Word: blancos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Early Wednesday morning, Aug. 31, two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, Blanco was frantic. Without any aides along, she and her husband had made an unannounced visit to the Superdome the night before and seen how desperate the situation there was becoming. The arena was teeming, its roof was leaking, and people had begun dying. "They were scared; they were upset. A lot of emotions were coming from them. Some were sick. They needed their diabetes medicine," the Governor told TIME in an interview. "What we were dealing with was a minute-by-minute life...
...would mistake Blanco, 62, for Rudy Giuliani. In the first week after the storm hit, she came across as dazed and unsteady, at one moment in despair over "people probably who are on drugs, who are threatening other people, who are causing our rescue effort to stall"; at another, declaring her troops had "M-16s, and they're locked and loaded...
Whether she did that as effectively or as forcefully as the catastrophe demanded is the question that now haunts the Governor. Should Blanco have told Bush she needed 7,000 cots? 200 boats? The 82nd Airborne? "I didn't give him a checklist or anything," she acknowledged in an interview. Nor should she have had to, her aides insist. Fumed one: "That's like telling a drowning man that you are not going to help him until he asks for a life preserver...
...with the exception of the mayor, no one was in a better position than Blanco to know precisely what was needed and how soon. Not until the following day--Thursday, Sept. 1--did she come up with specifics: 40,000 troops; urban search-and-rescue teams; buses; amphibious personnel carriers; mobile morgues; trailers of water, ice and food; base camps; staging areas; housing; and communications systems...
...Blanco is not the first Governor to learn those kinds of lessons the hard way. In 1992 Florida Governor Lawton Chiles came under withering criticism for waiting three days after the destruction from Hurricane Andrew before making a written request for the federal troops that were standing by with food and tents. As for FEMA, Chiles later said ruefully, it "may be well meaning, but they have no clout in the initial phase ... You've got to loudly and strongly and probably with all kinds of paper tell the White House what you need...