Natural Disaster Deaths... Who's Fault Is It?

Ok so today I was reading yesterday's NY Times and I came across the article talking about the governor of Louisiana being summons to testify in the Hurricane Katrina deaths that killed 35 enfeeble nursing home patients at St. Rita's in St. Bernand. The owners, Salvador and Mabel Mangano, face the charges of negligent homicide.

It appeared to me that this situation was more of a blame game and Gov. Kathleen Bablineaux Blanco was not having it. John Reed, lawyer for the Manganos, stated, "You, Governor, never issued an order of mandatory evacuation." Ms. Blanco responded that is was not how the chain of command usually happened. She states that the local officials would have given the mandatory evacuation to the local people.

OK so let me get this straight... the family of the victims are blaming the owners, the owners are blaming the Governor, and the Governor is blaming local officials!

The defense then asked Ms. Blanco why Johnny B. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary in charge of nursing home evacuations, had "failed to do so." She responded with... (and i'm paraphrasing) even though there was an emergancy plan in place, no one had faced a natural disaster of this magnitude and "Everybody was scrambling to make sense out of a situation that had nothing sensible about it."

This is exactly the point of my blog today. God Bless the people who died in Hurricane Katrina but... this was an accident! I understand that when a person is hurting inside, they need someone to blame. America is getting so "sue happy" they forget that people are human, and mistakes will be made! This was a terrible tragedy but will putting someone in jail really make you feel better? Think about it!!