The Federal Emergency Management Agency exists to support local and state agencies in planning for and responding to a disaster. The mayor of New Orleans took this agency and the president to task for the poor quality of their responses. He should have spoken into a mirror.

Apparently, neither his administration nor previous city administrations had any substantive plan in place for evacuating a city everyone knew would flood when the inevitable Category 4 hurricane hit this below-sea-level target. Apparently, this neglect of planning also extended to various state administrations.

Two images make my point. Image one: The picture of hundreds of flooded, parked school buses in New Orleans suggests that no evacuation plan for the city existed. Even a rudimentary plan would have utilized those ignored, parked buses in moving poor people out of the city.

Image two: A superhighway outside New Orleans whose four outbound lanes were clogged with stalled traffic and whose four inbound lanes were lightly spotted with a few random cars headed into the city. Any rudimentary state effort to accommodate evacuation, if it had existed, would have secured all lanes for outbound traffic and managed choke points in advance.

Federal agencies exist to assist in planning for and responding to disaster, not making up for a lack of local and state preplanning.

Neither they, nor the president, should bear the onus for local and state neglect to secure its people’s safety.

Leonard Hoy, Greenwood

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