Katrina's aftermath

Jesus, I never even thought about this til now.

Meanwhile here's some stuff from nola.com's blog (this includes a few things I've already posted):

Users report that the area near West Jefferson Hospital is dry, as is the 1700 block of N. Turnbull and St. Edwards near Transcontinental.

Walnut Bend and the Algiers area is reported to be doing well, with clean water and gas service.

There are several reports that the Uptown area remains unflooded, particularly around Magazine and Jefferson and Mag. and Webster; Prytania and Napoleon. Similar reports re the Garden District.

Baronne Street downtown is dry.

Port Street in the Marigny was dry this morning.

Canal Blvd. around Harrison is underwater, but a user posts that the water does NOT seem to be rising at all, regardless of what the nat'l. media reports.

(Am glad that Adam and Rock are OK.)

I finally got through to my family down in south Louisiana today. They live just north of Baton Rouge, on high ground, and had no damage, other than fallen trees. But they have no power, and don't know when they'll get it back, so they're boiling in the late August heat and humidity. Still, my sister said they would never complain, given what people are suffering not too far away. She had little idea of what's happening, because their TVs don't work. It's probably just as well. I heard from a Louisiana National Guard source that there are bodies everywhere in the far south, but the authorities aren't publicizing this.

My sister said she and the rest of the family are anticipating opening up their front yard to refugees in tents. They want to do something, anything. She said the sense of powerlessness to help the afflicted that those who emerged unscathed feel is agonizing. I know that we are going to see in the next days and weeks the strong backs and stout hearts of the people of Louisiana made manifest in the relief effort. My great aunt Hilda Moss, who died when I was a boy, was a Red Cross worker when the 1927 flood devastated so much of the state. When they told her that a woman had no business going into the back country to bring relief, she disguised herself as a man, commandeered a boat, and brought help to stranded country people. That's the spirit of Louisiana that I know. It's driving me slightly crazy to be sitting here in an office in downtown Dallas instead of down there helping.

The inmates would be moved to state prisons including the highest-security at Angola. Corrections spokesman Pam LaBorde says it's quite a logistical situation to accomplish.

Richard Leland, who had traveled from his California home to experience a hurricane, admitted: "I got a little more than I had expected."

Remind me not to be next to this fucker when the big earthquake hits.

The senator's wife, Tricia, told him the news Monday night. She had rode out the storm in their house in Jackson.

But it's horrible to think of all of those places being destroyed or damaged. The Half Moon. Tipitina's. And of course, all the wonderful people down there.

My wife and I met each other face-to-face in New Orleans. One day, we drove all the way down LA 45 until it dead-ended at a refinery. To think that all of that may be gone now. It's horrible.

This is a horrible analogy, but forgive me, I'm producing a sports-talk show right now. Just like one sees more of a football game from the huddle than from the Goodyear blimp, I can only imagine the ungodly horrors that are taking place basically before our eyes everytime a helicopter's camera swoops over the devastation.

I admit I thought, "No tears for you, Senator Fuckface."

(I'm sure my motives for being interested in disasters are far worse than Ned's. I've always regretted that in November 1963 I turned off the TV and went out to play 15 minutes before Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. I could have seen it! And this last July I was telling people "I know some people who lost a friend in the London bombings." Of course, it affected me, to know London ILX was going through grief, but also it was like I was passing along gossip, as if to say "Look at me, I'm in the know, I'm connected to this thing" (from which I was actually very distant). It's human, I'm human. And there's a sense in which these Big Stories become a conversation piece and connection between a lot of us. I must say, I enjoyed ILX immensely in the weeks following 9-11.)

I think a few have gone around already. Fuckers.

And yeah, Don just posted on ILM, so that's cool.

Here's hoping Fetchboy gets the news and gets out -- again, he's in the best place to be comparatively speaking, but remember he's also keeping an eye on his grandpa.

Well, given the fact that there's 1.3 million people in the New Orleans metro area, and there's 2.6 million in the entire state of Mississippi, I'd say you're comparing apples and oranges. Of course they're going to give more coverage since it hit New Orleans: It has the capacity of being the biggest disaster since 9/11, if not having a death toll *exceeding* that. If it was going to hit Houston, and Houston happened to be poorly designed as well and the possibility of it flooding everything and killing the entire populace was there, you can bet your ass the non-destination of Houston would get just as much interest.

two illuminating articles:

When the levee breaks [from www.pnionline.com]

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

This picture is an aerial view of New Orleans today, more than 14 months later. Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city and the sun is out, the waters continue to rise in New Orleans as we write this. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. (Much of the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.)

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions:

"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.

And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

LA National Guard Wants Equipment to Come Back From Iraq

August 1, 2005, 9:07 PM CDT

JACKSON BARRACKS -- When members of the Louisiana National Guard left for Iraq in October, they took a lot equipment with them. Dozens of high water vehicles, humvees, refuelers and generators are now abroad, and in the event of a major natural disaster that, could be a problem.

"The National Guard needs that equipment back home to support the homeland security mission," said Lt. Colonel Pete Schneider with the LA National Guard.

Col. Schneider says the state has enough equipment to get by, and if Louisiana were to get hit by a major hurricane, the neighboring states of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have all agreed to help.

"As Governor Bush did for Ivan, after they were hit so many times, he just maxed all of his resources out, he reached out to Louisiana and we sent 200 national guardsmen to help support in recovery efforts," Col. Schneider said.

Members of the Houma-based 256th Infantry will be returning in October, but it could be much longer before the rest of their equipment comes home.

"You've got combatant commanders over there who need it they say they need it, they don't want to lose what they have, and we certainly understand that it's a matter it's a matter of us educating that combatant commander, we need it back here as well," Col. Schneider said.

And even if commanders in Iraq release the equipment, getting it home takes months.

"It's just the process of identifying which equipment we're bringing home, bringing it down to Kuwait, loading it on ships or aircraft however we're gonna get it back here and then either railing it in or trucking it in, so we're talking a significant amount of time before that equipment is back home," Schneider said.