[Chapter-delegates] Condolences from Indonesia

[Gene Gaines]

On Sunday, September 4, 2005, 9:49:03 AM, Irwan wrote:

> To the people of the United States

> We share your loss and grieve over the disaster in New Orleans.
> As it is still fresh in our memory what happened earlier in Aceh, we
> understand what kind of sadness and sorrow you are going through, therefore
> if there is anything we can do to help, please do not hesitate to let us
> know.
> We suggest that all of us must work to find preventive solutions so that in
> the future, tragedies such as these can be avoided.

> On behalf of Indonesian members

> Irwan Effendi - secretary

Irwan,

Thank you so much for your thoughts.

Much appreciated.

I have thought long and hard about my statement below, but these
things need to be said. Just as many people in the U.S. were
interested in what really happened in Aceh, Malaysia, Sri Lanka,
etc. with the tsunami, I believe many people in other countries
are interested in what is happening with our disaster along the
U.S. Gulf Coast. What is happening in New Orleans screams out to
exposed for all to see.

A personal note. I am now living near Washington DC, but was
born and spent much of my early life in New Orleans. My father
is buried in New Orleans. So many of my boyhood friends have old
family homes along the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama coast
lines. All gone now.

Many people here will be working to assist the disaster victims.

But it must be stated that this hurricane caused two disasters.
Two disasters, very different, and must be dealt with in very
different ways. This is painful and embarrassing, but some facts
about the two disasters need to be said.

 1) The hurricane missed New Orleans, passing just to the east,
    with strength to inflict significant but not catastrophic
    damage in the city. It was the breaks in the levees around
    New Orleans that caused the great tragedy there. Could the
    levee breaks and subsequent flooding have been prevented?
    Yes. But soon after the present Bush administration took
    power, ongoing work on the levees, already in progress, was
    stopped by cutting the funding. Several new projects,
    critical to maintaining the integrity of the levees, were
    halted. Local officials, Louisiana elected officials to our
    national Congress, all raised their voices in protest of
    these cuts. In speech after speech and newspaper article
    after article, strong voices were raised, warning that the
    levee maintenance work was critical, and would open the city
    to flooding by a hurricane if not done. The levee work was
    not restarted. Why? Statements were made as to why the funds
    were needed elsewhere: (a) the coming war in Iraq (big U.S.
    firms can collect US$30,000 per month per employee, charge
    US$1,000 a day to feed soldiers) and (b) tax cuts for the
    most wealthy Americans.

    I was born in Charity Hospital in New Orleans, an excellent
    hospital staffed by two universities.  My family has been
    treated there for many generations.  As the business of
    health care in the United States has been privatized and
    hospitals turned into profit-making large corporations,
    Charity Hospital has become essentially a hospital for the
    poor, for those who do not have medical insurance.  (If I
    recall correctly) it is the oldest hospital in the U.S., a
    huge skyscraper building on one of the major streets.  At
    any time after the hurricane, large Army trucks could drive
    to the hospital.  But none were sent.  For five days after
    the hurricane, the hospital and many hundreds of medical
    staff and critically-ill patients were abandoned, forgotten.
    Generators failed, out of gas or flooded.  Of course,
    hospital emergency generators are expected to last only for
    a limited time, until help arrives.  But no help was sent to
    the hospital.  No power, no lights, no ventilation, no air
    conditioning, no water, no toilet or ways of disposing of
    waste.  No tests could be run on dying patients, electric
    breathing and pumping machines had to be operated by hand,
    day-after-day.  Food, water, medicines ran out and had to
    be apportioned among the most ill patients.  Nurses and
    doctors went without food or water for days, working through
    the nights, saving water for patients, giving themselves
    saline intravenous injections in place of food and water.
    There are thousands of suitable military trucks are within
    several hours drive of New Orleans.  Many were loaded with
    water, food, emergency supplies, but were withheld and not
    sent to the city.  I have been told by one emergency
    worker that there was some concern that Federal managers
    might be criticized if their trucks were damaged by water
    or lost, after one convoy of trucks were sent to a flooded
    parking areas and reportedly were flooded.

    Doctors in Charity Hospital, using cell phones as long as
    they lasted, made hundreds of phones calls for help -- to
    Federal officials, to other hospitals, to news sources --
    describing the horrific conditions and begging for help. It
    is my understanding that no serious effort was made to reach
    the hospital, or to at least air-drop water, food, medical
    supplies. No help went to Charity Hospital for FIVE DAYS
    after the hurricane. FIVE DAYS.

    News people have driven into the city with satellite TV
    transmission equipment, looked around, sent out live
    reports, and driven out again. But no help went to Charity
    Hospital. This failure to provide help was repeated over and
    over again in the city. Today, more than seven days after
    the hurricane winds were over, significant numbers of people
    are still trapped in their apartments, or the roofs or
    attics of their small houses, without any food or water
    other then what was at hand. Still trapped.

    Literally many hundreds of people skilled in disaster and
    flood rescue, offering boats, busses, planes, even trains,
    have been turned away from the New Orleans area because of
    red tape. Just one example, my local Loudoun County police
    department received a frantic call for help from the head of
    police in an area near New Orleans -- an area where people
    were dying in demolished buildings, corpses were laying
    unattended, thousands of people were without water or food.
    Power was out and phones were down, but the official calling
    for help was able to get through on a cell phone, his call
    "Please, please, we are desperate for help, can you send
    your people." My local police head (1,500 miles from New
    Orleans) went into emergency mode, assembled a large team of
    his officers, vehicles, food and water, tents and supplies
    so his people could be self-sustaining, and promised the
    people calling for help that his men were on the way. After
    driving hundreds of miles, they were stopped and told to go
    back home -- because the local police head asking for help,
    in the midst of death and devastation, had not gone through
    the proper channels.  It is now 7 days after the hurricane,
    and my local officials still have not received permission
    for their police officers to begin travel to Louisiana.

    To summarize, the flood in New Orleans is the result of man
    -- four years ago stopping maintenance work on protective
    levees (similar to the Dutch dike system) needed to protect
    the city, then the U.S. Federal government failing to plan
    for such a disaster (For example, providing at least some
    emergency disaster communications. There are none.) then the
    Federal officials stepping in to "take control" and actually
    preventing local officials, who know well what to do, from
    taking needed action.

    Are my statements accurate?  While people are dying, having
    waited more than a week for rescue, and while there are
    corpses all over this American city rotting in the hot sun,
    equipment is being diverted from rescue work to create
    "photo opportunity" scenes for the touring President of the
    United States.

    I can take you to a small town where a school building was
    used to house people rescued from New Orleans, crowded
    together with no electricity, no water, no toilet
    facilities, no food, no ventilation, no communication to
    their loved ones, desperate and with some seriously ill.
    This school building is across the street from an Air Force
    base where troops were stationed, playing basketball and
    lounging in the sun -- with food, water, medical facilities.
    But the troops were not permitted to leave their base to
    help the people in desperate need, and the victims were not
    permitted to enter the Air Force Base.

    As upsetting as the above statements are, they are true, and
    need to be said. For shame. For shame.

    Remember, it was NOT wind damage that took New Orleans, that
    destroyed the city. Yes, there was a hurricane. The city has
    survived such hurricanes many times before -- it was the
    collapse of two levees that happened a day after the winds
    subsided. Is this high water that collapsed the levees an
    unusual event for New Orleans? Think about it. The
    Mississippi River rises and floods in the Spring of almost
    every year. Floods and threats to the levee system are not
    new, and not unusual. New Orleans knows how to deal with
    high water threats. But not if the Federal government both
    (a) stops work on maintaining the levees, and (b) ties the
    hands of local officials for rescue efforts.

 2) The hurricane disaster along the Gulf coastline to the east
    of New Orleans is a different situation.  This was truly an
    event of nature, the damage done by the hurricane and mostly
    by the wall of water pushed on shore by the winds, what is
    called a storm surge.  I have lived through hurricanes on
    the Gulf Coast, there can be devastating damage from winds,
    but the huge wall of water that swept through is unique.
    The devastation is terrible, many lives were lost, but I see
    this as an act of nature, not an act of inhuman greed on the
    part of man.

My apologies for the above, but it needs to be said.

It also must be said that many, many good people are working
night and day on rescue efforts in New Orleans and along the
Gulf Coast. They need to be applauded.

I also must say that the several hundred thousand black and poor
people in New Orleans are among the kindest, most moral people
in the world. They will stop their activities to help others,
they willingly share their food and money with others in need.
They are not disposable, and they are not garbage. To see them
treated in this fashion offends me deeply.

I expect that some good Americans will wish to protest that I
should not embarrass my county in such fashion, that the ISOC
list is not the place for this, or perhaps wish to say that
this did not happen. If you feel I am wrong, I would like to
hear from you.

    







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