Hurricane Katrina

[KSigkid]

Originally posted by DeltAlum
You know, Rob, sometimes your nationalism and little digs even get to me.

Me too - which makes it very difficult for me to take his posts seriously at times. Really, it seems like he takes pleasure at misfortune in the U.S., and takes every opportunity possible to take a dig at our country.

Rob, that's certainly your right - but for someone who is so quick to point out the biases and agendas of others, you seem to have quite an agenda yourself.

[Honeykiss1974]

Sept. 16 will be a national day of prayer and rememberance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/12590373.htm

[RACooper]

Originally posted by DeltAlum
You know, Rob, sometimes your nationalism and little digs even get to me.

From a logistical standpoint, it's a hell of a lot easier for a group of 50 people to get to one particular area than it is for a huge rescue effort to get everywhere in an area the size of the United Kingdom.

Which isn't to excuse an overall dismal response from the US government.

That being said, I'm thankful for any help that our Canadian neighbors can offer.

I used the article to point out that a rescue response and team was put togther after the hurricane, and arrived in a somewhat more timely manner than the FEMA response - basically as saying: "here is some further concrete proof that FEMA dropped the ball".

Also I just thought that the article touched on an important break between what the Administration is promoting in it's press conferences and releases - and what the US and world media is reporting regarding the response to Hurrincane Katrina.

I could also have used an article discussing the Dutch experts on levee reconstruction, or the Swedish telecomunications equipment and technicians, or the German water pumps, or heck even the International Red Cross all being hampered by red tape in responding to the disaster... something that has grabbed a fair amount of air time on world media stations, or ink in the papers. I would hate to think that people are suffering or dying because of political gamemanship by anyone.

Now if the government has it's head in the sand with regards to the difficulties in any international response towards Katrina; one has to wonder if the same seemingly dumb/trivial governmental red-tape hampered or stalled the Federal response to Katrina. Further, I cynically wonder if the government's delays in approving or allowing some of the offered aid and equipment is somehow politically motivated as well - an agenda if you will - in order to mitigate the political damage caused by the slow response... you know making sure that American boots are firmly on the ground before allowing foreigners to participate.

But hey getting back to my main point - the seeming break between what the government and the media report... or even acknowledge in some cases. An example of this would be Cheney's on site interview today were a heckler yelled at him before being dragged away (I assume); a heckle/complaint which Cheney dismissed as saying that was the first bad remark he had heard about the government's response... or you could look at the CNN's interview of the minority leader today; were her perception was fully clouded by her obvious partisan agenda - an agenda that the interviewer called her on. To me the various branches of the government as well as the two parties are so disconected with the "non-political" world that they aren't getting or wanting to get a more complete picture - to the detriment of both America and it's people.

[wrigley]

How would it go over if President Bush and the rest of the cast involved for the breakdown in commmunication just say a group "I'm sorry"?

For the economists,bankers, etc... is it realistic to be able to start from scratch with just 2,000 dollars? How did FEMA come up with magic number?

[DeltAlum]

Originally posted by RACooper
"here is some further concrete proof that FEMA dropped the ball".

No question FEMA dropped the ball -- then laid an egg.

But the comparison is like apples and zebras.

They aren't even close in scope.

[AGDee]

Originally posted by wrigley
How would it go over if President Bush and the rest of the cast involved for the breakdown in commmunication just say a group "I'm sorry"?

For the economists,bankers, etc... is it realistic to be able to start from scratch with just 2,000 dollars? How did FEMA come up with magic number?

I'm hoping (and assuming) that the $2000 is a start, to tide them over for immediate needs, not the whole payment they'll receive down the line.

I just read that my flood insurance will be skyrocketing <sigh>. I better start saving for next year's premium.

[lifesaver]

An interesting article. A sad one tho.

From slate.com

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2125810&nav=tap1/


Don't Refloat- The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:19 PM PT

What's to rebuild?

Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

Only one politician, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, dared question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans as it was, where it was. On Wednesday, Aug. 31, while meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., he cited the geographical insanity of rebuilding New Orleans. "That doesn't make sense to me. … And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Hastert added.

For his candor and wisdom, Hastert was shouted down. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., and others interpreted his remarks as evidence of the Republican appetite for destruction when it comes to disaster victims. But if you read the entire interview—reproduced here courtesy of the Daily Herald—you might conclude that Hastert was speaking heresy, but he wasn't saying anything ugly or even Swiftian. Klaus Jacob seconded Hastert yesterday (Sept. 6) in a Washington Post op-ed. A geophysicist by training, he noted that Katrina wasn't even a worst-case scenario. Had the storm passed a little west of New Orleans rather than a little east, the "city would have flooded faster, and the loss of life would have been greater."

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New Orleans: that the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; that re-engineering the Mississippi River to control flooding has made New Orleans more vulnerable by denying it the deposits of sediment it needs to keep its head above water; that the aggressive extraction of oil and gas from the area has undermined the stability of its land.

"New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Why was it? Settlers built the original city on a curve of high flood land that the Mississippi River had deposited over eons, hence the nickname "Crescent City." But starting in the late 1800s and continuing into the early 20th century, developers began clearing and draining swamps behind the crescent, even dumping landfill into Lake Pontchartrain to extend the city.

To chart the aggressive reclamation, compare this map from 1798 with this one from 1908. Many of New Orleans' lower-lying neighborhoods, such as Navarre, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lake Terrace, and Pontchartrain Park, were rescued from the low-lying muck. The Lower Ninth Ward, clobbered by Katrina, started out as a cypress swamp, and by 1950 it was only half developed, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Even such "high" land as City Park suffered from flooding before the engineers intervened. By the historical standards of the 400-year-old city, many of the heavily flooded neighborhoods are fresh off the boat.

The call to rebuild New Orleans' levee system may be mooted if its evacuated residents decide not to return. The federal government, which runs the flood-insurance business, sold only 85,000 residential and commercial policies—this in a city of 188,000 occupied dwellings. Coverage is limited to $250,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they'll choose to rebuild in New Orleans, which will remain extra-vulnerable until the levees are rebuilt.

Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And how many of the city's well-off and wealthy workers—the folks who provide the city's tax base—will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won't be rebuilt.

Barbara Bush will be denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying yesterday that many of the evacuees she met in the Astrodome would prefer to stay in Texas. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by Katrina may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New Orleans' displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.

Page One of today's New York Times illustrates better than I can how the economic calculations of individuals battered by Katrina may contribute to the city's ultimate doom:

In her 19 years, all spent living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.

"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes restaurant.

New Orleans won't disappear overnight, of course. The French Quarter, the Garden District, West Riverside, Black Pearl, and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them out—and maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It's gone.

******

Apologies to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, Allen Toussaint, Tipitina's, Dr. John, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jelly Roll Morton, Jessie Hill, Lee Dorsey, the Meters, Robert Parker, Alvin Robinson, Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Stormy Weather, Huey "Piano" Smith, Aaron Neville and his brothers (falsetto is the highest expression of male emotion), Frankie Ford, Chris Kenner, Professor Longhair, Wynton Marsalis and family, Sidney Bechet, and Marshall Faulk. I await your hate mail at slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

[Honeykiss1974]

We just got an update this morning about our locations in NOLA and MS. We still have several hundred employees missing and unaccounted for.

[Honeykiss1974]

Now, I'm not all into the Dem vs Rep debates, but I did think this pic was funny.




I wonder did they realize what they wrote?

[Lindz928]

Originally posted by Honeykiss1974


I wonder did they realize what they wrote?

I would almost bet that they DID know what they wrote.

[Rudey]

Originally posted by wrigley
How would it go over if President Bush and the rest of the cast involved for the breakdown in commmunication just say a group "I'm sorry"?

For the economists,bankers, etc... is it realistic to be able to start from scratch with just 2,000 dollars? How did FEMA come up with magic number?

It is if you had nothing to begin with, didn't own your home, were poor, and probably had no job or a very low paying job.

So for a lot of people it's probably just fine...

-Rudey

[Rudey]

It's true but it's how you look at it. If Barbra Bush says it, certain people freak out. This guy wants the city to just not be rebuilt. David Brooks of the NYTimes said the exact same problems exist but that the government should use this as a chance to rebuild something better (better homes, better schools, better lives).

-Rudey

Originally posted by lifesaver
An interesting article. A sad one tho.

From slate.com

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2125810&nav=tap1/


Don't Refloat- The case against rebuilding the sunken city of New Orleans.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005, at 12:19 PM PT

What's to rebuild?

Nobody can deny New Orleans' cultural primacy or its historical importance. But before we refloat the sunken city, before we think of spending billions of dollars rebuilding levees that may not hold back the next storm, before we contemplate reconstructing the thousands of homes now disintegrating in the toxic tang of the flood, let's investigate what sort of place Katrina destroyed.

The city's romance is not the reality for most who live there. It's a poor place, with about 27 percent of the population of 484,000 living under the poverty line, and it's a black place, where 67 percent are African-American. In 65 percent of families living in poverty, no husband is present. When you overlap this New York Times map, which illustrates how the hurricane's floodwaters inundated 80 percent of the city, with this demographic map from the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, which shows where the black population lives, and this one that shows where the poverty cases live, it's transparent whom Katrina hit the hardest.

New Orleans' public schools, which are 93 percent black, have failed their citizens. The state of Louisiana rates 47 percent of New Orleans schools as "Academically Unacceptable" and another 26 percent are under "Academic Warning." About 25 percent of adults have no high-school diploma.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

Only one politician, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, dared question the wisdom of rebuilding New Orleans as it was, where it was. On Wednesday, Aug. 31, while meeting with the editorial board of the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill., he cited the geographical insanity of rebuilding New Orleans. "That doesn't make sense to me. … And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," Hastert added.

For his candor and wisdom, Hastert was shouted down. Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., and others interpreted his remarks as evidence of the Republican appetite for destruction when it comes to disaster victims. But if you read the entire interview—reproduced here courtesy of the Daily Herald—you might conclude that Hastert was speaking heresy, but he wasn't saying anything ugly or even Swiftian. Klaus Jacob seconded Hastert yesterday (Sept. 6) in a Washington Post op-ed. A geophysicist by training, he noted that Katrina wasn't even a worst-case scenario. Had the storm passed a little west of New Orleans rather than a little east, the "city would have flooded faster, and the loss of life would have been greater."

Nobody disputes the geographical and oceanographic odds against New Orleans: that the Gulf of Mexico is a perfect breeding ground for hurricanes; that re-engineering the Mississippi River to control flooding has made New Orleans more vulnerable by denying it the deposits of sediment it needs to keep its head above water; that the aggressive extraction of oil and gas from the area has undermined the stability of its land.

"New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Why was it? Settlers built the original city on a curve of high flood land that the Mississippi River had deposited over eons, hence the nickname "Crescent City." But starting in the late 1800s and continuing into the early 20th century, developers began clearing and draining swamps behind the crescent, even dumping landfill into Lake Pontchartrain to extend the city.

To chart the aggressive reclamation, compare this map from 1798 with this one from 1908. Many of New Orleans' lower-lying neighborhoods, such as Navarre, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lake Terrace, and Pontchartrain Park, were rescued from the low-lying muck. The Lower Ninth Ward, clobbered by Katrina, started out as a cypress swamp, and by 1950 it was only half developed, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Even such "high" land as City Park suffered from flooding before the engineers intervened. By the historical standards of the 400-year-old city, many of the heavily flooded neighborhoods are fresh off the boat.

The call to rebuild New Orleans' levee system may be mooted if its evacuated residents decide not to return. The federal government, which runs the flood-insurance business, sold only 85,000 residential and commercial policies—this in a city of 188,000 occupied dwellings. Coverage is limited to $250,000 for building property and $100,000 for personal property. Because the insured can use the money elsewhere, there is no guarantee they'll choose to rebuild in New Orleans, which will remain extra-vulnerable until the levees are rebuilt.

Few uninsured landlords and poor home owners have the wherewithal to rebuild—or the desire. And how many of the city's well-off and wealthy workers—the folks who provide the city's tax base—will return? Will the doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors have jobs to return to? According to the Wall Street Journal, many businesses are expected to relocate completely. Unless the federal government adopts New Orleans as its ward and pays all its bills for the next 20 years—an unlikely to absurd proposition—the place won't be rebuilt.

Barbara Bush will be denounced as being insensitive and condescending for saying yesterday that many of the evacuees she met in the Astrodome would prefer to stay in Texas. But she probably got it right. The destruction wrought by Katrina may turn out to be "creative destruction," to crib from Joseph Schumpeter, for many of New Orleans' displaced and dispossessed. Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration, a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will to be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.

Page One of today's New York Times illustrates better than I can how the economic calculations of individuals battered by Katrina may contribute to the city's ultimate doom:

In her 19 years, all spent living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.

"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms. Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes restaurant.

New Orleans won't disappear overnight, of course. The French Quarter, the Garden District, West Riverside, Black Pearl, and other elevated parts of the city will survive until the ultimate storm takes them out—and maybe even thrive as tourist destinations and places to live the good life. But it would be a mistake to raise the American Atlantis. It's gone.

******

Apologies to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Ernie K-Doe, Allen Toussaint, Tipitina's, Dr. John, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jelly Roll Morton, Jessie Hill, Lee Dorsey, the Meters, Robert Parker, Alvin Robinson, Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Stormy Weather, Huey "Piano" Smith, Aaron Neville and his brothers (falsetto is the highest expression of male emotion), Frankie Ford, Chris Kenner, Professor Longhair, Wynton Marsalis and family, Sidney Bechet, and Marshall Faulk. I await your hate mail at slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

[MysticCat]

Originally posted by Rudey
It's true but it's how you look at it. If Barbra Bush says it, certain people freak out. This guy wants the city to just not be rebuilt. David Brooks of the NYTimes said the exact same problems exist but that the government should use this as a chance to rebuild something better (better homes, better schools, better lives).

I agree. I didn't find Shafer's article very pursuasive at all.

But, I did love this quote:

"New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," St. Louis University professor of earth and atmospheric sciences Timothy Kusky told Time this week. "A city should never have been built there in the first place," he said to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

I'm holding my breath for him to say that Amsterdam should never have been built either, or a good portion of The Netherlands, for that matter. Then there's Venice.

And while we're asking the questions, why did we allow Los Angeles and San Francisco to become major urban areas? I mean, they're right there on major fault lines.

The reality is that major cities all around the world are built where they are sitting ducks for natural disaster of one kind or another. We live with it and carry on -- and we rebuild when necessary.

[Lindz928]

Part of me can understand one of the points he made.... Why spend billions and billions of dollars to restore a city that could easily be wiped out again in a year, or 5 years, or whenever.

I would hate to see people's homes not rebuilt...... But I do think that some good points are made.

The statistics that he gave (if accurate) are staggering. I would not blame anyone for not wanting to go back to that.

The possibly controversial question- If these people who have lived in poverty choose not to go back, but stay in places like Houston... Will they have a negative effect on the poverty rates and the education systems and the housing statistics in those cities?

I mean, he talked about the lady who was working for minimum wage at Popeye's in NO and is now planning on staying in Houston. Who is to say that she will automatically find a better job there? She may end up working for minimum wage at Popeye's in Houston. Won't make a bit of difference unless the cost of living in Houston is much lower than in NO. I honestly don't know if it is or not.

I am not trying to make political statements. I am not trying to pretend that I am an expert on anything that is going on with this situation. I am not sure what my opinion is in this particular matter.

I just thought I would like to see what everyone else thinks.

[Lindz928]

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/hurri...ropical_storms

FEMA Chief Relieved of Katrina Command
AP - 20 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, the principal target of harsh criticism of the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, was relieved of his onsite relief command Friday. He will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief, recovery and rescue efforts, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced.