Why would I lie or fake this information?  Are you dense?

I’ve got to keep the caller on the line for the duration of all claims filed. MINIMUM claims filed at a time were 2.  I’d say that in about HALF of the claims, at least one vehicle was a 2005.  BRAND FUCKING NEW.

Most of their vehicles are all registered to the same person - a family matriarch or patriarch.  So while there might be 5 driver’s in a household, ONE PERSON owns the vehicles.  I’m the one sitting on the phone taking calls from them all day long.

Don’t put statistics up unless you can BACK them up.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4834204

Commentator Austin Bay did relief work with refugees fleeing Congo in 2002. He says criticism of the federal relief effort in the Gulf Coast springs from ignorance about the realities of giving aid.

Maegan - 07 September 2005 04:12 PM

Why would I lie or fake this information?  Are you dense?

Why would the Department of Transportation do likewise? Are you?

Most of their vehicles are all registered to the same person - a family matriarch or patriarch.  So while there might be 5 driver’s in a household, ONE PERSON owns the vehicles.

I repeat:
Percentage of African-American households without a vehicle: 24.1%
Percentage of same when household income below $15,000: 46.5%
(source: FHWA, Department of Transportation)

You made the claim (specifically, “Please do not think these people had nothing.  I have taken literally hundreds of claims from people who needed to file claims for MULTIPLE vehicles left in their driveways during the storm.  How did they get out?  By helicopter or boat.  BEFORE the water began to rise they made a conscious decision to remain home.”), you back it up. In the best-case scenario nearly a quarter of the people affected will have had their decision made for them, and statistically nearly half of those who had the least to start with will now have nothing, if they survived. These people will not call you or anyone like you, as they will not have insurance.

Percentage of African-Americans without insurance: 19.7%
Percentage of all races when household income below $25,000: 24.3%
Percentage of people officially living in poverty in LA: 16.8%
Percentage of people officially living in poverty in US: 12.8%
(source: The 2004 US Census at census.gov).

Don’t put statistics up unless you can BACK them up.

The statistics are your government’s.

I’m the one sitting on the phone taking calls from them all day long.

Yes, I bet it’s very busy after a CAT4 hurricane, and probably quite stressful. I would sympathise, but then you knew the hurricane was coming and yet you made a “conscious decision” to go on working didn’t you? Cry me a river.

i heard on NPR that we actually reacted to the tsunami faster than the hurricane. sorry but theres no link, i couldnt find it.

The comparisons people have been making between the speed with which the US sent aid to the tsunami victims and the speed with which aid has reached the hurricane victims haven’t really been complete.  They’ve really been comparing two separate things:  the speed with which aid was sent, and the speed with which aid was distributed. 

Of course the US was able to respond to the tsunami quickly.  The tsunami didn’t do any damage to the US.  American roads weren’t washed out, American airports weren’t flooded.  There was nothing to hinder America sending out supplies and aid.  And after the hurricane, the unaffected parts of the US were again able to quickly gather and send out aid for the victims.  So in both cases, the US was able to send help quickly.

And in both cases, the help that was sent wasn’t always able to reach the victims quickly.  Aid was slow to reach many people stranded on their roofs in New Orleans, and it was slow to reach many people left homeless by the tsunami.  In both cases, this was largely due to the disasters having totally wrecked the normal logistical infrastructure and system.  So overall, the reaction to the tsunami and the reaction to the hurricane have been about the same.

David, I tried locating the stats you mentioned

Percentage of African-American households without a vehicle: 24.1%
Percentage of same when household income below $15,000: 46.5%
(source: FHWA, Department of Transportation)

and was unable to, I am by no means saying you made this up but a link to said stats would be appreciated.

Where are those statistics referring to, anyway?  For all anybody knows, they could be African-American households in Point Barrow, Alaska.  How relevant are they to New Orleans?

There’s no single person or organization to blame for what’s happened after the hurricane, unless you decide to blame the hurricane itself.

On one level, many of the people who chose to stay in New Orleans are partly responsible for the current mess.  They had several days warning that the hurricane was coming, and it was expected that the city would have some severe flooding.  Granted, some people were physically unable to leave the city.  But many (quite likely most) of the people who remained behind were capable of leaving, but chose not to.  Out of all the tens of thousands of people who were stranded, many did have cars.  And even if somebody didn’t have a car, that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t leave.  They could get a ride out with a friend, or take public transport, or ride a bicycle, or ride a unicycle, or even walk.  It’s not like they would have had to travel thousands of miles.  All they had to do was leave the area that was below sea level, and then they could have stayed in one of the hundreds of hurricane shelters than were opened further inland in anticipation of the storm.  But instead they remained at home, and the relief effort has to be diluted to deal with all of them rather than the few hundred or thousand people it would otherwise be able to concentrate on.

The Federal government’s response to the disaster does appear to be rather confused, but that’s largely not their fault.  They’re stepping in to what’s basically a giant vacuum and have to try to create order from that.  The New Orleans or the Louisiana government (I’m not sure which, really) seems to have not planned at all for this event.  They built some big levies around the city and decided that that was enough.  I’m sure the Dutch wonder what they were thinking.  There appears to be no pre-arranged plan to prevent or limit the flooding, no coordination, no plans on how to deal with the logistics of getting emergency supplies from place to place, no plan on how to clean up, no concept of where people were.  The New Orleans government didn’t even realize until well after the hurricane that the convention center there had been made into a hurricane shelter and that several thousand people were waiting there for food and water!  When the Federal government moves in to help the local government deal with something like a major disaster, it has to start by using the framework of the city or state government’s disaster plans in order for relief efforts to go quickly and smoothly.  They can’t set up an individual plan for every single possible disaster in every single town and city in the nation.  This time, there was no framework for the Federal government to start from.  They had to start from scratch on figuring out where people were, how to reach them, what they needed, etc.  It’s like expecting the fire department to quickly put out a fire when there is no water main provided, the streets are too narrow to get the fire trucks through easily, and nobody has told them exactly where the fire even is.

i believe the stas are for the entire nation acci since the site he claims to have gotten them from is a federal org and that is exactly why I requested a link, national stats are not very relevant to New Orleans and only serve to muddy the issue…in my opinion

Hmm, if they are national statistics and not New Orleans ones, then they really don’t mean anything in this situation.  It’s like saying that since the average length of rattlesnakes in the US is 3 feet long, then the rattlesnake under my house has to be 3 feet long.

run acci! run!