Media Matters, Facts Don't

Media Matters might benefit by hiring people who can do simple math and Google searches.

In a recent article, "A.S.", a man who claims to be a "journalist", accused Jack Kelly, and by extension myself, of spreading "falsehoods" about Katrina relief:

Claim #1: Federal government couldn't have had "preposition[ed] assets" near New Orleans ready to immediately assist relief effort

Kelly sought to defend the federal government's much-criticized response to the hurricane by citing an anonymous "former Air Force logistics officer" who claimed on the weblog Molten Thought that "[y]ou cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region." Kelly then adopted the point, declaring that "Navy ships sailing from Norfolk [Naval Shipyard in Virginia] can't be on the scene immediately."

In fact, a Navy ship -- the USS Bataan -- was "preposition[ed]" off the Louisiana coast ready to aid Katrina victims but was deprived of needed guidance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as the Chicago Tribune reported on September 4.

Moreover, the Bush administration did not send a hospital ship to New Orleans from Baltimore until four days after the levees were breached. Kelly wrote that the Army Corps of Engineers had by September 10 "begun pumping water out of New Orleans." But James Lee Witt, FEMA director in the Clinton administration, said that both efforts should have happened much sooner: "[I]n the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby."

The notion that the Bataan was in position for relief efforts and somehow prevented from doing so through FEMA incompetence has already been thoroughly debunked by Powerline.

Of note is the memo Lt Commander Sean Kelly of the Bataan sent to Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly:

USNORTHCOM was prepositioned for response to the hurricane, but as per the National Response Plan, we support the lead federal agency in disaster relief --in this case, FEMA. The simple description of the process is the state requests federal assistance from FEMA which in turn may request assistance from the military upon approval by the president or Secretary of Defense. Having worked the hurricanes from last year as well as Dennis this year, we knew that FEMA would make requests of the military -- primarily in the areas of transportation, communications, logistics, and medicine. Thus we began staging such assets and waited for the storm to hit.

The biggest hurdles to responding to the storm were the storm itself -- couldn't begin really helping until it passed -- and damage assessment -- figuring out which roads were passable, where communications and power were out, etc. Military helos began damage assessment and SAR on Tuesday. Thus we had permission to operate as soon as it was possible. We even brought in night SAR helos to continue the mission on Tuesday night.

The President and Secretary of Defense did authorize us to act right away and are not to blame on this end. Yes, we have to wait for authorization, but it was given in a timely manner.

To the larger issue of prepositioned assets, keep in mind that the Navy has exactly 7 WASP-class ships. Since these are typically used to support Marine brigades in amphibious assault operations, I would presume they aren't simply waiting around to be deployed domestically. Given these ships' capabilities (including a 600-bed hospital, the largest of anything short of a hospital ship), one ship could at least produce enough potable water to keep all of the 100,000 survivors hydrated, presuming they could be reached. The real trouble was search-and-rescue, since around 70% of these survivors were not clustered at the Superdome and Convention Center, but rather scattered about the flooded city, thanks to the failure of their mayor to implement the evacuation plan.

"A.S." also claims Kelly got the facts around the stranded buses wrong. Bill Hobbs demonstrates that working for Media Matters apparently means being perpetually ignorant of basic math. The 100,000 residents estimated to have been in New Orleans when the levees broke could have been evacuated to Baton Rouge (75 miles north) in four roundtrips of the 500 or so buses "A.S." claims were actually available. Even with the traffic jams, this could have been done within 24 hours, certainly within 48.

Of course, Nagin and Blanco weren't limited to 500 school and transit buses. They could have chartered buses, as enterprising tourists stranded in a New Orleans hotel after the levees broke did before it was commandeered.

Or they could simply have filled the train Amtrak sent down there for the express purpose of evacuating residents, which Nagin refused to fill and which went back empty:

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

That night, Mayfield picked up his phone again, to make sure Govs. Blanco and Barbour understood the potential for disaster. "I wanted to be able to go to sleep that night," he said. He told Barbour that Katrina had the potential to be a "Camille-like storm," referring to the August 1969 hurricane with 200-mph winds, and warned Blanco that this one would be a "big, big deal." Blanco was still unsure that Nagin fully understood, and urged Mayfield to call him personally.

"I told him, 'This is going to be a defining moment for a lot of people,' " Mayfield recalled.

Must be more conservative bias at The Washington Post.

Trains run pretty frequently to and from the ports. Was this the only opportunity for residents to hop one? Did any trains leave in the 24 hours before the storm hit besides this one which might have carried residents to safety?

If the military did what they typically do in the face of hurricanes, a lot of aircraft and military vehicles left the region to avoid the storm. I'm sure they would have taken anybody who wanted to go, and even if they didn't, Blanco could have utilized Lousiana National Guard assets at any time.

You can bet truckers bugged out too, with plenty of space in those trailers, space which might have been occupied by evacuees.

Did the airlines leave aircraft at the New Orleans airports? I doubt it. Were they completely full on the way out of the Crescent City?

Here's a fantastic summary of Nagin and Blanco's absolute incompetence.

The Left can spin, spin, spin all they like, but they won't be able to explain away the failures of the city and state government in Louisiana, particularly when Mississippi took a much stronger beating from Katrina yet didn't suffer nearly the problems Louisianans did.

Wonder what the difference was?

Appendix:

Our original post.

Jack Kelly's article.