By DHinMI
There are no plans for how (or even whether?) to collect all the bodies in Louisiana:
Nearly a full week after Hurricane Katrina, a rescue force the size of an invading army had not yet begun the task of retrieving the bodies Sunday. What's more, officials appeared to have no plan.
Daniel Martinez, a spokesman for FEMA working on Interstate 10 in eastern New Orleans, said plans for body recovery "are not being released yet."
Dozens of rescue workers questioned Monday said they knew of no protocol or collection points for bodies; none said they had retrieved even one of the many corpses seen floating in neighborhoods around the city as they searched for survivors.
Scores of rescue workers this week repeated the same mantra, over and over: We can't worry about the dead; we're still trying to save the living.
But as rescue teams across the city said they had checked nearly every house for survivors, the enormity of the death that lay in Hurricane Katrina's wake came into sharp focus even as the plans for taking care of the dead remained murky.
Sure, why develop a plan for dealing with the bodies. It's not as if it's a health risk, is it? Or it's not like there's a limited time to collect the bodies before decomposition or mutilation by vermin and stray or wild animals will make them unrecognizable, thus denying whatever solace the loved ones of the dead may get from at least being able to bury their dead.
What's disgusting about this is that planning for dealing with the dead isn't something that has to be devised and discussed. There should already be a generic plan in place for any such disaster. Somebody should be able to email an electronic file, and the crisis managers should be able to start assigning tasks based on the preexisting plans. And from the comments of former FEMA officials with the agency during the Clinton administration, there almost certainly were plans for just about every contingency presented by Katrina. Just like how almost everything that's happened in Iraq was forseen by people expert and experienced in any of the relevant competencies or knowledge areas, almost every problem wrought by Katrina had been anticipated, and there were plans in place for addressing the problems. The Bush administration appears to have either ignored the plans, tossed them out, or is just completely incapable of even following the plans they had been given.
The failure of the Bush administration to support the local and state governments trying to contain the damage and death caused by Katrina is bad enough. But the callous incompetence of the Bush administration wasn't only a failure to protect Americans from the horrific deaths by drowning and neglect, it was a failure to protect the innocent from the depraved:
Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday, flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started pointing out bodies.
"Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated," he said. "That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man."
Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.
"That's a kid," he said. "There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut."
He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.
"There's an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.
Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson...Many trapped by flood waters in shelters found their own ways of dealing with those who died in their midst.
Near an elementary school at Poland and St. Claude avenues, Dwight and Wilber Rhodes, two brothers, said they had tried to save a middle-aged man and woman at the Convention Center who appeared to have drowned.
"We performed CPR on them, but they were already dead," Dwight Rhodes said. "So we took the food out of the freezer and put the bodies in."
Of the four bodies that lay just inside the food service entrance of the Convention Center, the woman in the wheelchair rattled Brooks the most. When he found her two days before among the sea of suffering in front of the Convention Center where one of the last refugee camps evacuated, her husband sat next to her. He had only one concern when Brooks and some of his comrades carted her away.
"Bring me back my wheelchair," he recalled the man telling him.
One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was gang-raped.
"There was an old lady that said the little girl had been raped by two or three guys, and that she had told another unit. But they said they couldn't do anything about it with all the people there," Brooks said. "I would have put him in cuffs, stuck him in the freezer and left him there."
Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.
"I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat decomposing. "In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live."
Anarchy in America. It's bad enough that the Bush administration failed to do everything possible before 9-11 to protect Americans from terrorists. It's bad enough that the Bush administration, by not deploying enough soldiers and outfiting soldiers and their vehicles with sufficient armor, didn't do everything possible to protect American soldiers in Iraq from death and maiming. It's bad enough that the Bush administration didn't do everything possible to prevent people dying awful deaths while they waited in vain to be rescued in the aftermath of Katrina. But doing so little to prevent 7 year olds from having their throats cut and 5 year olds from being gang raped demonstrates that the President and his administration can't even be counted on to try to protect us from ourselves.
Okay, I realize this is a semi-stupid idea, and not one I'd ever expect the "no one tells us what to do" Bush gang to even consider, but...
If the folks who worked FEMA under Clinton had plans for things like this, and their successors don't -- can we issue a call for the predecessors to step in and take over? They can't have forgotten everything they knew in four years. And even if it takes them a while to get back up to speed, won't they be further along than a bunch of people who aren't even thinking about it?
I know; I'm starting to sound like a disgruntled street-mutterer. But that's how far this situation has reduced me. I jus want to try something, anything, that will make things a little better, a little faster.
Posted by: demtom | September 06, 2005 at 14:12
the predecessor is James lee Witt and he now works for Blanco. Expect LA to organize it.
Posted by: DemFromCT | September 06, 2005 at 14:21
Sure, why develop a plan for dealing with the bodies.
Most of the plans for collecting and burying bodies probably involve (A) counting them, (B) assembling them together in a central site [that may be accessible to photographers], (C) burials and memorial services -- many, many burials and memorial services.
I think they're hoping the bodies will just sort of go away. We'll see how that pans out for them.
Posted by: emptypockets | September 06, 2005 at 14:23
See Froomkin today...
Bush failed his challenfge; let's see how thwe press does with theirs, and how they will handle the morbid details of body counts etc.
Posted by: DemFromCT | September 06, 2005 at 14:44
But with every body removed from the attics of New Orleans over the coming weeks, America will remember the colossal failure of government to protect its people.
Bush failed his challenfge; let's see how thwe press does with theirs, and how they will handle the morbid details of body counts etc.
I so hate this bunch of thugs, hacks, legacies, bagmen and gross incompetents for so many reasons, but one of them is that they have me thinking in terms of conspiracies, like "is it possible they're not doing anything to collect the bodies so that the death toll will seem lower than it really was.
Posted by: DHinMI | September 06, 2005 at 14:51
Jesus, what the hell did they think was going to happen? Nobody was going to die? Or not very many people were going to die?
As for this:
Of course, bodies can be identified using dental records, but you have to have some idea of who the body was, more or less, based on location, people who are reported missing, etc. Then you'd have to pull dental records and compare... um, you get the idea.
It's damned near impossible, or at least it would be very, very difficult.
</forensics nerd>
Maybe I'm wrong, though.
Posted by: Plutonium Page | September 06, 2005 at 15:15
although the thought occurs to me, i think not. That's up to the locals to do.
I also think they call it the 'worst nautiral disaster' on purpose... but of ourse it wasn't. Spanish flu killed 975,000 people in 1918-9. But to bring that up would raise preparedness questions they don't wish to and can't answer.
Posted by: DemFromCT | September 06, 2005 at 15:34
Did you all see this?
IMO, No president, no administration should be allowed to continue if this is true. That should be a new constitutional amendment. If >30,000 Americans die at home for any reason, you must resign, period!
Neil
http://www.t-g.com/story/1116806.html
Funeral director deploys to hurricane region
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
By Clint Confehr
A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.
"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.
Posted by: NG | September 06, 2005 at 21:25
Oh my God...
Posted by: rj | September 06, 2005 at 21:28
"Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics" is sonething to keep in mind here.
A "generic plan" is useless. It's not like you can take a task list, assign jobs, and expect things to start rolling. For plans to be effective, you need specifics -- you need to know available locations, sources of supply, staffing, and methods of getting people and materials from one point to another. You need to evaluate contingencies and have backup plans if problems develop in the primary plan. That's all stuff that CANNOT be done without in-depth local knowledge and forethough.
Posted by: fiat lux | September 07, 2005 at 14:50