From: John Cuccia 

On Sat, 4 Mar 2006 18:54:24 +0100, "Phil Payne"
 wrote:

>> And again, you know squat about how things work here.
>
>So you 'let 1,300 people die because "That's the way things are
done here"?

There's that tittle again.

No one "let" 1300 people die.  They died for many reasons
(stubborness being a primary one), but very few died of neglect.  There
were cases of neglect, like the 32 elderly nursing home residents who were
abandoned by their caretakers, but they were the exception, and, in that
instance the proprietors are being prosecuted.

http://dolinar.com/column/politics/katrina.html
one of the largest rescue operations in history saved more than 50,000
people by boat and helicopter. In this Dunkirk on the Mississippi, Coast
Guard and other military units, volunteers, and state and local first
responders delivered thousands from death by drowning, dehydration,
heatstroke, fire, starvation, and disease. The three goats of Katrina —
FEMA’s Michael Brown, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and Mayor Nagin — had little if
any role; in fact, because local communication was wiped out by the storm,
they may not even have known about the scale and success of the rescue
operation.

....

The Coast Guard — a branch of the much-maligned Homeland Security
Department — was far and away the main player. It claimed more than 24,000
rescues, and evacuated another 9,000 from hospitals and nursing homes. The
Coasties got there first with the most — 16 search-and-rescue helicopters.
Equipped with night-vision gear and hoists, these first units, joined by
many more, ran 24 hours a day, every day, for a week. Preliminary reports
showed that on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the Coast Guard rescued
3,000 to 5,000 people from rooftops. The operation grew to hundreds of
boats and 50 helicopters. Even barges were commandeered to load hundreds of
survivors at a time who were stranded on broken levees.

....

At the state level, the Louisiana National Guard’s 1-244th Aviation
Battalion and 812th Med-Evac unit moved helicopters — ten Black Hawks and
six Hueys — into New Orleans behind the storm. “It was like a scene from a
Stephen King movie,” says Capt. Shawn Vaughn, who piloted a Black Hawk. “We
just got back from Iraq and saw nothing like this kind of devastation
there.” Most of the crews were from New Orleans, and knew the city well — a
boon for rescue operations. (The regrettable underside of this familiarity
was that most lost everything they had in Katrina. One pilot was plucked
from his sunken home by his own unit, and began flying again a few hours
later.) The Black Hawk operation was a textbook example of quick-and-dirty
improvisation: Lacking rescue hoists, crews adopted the nervy tactic of
landing directly on rooftops to take on passengers, while applying power to
keep the helicopters light so they wouldn’t collapse the storm-weakened
buildings. Some stripped out their seating to increase capacity to 30
passengers standing, or to carry stretchers for the elderly and disabled.

....

Not everyone flew multimillion-dollar helicopters. Also on Monday, the
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries had 250 agents and their
boats in the water, along with volunteers from inside the agency, according
to Lt. Col. Keith LaCaze. His operation claimed 20,000 rescues by September
8 — at which point it suspended calls for more volunteers and boats. LaCaze
says many of these rescues were of people facing imminent death. “There
were a lot of people we rescued on the first night — in houses and in
attics where the water was almost over their head. There were still many
people the next day in danger of drowning and dehydration.”

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