passed through New Orleans. Guidroz led “a squadron of eight boats and crews in the evacuation of approximately 2,000 people from the campus of the University of New Orleans. Like many of the [Coast Guard] station crew, she lived nearby and lost all her personal possessions to the storm, yet put her duty first,” the White House report says.
Petty Officer Moises Rivera-Carrion served as a rescue swimmer on Coast Guard helicopters. He was on duty for three days and confronted such hazards as downed power lines and contaminated floodwaters. “Rivera-Carrion tested the limits of his skill and endurance while rescuing 269 survivors trapped on rooftops and balconies throughout New Orleans and southwest Louisiana,” the report says.
Much of the Coast Guard rescue effort hinged on the skills of Petty Officer Rodney L. Gordon . According to the report, he landed in the first aircraft to return to New Orleans, even though strong winds were tossing debris across the Coast Guard station.
Gordon “immediately began a series of complex electrical and mechanical repairs vital to sustaining what quickly grew into the largest air rescue operation in Coast Guard history,” the report says. He cannibalized broken machinery to repair emergency generators and power lines, including lines to the Naval Air Station control tower that dispatched rescue sorties. Gordon “single-handedly performed a complex rewiring” of emergency generators at the base’s aviation fuel distribution plant, a feat that permitted “hundreds of aircraft to continue lifesaving missions,” the report says.
Overall, the White House report says, nearly 6,000 Coast Guard personnel played roles in the Katrina search and rescue missions. They retrieved more than 33,000 people along the Gulf Coast, including more than 12,000 by air.
What should be teh lesson of Katrina? That government cannot be everywhere all the time. And if and when we need government, we need the most effective part of government to be in charge of what they do best. The Department of Homeland Security is the largest, and now we’ve seen, slowest moving part of Government. Why the heck did we expect something with hundreds of thousands of people in it, to react in a split second manner?
Had everyone who works for DHS personally saved 1 rescued 1 person in New Orleans, there’d have been no tragedy. But we all know that is impossible. Instead we need to have the specialized groups do what they know how to do. You want to know what worked flawlessly during Katrina, it was our defense orientated organizations like teh Coast Guard and teh Military. They were the ones who stepped in and saved the people after they were left out to dry (sorry for pun) when their local leaders decided to let them go down with the busses.
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February 27th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Thank you for linking that article. This is something that liberals like me and conservatives can agree on. The DHS is an enormous, ridiculous bureaucracy that can’t even catch its own tail. But there are good veteran officials who know their jobs and should be allowed to do them without the interference of political appointees. I think there are aspects of federal response that should, in a sense, be militarized — if not literally with firepower, then at least taking a military approach to chain of command structure and overall readiness.
In that sense, government — if done right — doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You could call it a classical view of “limited government,” if conservatives can still support that. It’s also, of course, antithetical to the current Bush administration worldview.
In ‘08 I hope there is a Democrat who makes this case, because that’s who I’d want to vote for. But I also hope the Republicans nominate someone who makes a similar case, even if in more conservative terms, because I don’t want another president who governs like Bush.
February 27th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Thanks Ron, for the first paragraph.
But Bush’s downfall has been buying into the Dems’ ideas. Big Government health care, bureaucracies like Lieberman’s DHS, Ted Kennedy’s NCLB, and allowing Soc Sec to go down the rabbit hole of bankruptcy.
You say you hope that a Dem runs on Bush’ faults on limited government, but that is not what the Dems stand for. Granted Bush has been horrible at this, but it was done in the spirit of his stupid ‘new tone’ compassionate conservatism we gotta work with the Dems BS! It was liberalism!
If we are now going to have a Federal Government who is prepared for each and every local disaster (which I consider to be the failed evacuation of New Orleans) , what is the point of having any other level or form of government below the Feds? Redundancy? More Gov. Jobs? Seems stupid, and against conservative/Republican principals (as I thought they were before Bush).