Katrina or Sandy? Late warnings, confused and inadequate responses, FEMA foul-ups and suffering refugees.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
USA Today
11/12/2012
Is the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy turning into Katrina-on-the-Hudson? Pretty much, and that tells us some things about Sandy, and Katrina, and the press…
…late warnings, confused and inadequate responses, FEMA foul-ups and suffering refugees. In this regard, Sandy is looking a lot like Katrina on the Hudson. Well, things go wrong in disasters. That’s why they’re called disasters. But there is one difference.
Under Katrina, the national press credulously reported all sorts of horror stories: rapes, children with slit throats, even cannibalism. These stories were pretty much all false. Worse, as Lou Dolinar cataloged later, the press also ignored many very real stories of heroism and competence. We haven’t seen such one-sided coverage of Sandy, where the press coverage of problems, though somewhat muted before the election, hasn’t been marked by absurd rumors or ham-handed efforts to push a particular narrative.
That, I suspect, is because Sandy happened in an area that reporters know. Media folks found it easy to believe stories about New Orleans that they wouldn’t believe about their own area. New Orleans is full of black people and southerners, two groups underrepresented in the national media. Manhattan, on the other hand, is familiar turf. Count on the press to give its own milieu a fairer shake.
Read the complete article at USA Today.
Related: No Red Tape? Non-Union FEMA Crews, Water and Other Supplies Sit Idle Thanks To Unions & Red Tape
It’s been two weeks since Hurricane Sandy killed 113 people, wiped out portions of towns, and knocked out power to millions. It has also been two weeks since Barack Obama pledged, “No bureaucracy. No red tape.”
However, according to multiple public and private sources, unions and union-related red tape are causing workers from out of state to be turned back, as well as workers contracted by FEMA, as well as tons of supplies, already in New York and New Jersey to sit idle—at a cost of millions to taxpayers…
…there are tons of supplies in trailers, as well as rows and rows of water that are not being delivered.
Immediately after the storm, beer maker Budweiser converted its beer lines in Georgia to produce water—44,000 cases of water. That water was trucked into the storm ravaged area, but much of it is still sitting as residents in across Brooklyn and in Far Rockaway, Queens continue to boil their water as of Saturday…
Read the whole thing.
