St. Louis looks to be able to fend for their citizens during a weather crisis!
The governor sent in the National Guard to evacuate people from their sweltering homes Thursday after storms knocked out power to nearly half a million St. Louis-area households and businesses in the middle of a searing heat wave that has killed at least 17 people across the country.
With forecasters expecting another day of 100-degree heat, utility crews raced to restore electricity, and Gov. Matt Blunt declared a state of emergency, granting the mayor’s request to send in 250 troops to take people to air-conditioned public buildings and to clear debris.
“We can’t overemphasize the danger of this heat,” Mayor Francis Slay said. “The longer the heat goes on and the power is out, the riskier it is.”
Police used public-address speakers from their squad cars to announce locations of the community centers and other places designated as cooling centers. Volunteers went door to door, checking on people with no power to run fans or air conditioners.
Utility workers urged customers to find a cool place to stay. They warned that power could be out in some areas for three to five days.
Note that the governor worked with the mayor and called out the Guard..No need to bring the feds in…
If you’re trying to compare this particular local/state reaction to the Katrina disaster, I think you’d be a little off the mark…
The fact that the Feds are not involved proves nonetheless that GWB just doesn’t care about the poor! The details don’t matter. The fact don’t matter.
Emergency without Feds = Bush doesn’t care about ________ (fill in blank).
1- I don’t. St. Louis proper is a very poor city with a very high population of blacks…they took care of themselves…
When it comes to emergencies, I like to use the analogy of cutting yourself. If you cut yourself, do you:
a. Put a bandaid on it and see if that takes care of the problem (Local government response)
b. Go to an emergency room for a band aid and if necessary see if a few stitches can take care of the problem? (state government response)
c. Go directly to the $10,000 an hour reconstructive surgeon to have him decide if you need a bandaid, stitches, or major reconstructive surgery? (FEMA)
In other words, do you try to fix the problem on as small and as efficient a scale as possible, or do you immediately go for the most expensive inefficient means possible whether that is necessary or not.
In this case the Mayor felt he didn’t have the means to handle the entire problem locally, so he got the state involved. The governor used the assets at his disposal to supplement the mayor’s assets to solve the problem. As for Katrina, if NAGIN had used the police to get as many people onto the school buses out of New Orleans, and then had the Governor activate the National Guard to provide assistance and security at the Super Dome and the Civic Center as well as to unload the supplies transported to the Super Dome by the Salvation Army/ Red Cross versus not allowing the trucks to be unloaded and the supplies then rendered useless, the entire storm impact would’ve been greatly reduced. By doing this, the city would’ve been well able to care for itself until the Federal aid arrived within the proscribed 48 to 72 hours.
The only really effective thing Nagin and Blanco did after Katrina was to shift responsibility and blame to others. They got a willing cadre of BHDS idiots to readily agree and take up the cause, aided of course by the BHDS MSM.
Al Gore will be blabbering this global warming poppycock nonsense like he always dose way beyond the hogwash he has peddled in his putrid movie:roll:
Comparing this weather event to Katrina is ridiculous.
I don’t think anyone is comparing events… only mindset and philosophy…the fact that Nagin and the incompetent boobs that were running New Orleans did not evacuate the citizens, did NOTHING, ran to Texas, then starting bitching about the President is SHAMEFUL.
America used to be a country of self-reliance, of can-do spirit, of community solutions..
now its a fuckign prozac and ritalin fueled, soccer mom infested cesspool of whining and dependence…thanks FDR, LBJ, and every other liberal fuckface who are doing there best to turn us into Europe west…
7- both are weather events Tom…and the sad thing is, Katrina victims were told before the storm that they were on their own…
“Comparing this weather event to Katrina is ridiculous.”
Seriously ridiculous.
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“…both are weather events”
Oh come on, the differences between the two are legion.
That’s like comparing a thunder-storm to a hurricane. There is just way too much of a difference between the two in terms of size and damage to infrastructure.
Roadways leading out of the St. Louis aren’t submerged under ten feet of water, Peejz.
They weren’t submerged 10 days prior to the storm were they SF? NOLA had a whole lotta buses to get the people out, but they didn’t did they?
The difference between people who handle emergencies well and those who don’t is attitude. People with the old fashioned Boy Scout attitude of “Be Prepared” tend to do much better. Those who don’t, won’t. Blanco was warned that there was probably going to be another bad hurricane season and when the governor of Florida offered to have his emergency response agency help Louisiana develop an emergency response plan, she turned them down. When President Bush advised her the day before the storm made landfall that she might want to take action to be prepared for it, she ignored the warning. Mayor Nagin was warned days before the storm hit that he should evacuate as many people as possible and make arrangements to shelter those who didn’t leave. While he did send out an evacuation order, it was more in the line of a suggestion and was soundly ignored. Because he didn’t want people to congregate at the Super Dome or the civic center, he took no action to prepare those locations to shelter those who eventually ended up there despite instructions to do otherwise. While them refusing to leave New Orleans was certainly not Nagin’s fault, not having the foresight to realize that if the feces hit the ventilator he would have hundreds if not thousands of indigent residents to house, feed and water was. He had what should’ve been a reasonably effective emergency plan that he failed to implement.
Honestly, I have a feeling that he either had no appreciation for the size of Katrina, or was so overwhelmed by it that he didn’t know what to do. Of course the levees breaking certainly made matters a lot worse. The Levee commissioners who were convicted of graft should be made to go door to door in the ninth ward and apologize for their theft and ineptitude. Of course the multimillion dollar Mardi Gras fountain was certainly a much better investment than using the money to actually reenforce the levees and upgrade the pumps.