Nagin said slow response cost lives Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005 7:57 p.m. Frustrated and grieving, Mayor Ray Nagin on Sunday again ripped the painfully slow response of state and federal authorities to the plight of tens of thousands of stranded New Orleanians in the days following Hurricane Katrina, saying their inaction cost lives and caused needless misery. Nagin singled out Gov. Kathleen Blanco for criticism, saying that the governor had asked for 24 hours to think over a decision when time was a luxury that no one, especially refugees, had. "When the president and the governor got here, I said, 'Mr. President, Madame Governor, you two have to get in synch. If you don't, more people are going to die." Blanco and Bush met privately at his insistence, Nagin said, after which Bush came out and told Nagin that he had given Blanco two options, and she requested a full day to decide. "It would have been great if we could have walked off Air Force One and told the world we had it all worked out," Nagin said. "It didn't happen, and more people died." Police spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo said Sunday that "about a dozen" corpses were being taken out of the Superdome. The convention center "has not been swept yet," he said. Apart from the deaths, Nagin said people needlessly suffered, particularly at the Dome. "There was suffering at an unprecedented level in this city, at this place and at the convention center," he said. "This is one of the richest countries in the world. I'm looking at my city and I see death and destruction, and I see a lot of it. And I'm pissed." Nagin said while much of the suffering was borne by poor people, it would be a mistake to think it was limited to the poor. "When the final script is written, they're going to see that everyone suffered," he said. "Not just black people - white people, Hispanics, people from Italy. At the convention center, you had tourists, you had people from hospitals, you had a mixture of people." Asked whether he himself bore responsibility for the debacle, Nagin responded: "I'll take what responsibility I have to take. But let me ask you this: When you have a city of 500,000 people, and you have a Category 5 bearing down on you, and the best you've ever done is evacuate 60 percent of the people. and there's never been a mandatory evacuation in this city's history. "I did that, and I elevated the level of stress to the citizens. I said to make sure you have a fricking axe in your house. And as a last resort, there are no buildings in the city to withstand a Category 3 storm other than the Superdome, and when that filled up, we started sending them to the convention center. You tell me what else I was supposed to do." Nagin said the government needs to learn quickly from its nightmarishly slow reaction to Katrina. "Our response to a significant disaster is appalling," he said. "What went down is a national and state disgrace." The mayor said his next fear is that the decomposing bodies of those who died in the storm and its wake will spread disease, via mosquitoes, across the region if the corpses aren't picked up soon. Again, he feels the response has lagged. "I requested a crop duster as soon as possible," the mayor said. "I still don't see a plane flying.
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