Wow ... just wow.
This story via the always amazing Laura Rozen is just incredible.
Post Katrina, the mayor of New Orleans and some of his staff are hold up in a conference room at the Hyatt Hotel, trying to coordinate local response to the disaster. But they are completely cut off from the rest of the world by the near total breakdown of communication infrastructure.
Their solution? Find a working Ethernet port in the hotel and turn staff member Scott Domke's laptop into a phone using the personal VoIP account he had set up with Vonage . That one laptop handled all the city officials communications with the outside world for the next 5 days!
To meet their own communications and organization needs as the mayors team directed local response to the disaster, several staff members accompanied by the New Orleans chief of police, borrowed a military hum-vee and looted a local Office Depot for phones, fax machines, routers, printers and a server to handle email.
The mayors team set up it's own infrastructure while living like dogs in the middle of what is no doubt the biggest natural disaster in our countries history!
But wait, according to the article there were only 5 cots and about a dozen people living in the conference room. So my comment about living like dogs is totally inaccurate.
Why?
Because my dog, like most, has her own fucking bed!
The mayor's team lived "way fucking worse that dogs" for over a week and still managed to hack together their own computer and communications infrastructure to support the local disaster relief efforts!
I would say something snarky hear about how it's too bad the mayor and his crew weren't in charge of FEMA, but it would be undignified. The mayor and his crew stayed in the middle of this disaster, sacrificing personal comfort and security, and risking life and limb in order to save what they could of their city and it's people. They took the implied promises that elected officials make to their constituents seriously and stayed to fight for their town to the bitter end.
And what did our federal government do?
Post Katrina, the mayor of New Orleans and some of his staff are hold up in a conference room at the Hyatt Hotel, trying to coordinate local response to the disaster. But they are completely cut off from the rest of the world by the near total breakdown of communication infrastructure.
Their solution? Find a working Ethernet port in the hotel and turn staff member Scott Domke's laptop into a phone using the personal VoIP account he had set up with Vonage . That one laptop handled all the city officials communications with the outside world for the next 5 days!
To meet their own communications and organization needs as the mayors team directed local response to the disaster, several staff members accompanied by the New Orleans chief of police, borrowed a military hum-vee and looted a local Office Depot for phones, fax machines, routers, printers and a server to handle email.
The mayors team set up it's own infrastructure while living like dogs in the middle of what is no doubt the biggest natural disaster in our countries history!
But wait, according to the article there were only 5 cots and about a dozen people living in the conference room. So my comment about living like dogs is totally inaccurate.
Why?
Because my dog, like most, has her own fucking bed!
The mayor's team lived "way fucking worse that dogs" for over a week and still managed to hack together their own computer and communications infrastructure to support the local disaster relief efforts!
I would say something snarky hear about how it's too bad the mayor and his crew weren't in charge of FEMA, but it would be undignified. The mayor and his crew stayed in the middle of this disaster, sacrificing personal comfort and security, and risking life and limb in order to save what they could of their city and it's people. They took the implied promises that elected officials make to their constituents seriously and stayed to fight for their town to the bitter end.
And what did our federal government do?
posted by mad science at 11:36 AM
2 Comments:
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Before Mad Science gets uncharactersistically dewey-eyed abouth the mayor of New Orleans, he should put things in context. Before doing so, let me make it clear that I deeply regret that, in our system of government, the President cannot be impeached for out and out incompetence. Certainly if the Democratic Party cannot make political hay out of this, they deserve to be kicked out too. At the next level down, the Governor of Louisiana also completely failed. Plenty of blame to go around, though I tend to believe that the biggest boss deserves the largest share of the blame.
That said, the mayor utterly failed in pre-hurricane planning, quite apart from running one of the most disfunctional cities in the country. The basic plan was to simply tell everyone to leave and hope they had the means to do so. Granted, he was merely the last in a long line of mayors who did nothing except preside over a corrupt and incompetent city administration; his post disaster actions may even have been admirable; but let us not pretend that trying to close the barn door after the horse is gone makes him a good farmer.
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