You Don't Expect Anyone to Have a Plan for Collecting Bodies, Do You?: "

By DHinMI

There are no plans for how (or even whether?) to collect all the bodies in Louisiana:

Nearly a full week after Hurricane Katrina, a rescue force the size of
an invading army had not yet begun the task of retrieving the bodies
Sunday. What's more, officials appeared to have no plan.


Daniel Martinez, a spokesman for FEMA working on Interstate 10 in
eastern New Orleans, said plans for body recovery 'are not being
released yet.'


Dozens of rescue workers questioned Monday said they knew of no
protocol or collection points for bodies; none said they had retrieved
even one of the many corpses seen floating in neighborhoods around the
city as they searched for survivors.


Scores of rescue workers this week repeated the same mantra, over and
over: We can't worry about the dead; we're still trying to save the
living.


But as rescue teams across the city said they had checked nearly every
house for survivors, the enormity of the death that lay in Hurricane
Katrina's wake came into sharp focus even as the plans for taking care
of the dead remained murky.

Sure, why develop a plan for dealing with the bodies. It's not as if it's a health risk, is it? Or it's not like there's a limited time to collect the bodies before decomposition or mutilation by vermin and stray or wild animals will make them unrecognizable, thus denying whatever solace the loved ones of the dead may get from at least being able to bury their dead.

What's disgusting about this is that planning for dealing with the dead isn't something that has to be devised and discussed. There should already be a generic plan in place for any such disaster. Somebody should be able to email an electronic file, and the crisis managers should be able to start assigning tasks based on the preexisting plans. And from the comments of former FEMA officials with the agency during the Clinton administration, there almost certainly were plans for just about every contingency presented by Katrina. Just like how almost everything that's happened in Iraq was forseen by people expert and experienced in any of the relevant competencies or knowledge areas, almost every problem wrought by Katrina had been anticipated, and there were plans in place for addressing the problems. The Bush administration appears to have either ignored the plans, tossed them out, or is just completely incapable of even following the plans they had been given.

The failure of the Bush administration to support the local and state governments trying to contain the damage and death caused by Katrina is bad enough. But the callous incompetence of the Bush administration wasn't only a failure to protect Americans from the horrific deaths by drowning and neglect, it was a failure to protect the innocent from the depraved:

Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks stepped through the food
service entrance of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Monday,
flipped on the light at the end of his machine gun, and started
pointing out bodies.




'Don't step in that blood - it's contaminated,' he said. 'That one with his arm sticking up in the air, he's an old man.'



Then he shined the light on the smaller human figure under the white sheet next to the elderly man.




'That's a kid,' he said. 'There's another one in the freezer, a 7-year-old with her throat cut.'




He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor.

'There's an old woman,' he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a
sheet. 'I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to
death,' he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair.


Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40
more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. 'It's not on, but at
least you can shut the door,' said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson...

Many trapped by flood waters in shelters found their own ways of dealing with those who died in their midst.


Near an elementary school at Poland and St. Claude avenues, Dwight and
Wilber Rhodes, two brothers, said they had tried to save a middle-aged
man and woman at the Convention Center who appeared to have drowned.


'We performed CPR on them, but they were already dead,' Dwight Rhodes
said. 'So we took the food out of the freezer and put the bodies in.'


Of the four bodies that lay just inside the food service entrance of
the Convention Center, the woman in the wheelchair rattled Brooks the
most. When he found her two days before among the sea of suffering in
front of the Convention Center where one of the last refugee camps
evacuated, her husband sat next to her. He had only one concern when
Brooks and some of his comrades carted her away.




'Bring me back my wheelchair,' he recalled the man telling him.


One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years
old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was
gang-raped.


'There was an old lady that said the little girl had been raped by two
or three guys, and that she had told another unit. But they said they
couldn't do anything about it with all the people there,' Brooks said.
'I would have put him in cuffs, stuck him in the freezer and left him
there.'


Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year
of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing
comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center,
where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.


'I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,' said
Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat
decomposing. 'In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's
just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping
people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is
just 300 miles south of where I live.'

Anarchy in America. It's bad enough that the Bush administration failed to do everything possible before 9-11 to protect Americans from terrorists. It's bad enough that the Bush administration, by not deploying enough soldiers and outfiting soldiers and their vehicles with sufficient armor, didn't do everything possible to protect American soldiers in Iraq from death and maiming. It's bad enough that the Bush administration didn't do everything possible to prevent people dying awful deaths while they waited in vain to be rescued in the aftermath of Katrina. But doing so little to prevent 7 year olds from having their throats cut and 5 year olds from being gang raped demonstrates that the President and his administration can't even be counted on to try to protect us from ourselves.

"

(Via The Next Hurrah.)