Recording Katrina

Cop pleads guilty in post-Katrina shootings

2010-03-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

Ex-New Orleans Cop Pleads Guilty To Massive Cover Up In Post-Katrina Shootings Talking Points Memo, 2/25/10:

A veteran New Orleans police officer pleaded guilty yesterday to orchestrating an elaborate cover-up of a shooting in the days after Katrina in which police gunned down six unarmed city residents, killing two and seriously wounding four.

The development -- which the Times-Picayune calls a "potentially devastating blow" to other officers linked to the case -- is the first plea in a wide-ranging federal probe of several post-Katrina police shootings. The Feds are reportedly looking at possible crimes in both the shootings themselves as well as the subsequent investigations.

The Danziger Bridge shootings occurred on Sept. 4, 2005, just six days after Katrina hit. The victims were reportedly stranded on a part of Chef Menteur highway that was surrounded by flooding; the police involved were working out of a temporary station at a reception hall nearby.

"Making Light" blog commemorates Katrina + 3

2008-08-30T00:43:00.000-07:00

[[ "Making Light" is the blog I first followed the Katrina story on. The blog is published by New Yorkers Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, with additional posts by Jim MacDonald and others.
-- Thomas ]]
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Katrina - Third Anniversary ("Making Light")

Making Light followed this story from the beginning, from the day before Katrina hit New Orleans:
Katrina: Not your usual weather disaster story
28AUG05 O the dreadful wind and rain—They’re talking about this being the kind of storm that can reshape coastlines. Hurricane-force winds could be felt up to 150 miles inland. The Mayor of New Orleans has ordered a mandatory evacuation, and the governors of Louisiana and Mississippi have ordered that all the lanes on the interstates be switched to “outbound.” Best-case scenario for New Orleans still has the levees breaking and the city under fifteen feet of filthy water—and it doesn’t look like we’re going to be a best-case scenario. As of mid-afternoon, the storm’s stats are worse than Hurricane Camille’s—and while Camille was intense, it was also physically small. Katrina is huge.
Katrina
29AUG05 “Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues” by Will Bunch, in Editor & Publisher. A very strong article which lays out Bush & Co.’s consistent policy of stripping funding from levee maintenance and hurricane preparedness in the Gulf Coast area in order to reallocate those funds to the Department of Homeland Security and the war in Iraq.
Apocalypse deferred; likely damage merely “incredible”
29AUG05 Maybe there’ll be a New Orleans to go back to after all. We can hope.

More.

Katrina Commemoration Events

2008-08-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

Via Katrina Information Network.

NATIONAL

• (August 29) Los Angeles, New Orleans and Los Angeles: Fighting for the Right to the City*** Co-sponsored by the East LA Community Corporation, Esperanza Community Housing Corp., Korean Immigrant Workers Alliance, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, South Asian Network and Union de Vecinos. This event will feature a candle-light vigil filled with art, food, theater, speakers, live music and entertainment connecting the struggles for working class people of color in New Orleans and Los Angeles. August 29, 2008 6:30 pm 3245 Wilshire. For more information please contact: Thelmy Perez-213-745-9961 x226

• (August 29) Miami, Trouble the Water Film Screening, Fundraiser and Speak Out*** Co-sponsored by the Miami Workers Center, Vecinos Unidos, and Power U center. Friday August 29, 7:30pm at Shantel’s Lounge (5422 NW 7th Ave). This event will connect the struggles around police, prisons, poverty, and education for communities in New Orleans and Miami. Including Power U Band and open mic. $5 Donation. Contact 305.576.7749 for more info.

• New Orleans/Gulf Coast Tour Youth from New York’s West End and Middle Collegiate Churches are traveling to the Gulf Coast to help with recovery work in the region and to meet with youth advocates. They will spend two days in Mississippi helping to rebuild homes in the Gulfport area and a few days in New Orleans working on green projects and meeting with youth affiliated with Save Our Schools New Orleans and Frederick Douglass High School to understand how communities are rebuilding through the eyes of young people. For more info contactwww.westendchurch.org or www.middlechurch.org.

• (August 29) New York, Commemoration Rally and March*** New York City – Right To The City Alliance, the New York Solidarity Coalition with Katrina/Rita Survivors, Artist Relief, Brenda Stokley, Joetta Rogers and Northeast Survivors Group. The event will start with a rally and press conference at Sarah Roosevelt Park followed by a march starting at 4:15pm. The march will wind through the Lower East Side and Chinatown with short stops in each community and will end with a vigil in front of One Police Plaza. The commemoration will end with a fundraiser at Judson Memorial Church at 7:30 pm put on by the Artist Relief Collective and the Nola Preservation Society. For more information contact Rob Robinson at Picture the Homeless (646) 314-6423 or Brenda Stokley at the New York Solidarity Coalition with Katrina and Rita Survivors (212) 969-0449

• (August 29) Philadelphia-Hurricane Season. Alixa and Naima of Climbing PoeTree are premiering their two-woman show on 8/29/08 kicking off a 50-city national tour. A multimedia piece, Hurricane Season connects issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the "unnatural disasters" unfolding nationwide and world wide on a daily basis. Hurricane Season tackles global warming, environmental injustice, criminalization, militarism, corporate domination and displacement as they manifest from one gulf to another, with a powerful tale of resistance, resilience, creativity and survival . For more info visit www.hurricaneseasontour.com. Doors open at 7pm, Show starts at 7:30. Location: The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. Tickets are $10-$20

• (August 29) Providence, RI Commemorative March*** Sponsored by Boston/Providence Right to the City Alliance members including DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) and ONA (Olneyville Neighborhood Association). Second line style action starts at 3:30pm at DARE offices (340 Lockwood St. Providence, RI 02903) Participants will follow the Hurricane Evacuation Route and will make stops along the way which highlight issues of criminalization, foreclosures, gentrification, education, and immigration and will connect the struggles of Providence to New Orleans. For information contact 401-351-3560 or 401-228-8996.

• (August 29) San Francisco Bay Area-No Business as Usual Katrina Anniversary*** Action is Co-sponsored by Bay Area Right to the City. August 29th 10am-5pm. Start at 7th St and Market in San Francisco for rally and march. 1pm cultural performance at Oakland City Hall at 14th and Broadway. Followed by march to rally at Oakland Police Department. Highlighting connections between Bay Area and New Orleans including: criminalization, incarceration and deportation of communities of color; public housing, privatized development/gentrification, and displacement of working class people of color. Contact Robbie at robbie@justcauseoakland.org or 510-763-5877.

• (August 29) San Francisco Bay Area-Katrina Commemoration and Community Forum (Part of Black August) In Solidarity with the Peoples' of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: Right of Return, Reconstruction, and Self-Determination. Friday, August 29th from 6 – 9 pm at the Eastside Cultural Center, 1227 International Blvd. In collaboration with Huaxtec, Katrina Solidarity Network, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Right to the City. Contact 510-533-6609, email mxgmoakland@gmail.com or visit www.mxgm.org.

• (August 29)Washington DC- Rally at FEMA*** Friday, August 29th 11:30 am-1:30pm, FEMA Headquarters, 500 C Street, SE. Mid-Atlantic Right to the City Alliance is rallying at FEMA headquarters to highlight the federal government's failure to protect residents' human rights. Community groups are calling on the government to stop promoting incarceration and demolition of supportive housing, and to invest in a permanent solution to the housing crisis, public education, mental health and other crisis services. Contact awillis@onedconline.org for more info.

*** Denotes activities that are a co-sponsored by the national Right to the City Alliance

Blog Reactions on Technorati: "Supplies for Katrina victims went to Mississippi agencies"

2008-07-07T19:22:00.001-07:00

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/mississippi.katrina/index.html: Blog Reactions on Technorati: "34 blog reactions to http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/07/07/mississippi.katrina/index.html

Supplies for Katrina victims went to Mississippi agencies

July 7, 2008 - Prisons in Mississippi got coffee makers, pillowcases and dinnerware -- all intended for victims of Hurricane Katrina."

FEMA and a Worthless President
1 hour ago in Robert Stinnett's Paper and Pencil by rstinnett · Authority: 4
instead of to the people who have suffered for years now after the Katrina disaster (which was a disaster in part because of Bush’s ineptness to do anything but sit on his ass while his rich friends were awarded lucrative contracts for rebuilding). The story just boggles the mind

FEMA Doesn’t Like People
1 hour ago in bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards · Authority: 27
Can't take FEMA personally. They screw everyone

JOKERs News - Always the latest News from around the Globe
1 hour ago · Authority: 1
...Katrina aid anger: 'I just want to slap them' Mississippi agencies had a field day with free goods meant for Katrina victims. Prisons, fire departments, colleges and park agencies snatched up coffee makers, cleaning goods and other supplies, a CNN investigation has found. What about the victims?

FEMA-- Brownie's gone but someone is still doing a Heckuva Job. (a screw job, that is.)
1 hour ago in Night Bird's Fountain by nightbirdlizzy · Authority: 30
Then if you have a state government run by good ol' boys (somebody must have tipped them off) they can jump in and claim the loot to plug budget holes in their own agencies. That's what the Bush administration did with millions of dollars in supplies that never made it to Katrina victims

ipku to make upki always
2 hours ago · No authority yet
Katrina aid anger: 'I just want to slap them'

Katrina aid anger: 'I just want to slap them'
2 hours ago in The media and it's attack on the United States · Authority: 1
and park agencies snatched up coffee makers, cleaning goods and other supplies, a CNN investigation has found. What about the victims? They've been left high and dry. "I just want to slap them upside the head," says one aid group official. Source: CNN.com

RealNews: Glover in New Orleans for the "Algebra Project"

2008-06-02T12:14:00.001-07:00

From Danny Glover's speech announcing a Vanguard Foundation grant to Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Fund:

When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country - as it has been disparagingly implied in the media - it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster: grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.

More on the Algebra Project in New Orleans and elsewhere here.

New Orleans Journal: The New Yorker

2008-05-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Found this after it ended: New Orleans Journal: The New Yorker, by Dan Baum. From the last post, "What It Means" (June 1, 2007):

The final New Orleans experience I will record in this journal is, fittingly, one of exile. I’m on the outskirts of Houston, stuck in a sterile motel room and pining for the rich, convoluted streets of the Crescent City. The soaring expanses of freeway disorient me; my eyes haven’t focussed on anything farther away than a few blocks in a long time. And, instead of looking at peeling multicolored shotgun houses with oddly dressed people sitting on their porches and others walking dogs in the street, my eye falls on the featureless beige wall of a Best Buy and the acres of parking around Sam’s Club.

But, most of all, I’m lonely. I was in Beaumont, Texas, having vegetarian fajitas at an outpost of the Acapulco Mexican Grill chain, when I noticed a woman at the next table looking at my food. “That looks good,” I heard her whisper to her mother. I kept expecting one of them to lean over and shout, “Hey, babe, what’s that you’re eatin’?,” and for all of us to end up at the same table. But they kept to themselves.

“Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” an old song asks; another reminds us, “You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.” Since Katrina, I’ve often been asked (though never by someone in New Orleans) why the country should bother rebuilding it. Is it really worth the billions it would take to protect this small, poor, economically inessential city, which is sinking into the delta muck as global warming raises the sea around it? But the question of “whether” has been settled—New Orleans is rebuilding itself, albeit slowly, fitfully, and imperfectly. Now it’s only a matter of how and how long. That is better news than perhaps the rest of America fully understands.

Baum's ongoing web site, which he shares with his spouse and fellow freelance writer Margaret Knox, is at http://www.knoxandbaum.com/

Katrina video on Real News Network

2008-05-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

Impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on Substance Use and Mental Health

2008-02-01T20:34:00.000-08:00

Impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on Substance Use and Mental Health:

Gulf State Disaster Area residents aged 18 or older who were displaced from their homes for 2 weeks or longer had significantly higher rates of SPD [severe psychological distress], MDE [major depressive episode], and unmet need for mental health treatment or counseling in the past year compared with residents who were not displaced or who were displaced for less than 2 weeks (Figure 3). Approximately one in four residents who were displaced for 2 weeks or longer reported SPD; rates of MDE were more than 3 times higher among those who had been displaced for 2 weeks or longer compared with those who were not displaced.*

The study found similarly strong effects of displacement on substance abuse including binge alcohol, cigarettes, and illicit drugs.

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* Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies. (January 31, 2008). The NSDUH Report: Impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on Substance Use and Mental Health. Rockville, MD.

Bill Quigley's 10 lessons

2007-08-29T07:38:00.001-07:00

At "Facing South," guest contributor Bill Quigley has posted 10 IMPORTANT LESSONS: Katrina, Two Years Later. Excerpt:

One. Build and rebuild community.

When disaster hits and life is wrecked, you immediately seem to be on your own. Isolation after a disaster is a recipe for powerlessness and depression. Family, community, church, work associations are all important --get them up and working as fast as possible. People will stand up and fight, but we need communities to do it. Prize women --they are the first line of community builders. Guys will talk and fight and often grab the spotlight, but women will help everyone and do whatever it takes to protect families and communities. Powerful forces mobilize immediately after a disaster. People and politicians and organizations have their own agendas and it helps them if our communities are fragmented. Setting one group against another, saying one group is more important than another is not helpful. Stress and distress is high for everyone, but community support will multiply the resources of individuals. Build bridges. People together are much stronger than people alone.

Two. Self-reliance.

Your community must be ready to re-settle your property as soon as possible and care for those most in need. Prioritize help for the elderly, the sick, children and women, especially the poor. The prime cure for helplessness is taking control over your own life and joining others to fight for justice. Groups and people will want to treat you like a victim --say you are traumatized and incapable of making basic decisions about yourself. They will tell you they know best and act like they know best. Tell them to get lost.

Three. Tell your own story.

Sharing our stories, successes and failures, is a way to connect and educate ourselves. Connecting with others nationally and internationally who have been through disasters is the very best thing that you can do. Disasters and the corporations that cause them and profit from them do not respect national boundaries. Look for global justice connections. Learn from those who have been through this before. They will tell you - do not let anyone say who you are or what is best for your community --say it yourself.

Those in power will blame circumstances outside their control for what happened and inevitably they will blame the victims of the disaster. Those in power will tell the people's story in ways that makes the powerful look good. If others do not tell the truth --you do it and get your stories out. Real allies help lift up the voices of the people.

...read on.

Bill Moyers Journal: Katrina Revisited

2007-08-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

From the August 17 "Bill Moyers Journal," featuring Mike Tidwell (Bayou Farewell, The Ravaging Tide), and Princeton University professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell ("2005 Racial Attitudes and the Katrina Disaster Study"):

BILL MOYERS: ... Why do we ignore the warnings? We ignored the warnings before 9/11. We ignored the warnings before Katrina. I mean, you wrote in your book that Katrina's arrival was as certain as tomorrow's sunrise.
MIKE TIDWELL: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: How could you be so sure?
MIKE TIDWELL: Because all you had to do was look at the coastal maps going back from the French explorers all the way to the satellite maps from the mid 1970's forward and you saw a land mass, a coastal land mass imploding, disappearing. An area the size of Delaware was subtracted from south Louisiana between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico just since the great Depression. It was clear that there was no longer any land mass buffering the city.

Also:

BILL MOYERS: I've kept in my files since written one week after the disaster. Listen to this. "What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological-- what Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequence of the welfare state. 75 percent of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane. And of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects." What does that say to you?
MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: Well, it's bizarre and inaccurate empirically. Because in fact, the public housing projects were on high ground. They experienced very little water damage. And most of the residents there who have been shut out by their government, by their city and by our national housing office, is not because of any destruction that occurred because of Katrina but because of the required evacuation that occurred.They were mostly safe.
The people whose homes were destroyed were mostly home owners. But they were poor people. And this is what we can't deal with in America. They worked jobs every day. Most of them stayed because they needed to go to work in the morning. Most of them had to go to work in the morning in the hotels, in the tourist industries, in the restaurants that served to make New Orleans the fun place that the rest of us liked to visit. So they were homeowners who were poor. They were working people who were poor. Because we live in a country where we allow people to work every day and still be poor. To still have the inadequate capacity to leave.
And the third reason why many people didn't leave are very thick social networks. So part of the question you asked is, why didn't people think, oh, this disaster is coming? Well, Betsy, Hurricane Betsy was in living memory in New Orleans. And Hurricane Betsy was a terrible storm that many people had survived. If you had an aunt or an uncle or a grandmother who had survived Hurricane Betsy, she or he refused often to leave.

Also:

MIKE TIDWELL: I think the true tragedy, as we-- as we look at the ninth ward, we look at Lakeview and these neighborhoods that are not being rebuilt, the city of New Orleans is effectively being abandoned. It really is. And we're not doing what we know we can do to save it. The city can be saved. I completely believe that. People should and we can save this city. And we have to do a number of things. We have to restore the wetlands and barrier islands. We've got to make levees that work.
BILL MOYERS: Would you take your family to live there?
MIKE TIDWELL: No, I would not. I would not go--
BILL MOYERS: To move to New Orleans.
MIKE TIDWELL: It's the most dangerous city in the world to live in.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
MIKE TIDWELL: The levees are ineffective. The army corps of engineers says it's going to be 2010 before they even have the levees up to pre-Katrina levels. And then climate change. Hurricanes are getting bigger. We know this. There have been MIT studies, Georgia Tech studies that show that it's already happening. It is a dangerous place to live.
Now, if we resolve the issue of climate change, which we can-- the tragedy is, we can fix New Orleans. There-- it's not a matter of money and technology. We can do it. You know, in the war in Iraq, six weeks earlier, you have the 30 billion dollars to build the levees in the wetlands. And climate change. If we became a nation of hybrid car drivers, ten years from now, we'd cut our gasoline in half. We wouldn't be in Iraq. If Iraq's number one export was broccoli, would we be there? So, the tragedy is we can in fact save New Orleans, but we're not doing it. We can solve global warming, but we're not doing it.
And I think the main thing for people who live in Miami, who live in lower Manhattan, who live in Charleston, all these vulnerable coastal cities, if we allow New Orleans to disappear, if we don't come to the permanent rescue of our fellow countrymen in New Orleans, how are you safe in Miami? How are you safe in lower Manhattan? Who's going to come to save you?

From late March: Katrina Death Toll Passes 4,000

2007-05-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

Robert Lindsay, who's been tracking the Katrina death toll figures for quite a while, wrote on March 30 about testimony by Dr. Kevin Stephens, director of the New Orleans Health Department, at a March 13 hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations ("Post Katrina Health Care: Continuing Concerns and Immediate Needs in the New Orleans Region"). Lindsay:

...Residents reported observing a larger than usual number of death notices in the newspaper, even long after Katrina and into 2006. At the same time, even months after the storm, residents reported going to more funerals than they ever had.

These anecdotal reports caused Stephens and a team to undertake a study to count the number of death notices in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and compare it to a reference year which would serve as a baseline. 2003 was chosen as a reference year. The data can be seen on page nine of the testimony linked above.

In the first six months of 2003, 5,544 deaths were counted. In the first six months of 2006, 7,902 were counted, an increase of 2,358 deaths over baseline in the post-Katrina period. Based on this, we will assign 2,358 deaths as caused by the accelerated death rates that occurred in New Orleans even long after the storm.

Although the population of New Orleans is only 1/2 what it was prior to the storm, the obituaries covered not only New Orleans but also included many of the refugees tossed about to various parts of the country.

Based on this new information, we can add the previous toll of 1,723 to the new post-Katrina figure of 2,358 to posit a new unofficial death toll of 4,081.

(Link to Lindsay's tally of 1,723 added). Dr. Stephens' testimony can be read here (Acrobat .PDF document), the hearing can be viewed here (.wvx file).

Serious weaknesses found in repaired New Orleans levees

2007-05-10T18:04:00.000-07:00

Facing South:

With hurricane season less than a month away, experts from the United States and the Netherlands say flaws in New Orleans' repaired levee system could leave the region vulnerable to another disastrous breach like the one that occurred after Hurricane Katrina, which was the largest civil engineering disaster in U.S. history.

So warns a special report from National Geographic, which had Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor and former chief engineer for Shell Oil Co., inspect the protective barriers. Bea found multiple weak spots in critical areas, according to the magazine:
The most serious flaws turned up in the rebuilt levees along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet ship channel, which broke in more than 20 places when Katrina's storm surge pounded it, leading to devastating flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. Bea found several areas where rainstorms have already eroded the newly rebuilt levees, particularly where they consist of a core of sandy and muddy soils topped with a cap of Mississippi clay. 'It's like icing on the top of angel food cake,' Bea says. 'These levees will not be here if you put a Katrina surge against them.' ...

More here.

The one-two punch

2007-05-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

...is how New Orleans resident Tim ("Tim's ~ Nameless ~ Blog") describes what happened to a neighbor:

John lost his mother and brother in the past few months. You might say he lost them to Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, his story is not typical, but it is not all that uncommon either.

Sunday morning I wandered out of our FEMA Travel Trailer to look at the day. Across our vacant lot, across the lot next door made recently vacant as well, I saw John standing with his hands on his hips. I walked over to say hello. The house that used to stand next to our vacant lot was knocked down last week. The backhoe arrived late one afternoon and parked in the front yard. When I got home from work the next day, nothing but brown dirt remained. The only evidence of the house was a few glass shards and chips of brick.

It's one of those odd circumstances of urban living. We moved here about 6 years before Katrina, before the flood washed the neighbors away. John lived just two doors away. But I don't recall ever meeting him before this day. So as suddenly as the levees breached, as swiftly as the neighborhood had been doused, as quickly as that house between us had been ripped up and carted away, we stood there and talked as if we had been talking like this all along.

John told me that he had lived here since he was 10 years old. His mother and father had built one of the first homes in Vista Park. He said it was the second house on the whole street. He pointed to a white-brick house a few hundred feet away, telling me that was the only other one here back in the early days.

And now, John observed matter-of-factly, it's looking a lot like it did back then. Vacant land all around. A few houses and not much traffic.

John was soft-spoken and alert when I talked to him. But there was a slight slur as one side of his mouth lagged in movement. It was easy to guess that he was in his 60's; I wondered too if he had suffered a stroke recently.

The clear sky radiated a blueness that only occurs on the hottest days. The bright light of morning was tempered by the low humidity and light breeze of what was starting out to be a beautiful day. In stark contrast, John told me about the unhappy journey his life has become since that not-so-perfect-day in August 2005.

The Saturday before Katrina attacked, John and his elderly mother were planning to stay. They had stayed for Betsy. They had stayed for Camille. The street had never flooded and damage was mostly from a few fallen trees.

But Sunday morning John heard panic in the voices of the reporters and meteorologists on the TV. The hurricane had not turned. It was headed here. He heard desperation in the pleas of the Mayor and Governor. He decided to leave his childhood home, still expecting to come back in a few days. John took his mother to the north shore, to a house his brother owned on the relative high ground of St. Tammany Parish.

We all know what happened that Monday.

The weeks and months that followed have continued to be hard on John. Harder still on his family. His elderly mother was not able to return home, and his brother took up the job of filing the paperwork for insurance and government assistance. John was not specific--and I did not press for details--but at some point his brother was not able to go on. He killed himself less than a year after Katrina.

John's mother, now dealing with further grief, had to move to an assisted living facility. "She lasted six months," John says, so plainly that it startled me. As if her death from the one-two punch of a hurricane and a suicide was a given.

"And how about you?" I asked. "How are you getting along?"

He tells the same lie we all tell when asked. "Fine."

There's more at the link.

Where's New Orleans?

2007-05-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

asks Tom Watson:

Two long debates, 18 candidates, four hours of naked ambition. No discussion of the great domestic failure of our times - the ongoing tragedy of the official national abandonment of New Orleans.

You would expect this from the Republicans; they posed as if angling for the mantle of Reagan at his tacky and Disneyesque "library" - all that's missing is the gruesome Leninesque attraction at the center - but they're really jockeying for the legacy of George W. Bush... [...]

Malign neglect is to be expected from the modern Republican Party, but where were the Democrats?

Why wasn't New Orleans front and center for the Democrats; why isn't a central issue on the campaign trail? Why don't all the candidate websites contain a plan, a proposal, the account of some working being done on behalf a great American city that is being allowed to die.

Here's a sad truth: American Idol did a better job in its recent fundraising campaign of highlighting the ongoing horror of southern Louisiana than did Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and that talkative guy from Alaska in their nationally-televised first debate.

Personally, I'd give John Edwards at least a little more credit than that. From a Bob Herbert column in today's New York Times, reporting on an Edwards campaign visit to New Orleans:

[Edwards] said he would appoint a high-level official to take charge of the rebuilding, and he would have that person “report to me” every day. He said he would create 50,000 “steppingstone jobs,” in parks, recreation facilities and a variety of community projects, for New Orleans residents who have been unable to find any other work. And he said, “We’re also going to have to rebuild these levees.

But point taken. And not just about candidates, but about me.

18 Missing Inches in New Orleans

2007-05-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

18 Missing Inches in New Orleans (from "Armed Madhouse", Greg Palast):

On August 22, 2006, we were videotaping Katrina evacuees still held behind barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It had been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW’s (Prisoners of Dubya) were still in mobile home Gulags. I arranged a surreptitious visit with Pamela Lewis, one of the unwilling guests of George Bush’s Guantanamo on wheels. She told me, “It’s a prison set-up” - except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes. [...]

That Monday night, August 29, 2005, the sleepless crew at the state Emergency Operations Center, directing the response to Hurricane Katrina, were high-fiving it, relieved that Katrina had swung east of New Orleans, sparing the city from drowning.

They were wrong. The Army Corps, FEMA and White House knew for critical hours that the levees had begun to crack, but withheld the information for a day and night. The delay was deadly.

Van Heerden explained that levees don’t collapse in a single bang. First, there’s a small crack or two, a few feet wide, which take hours to burst open into visible floodways.

Had the state known New Orleans’ bulwark was failing, they would have shifted resources to get out those left in the danger zone. [...]
But why did the levees fail at all if the hurricane missed the city? The professor showed me a computer model indicating the levees were a foot and a half too short - the result of a technical error in the Army Corp of Engineer’s calculation of sea level when the levees were built beginning in the 1930s.
And the Bush crew knew it. Long before Katrina struck, the White House staff had sought van Heerden’s advice on coastal safety. So when the professor learned of the 18-inch error, he informed the White House directly. But this was advice they didn’t want to hear. The President had already sent the levee repair crew, the Army Corp of Engineers, to Afghanistan and Iraq.

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UPDATE, 5/11: Van Heerden is also mentioned here in this blog, in connection with a NOVA program about the Katrina levee disasters.

Brown on White House vs. Blanco: "A chance to rub her nose in it"

2007-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

Michael Brown, the hapless FEMA director during Katrina, is making headlines with a new charge, reported by AP and the Baton Rouge Advocate:

Brown, speaking at the Metropolitan College of New York, said he had recommended to President Bush that all 90,000 square miles along the Gulf Coast affected by the powerful hurricane be federalized — a term Brown explained meant placing the federal government in charge of all agencies responding to the disaster. “Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, ‘We had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,”’ Brown said, without naming names. “‘We can’t do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley’s a white male Republican governor. And we can’t do a thing to him. So we’re just gonna federalize Louisiana.”

At the Breaking Point

2007-01-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

Nolalily writes at dKos that "Katrina ain't over. It's still there."

We're teetering on all out anarchy. Seriously. Our murder rate has soared due to many, many thugs (teens and young adults mostly) who have returned to the city without their parents.

Central City (which is the area which is, well, central in the city) has been completely empty since Katrina. Many of these thugs are squatting in abandoned houses. They are engaged in an all out drug war with rivals from New Orleans but worse, other parts of the country who were never here before.

Addicts and punks are robbing people in the populated parts when they need money. This brings crime into our backyard which is a small backyard to begin with.

Yesterday morning, around 5:30am, a doctor and his wife were shot in their home in the Marigny. They were a young couple with a 2-year old son. The husband had started a clinic for the poor and his wife, a Harvard graduate, was a filmmaker. Both were community activists, liberal and well-loved. He played in a band. She died. He collapsed in the doorway, after he was shot, holding his son in his arms. They were quite liberal and open.

Today, many of us are attending meetings concerning the city's welfare and there is a march on city hall planned for this Thursday.

October 26, 2005

2006-10-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

This is the final post of a series by our extraordinary co-blogger Riggsveda, about her experiences as a volunteer in Louisiana in October, 2005.

For a complete listing of the series, go here: "Louisiana Diary, by riggsveda." Navigation links to that listing are provided at the end of each individual post, along with links to the prior and next posts in the series . -- tn

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I didn’t even bother to write an entry this a.m. I woke up over and over again last night, thinking of all the things I would need to do or want to do before I leave, and of course hardly remembered any of it. Except that I woke up un-refreshed and a little burnt out. I did remember to call BTI to confirm my flight home, and wrote notes to both J. and D., the shelter manager till Saturday, that I had put in for a car and a day off Friday, needed to process out Saturday, and would be flying out of Baton Rouge on Sunday. As I was informed, this means I’ll have to move camp to B.R. and stay there Saturday night, which is a pain in the ass. Everybody else has been able to process out in Covington and fly out via the NOLA airport next door, but that would have been way too easy for me. I took another $200 out of my card, and left $133 in the bank. When we reconcile at Financial during outprocessing, I think I can justify it all. Some people, especially the kids who have been camping out in the French Quarter every night, have gone through their money like drunken sailors. Well, the drunken part fits.
J. just came in briefly and I told her I want to go into NOLA for my last run tomorrow. “Send me someplace good”, I told her. This way I’ll avoid being stuck on some pointless 2nd run on a Bravo ERV and risk possibly returning at an ungodly hour.
Earlier there was a birthday celebration for R., who came down with me. He was in tears. It was very sweet.
I’ve been trying to remember some of the things I’ve been seeing over the past few days. In Mid-City, angry graffiti on the side of a house:
“Screw you, Nagin. We made our own plan.”
“Katrina got PMS.”
The broken bodies of rotted and collapsed buildings have become billboards for the anger and pain of the people of NOLA and the towns surrounding it. Sprawled over 4 corners (of an intersection) and down half the city blocks beyond, piles of ruined stuffed animals 6 or 7 feet high, the ruins of a warehouse that held a man's entire livelihood. Delicate little houses with wrought ironwork and still-vibrant paint jobs, broken, rotting, and abandoned for miles. The fluorescent red or orange "X" painted on house after house, a sign left by those who entered searching for bodies or the still-living in need of rescue. At the top is the date of inspection--most are dated around 9/15 or later, some as late as early October. On the left, the initials of the inspecting group.
At the bottom, the number of dead found; usually that was a "0", meaning none. To see a number other than the struck through zero there always gave me a chill. The letters in the right side of the cross still remain a mystery. Sometimes they seemed to indicate a direction, as in "NE". Other times they made no sense at all. And often I'd see "TFW" written (inside a circle). I still don't know what it is. The SPCA would sometimes weigh in, as well. Their messages were easy to decipher: "K-9 moved to corner"; "1 dog alive"; "2 cats under house"; and sometimes "no dogs" or "1 dead cat".
Between these signs and messages, and the words written by the ones who had to leave in anger and bitterness, even the parts of NOLA that are still and lifeless vibrate with a thousand voices, reaching out to communicate with anyone who comes after. "Help! Help! Help!" reads the house on the street in the lower Ninth Ward. Places where not a living thing moves can make the tears come, when you read the stories that have been left there. Holes in roofs torn by the desperate, trapped inside their houses while trying to escape rising waters, still gape to remind us of their terror.
To imagine living here, constantly facing the massive deconstruction on every corner, in every yard, with your entire environment looking like one big landfill;
to live growing numb to the ugliness; to expect mud, cracked earth, endless dust, to always be hacking and coughing, living with low-level respiratory ailments; to wait without hope for salvation from the insurance company, the city, the federal government, to live with price gouging. To live in tents.
At home it has rained endlessly, and been cold. Here, the sun has shone everyday, and the earth is parched. Hurricane Wilma's hellacious winds sent water into the Ninth Ward again Tuesday, and what small progress made there was halted.
I wish I could say I'll miss NOLA, or Louisiana, but I won't. It's too flat for my soul, and I miss the seasons. Fall doesn't exist here, at least in a way that makes sense to a Yankee. The few Halloween decorations I've noticed look as out of place as a Christmas tree in the middle of a bandstand on a summer night. But most of all, I won't miss the constant low-level misery, the endless fighting back against despair that is the lot of every person here. I've come to love the strength, humor, and compassion of the local people. But I don't have enough of any of those qualities to bear their miseries.
Today my ERV got to come back early (3:30) because the kitchen ran out of food, so I had a very pleasant and relaxing day. J., next to me, went up with me to a local store and took money out of our Red Cross cards, then I came back, took a hot shower, enjoyed cake and ice cream and 2 more chicken sandwiches for dinner, and sat down to write in this journal.
Time for bed.

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October 25, 2005

2006-10-29T11:03:00.000-08:00

3 more working days, including today. The cold snap continues---low 40s this a.m, 60s later. After tomorrow it should slowly warm up into the weekend. At least the wind has died down considerably.
I’m still on a high from yesterday. Full of energy, and looking forward to the rest of the week. Some of the new folks are being sent to Kitchen #5 in Westwego to work (leaving @ 7:30) but have to stay here for lack of a shelter (we’re Kitchen #3.) The rest of us, some case management folks and the rest ERV people, continue to plug away at our usual work.

8:28 p.m.—A good day on the ERV with a new driver, S., and Su., M. (an Americorps kid), and T., and old guy from N. Carolina. We did a real good job, down in Mid-City NOLA---got rid of all the food with a little trip to the Municipal Auditorium. Couldn’t reach K. all day because of phone trouble, but he just now called. I’m tired. Not much to say. Saw some zombies (hazmat guys in white suits and gas masks who pull the dead bodies out) who came to eat from the truck, and the most bizarre sight since I’ve been here: a house that had collapsed to the ground so that the only thing visible above the ground was the roof and attic. So much destruction.

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October 24, 2005

2006-10-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

4 working days left. Yesterday I was too beat to finish my entry.
There was the same trouble with getting through on my phone. When it was working for awhile, I got a call from K.’s brother J. as I was handing food out the window of N’s truck. It was a horrible connection and I couldn’t stop to talk, so I got off with a promise to call back. Of course, it wasn’t working when I got back and settled. K. called after I went to bed and I told him to let J. know. Evidently M.’s called a few times, too, but I found no messages on the phone.
Yesterday L. took us on a mobile feed of the Loyola area in Kenner, then we were in Bucktown in Metairie with N. People told us of the problems they were having trying to rebuild, with insurance refusing to pay, saying it’s flood damage, and the authorities are requiring $100+ permits to rebuild, which means first an inspector is needed. Of course, there’s a line for the inspections, which means it can take 10-15 days or more before they even get an appointment, plus the fact that many of these folks haven’t had income since the storm. People are angry, and disillusioned, and traumatized.
One thing I came to terms with yesterday as I heard T. and the apostle P. sniping at N: personality conflicts and head-butting are more common than I thought, and it’s not just me. L. asked me how it was when she got in later, and when I told he, she wasn’t surprised. It’s like having 3 or 4 people in the same kitchen, each with their own ideas about how to do things, and each wanting to control those things. Some folks, like T. and the apostle P., eye folks coming on who they think are new, like M. and I, and take a patronizing attitude, or an “Oh God, here we go again” attitude. Others, like me, see new people with a friendly eye and patiently help them learn. When “P.” found out I had been here longer than he, his eyes got wide. He’d never seen me before. Well, I said, it’s a big shelter.
So this a.m, after a restless night from much loud banging and blowing, I awoke to discover that the wind outside, which had been steady but pleasant and a balmy all yesterday, had turned nasty. Last night it came up so hard it blew over a porta-potty and sheared off a car’s side view mirror. M. just said it’s 48 degrees outside, and when I stepped out earlier, the trees were flagged and there was much violence. Yes, it’s practically freezing outside.

8:15 p.m.---Turned out to be a great day. I rode with L. again this a.m.,, and a couple of women I didn’t know, one new, one with a little experience, and we only had the 1st run. Instead of looking for a 2nd ERV like yesterday, I hitched a ride back to the shelter with someone who was finished (since L. was going out scouting), and decided to try to get a car to go to Wal-Mart and try to get a new pair of sunglasses to replace the ones that broke this a.m. on the truck. When I asked for one, the only one available was about to be used to ferry a guy to Harvey for outprocessing, and R. told me I could have it if I rode the guy down there. I jumped at it, and on the way back stopped at a Target in Harvey, then later got off Rt. 10 at Tchoupitoulas St., which goes right into the French Quarter. I drove in, marked the parking and landmarks like the French Market and Café du Monde, then got out and took I-10 back into Kenner. The combination of getting out of the shelter, doing some shopping for myself, and finally seeing the French Quarter (not much, admittedly, but I was worried about being gone too long) was like getting an IV tonic. I was transformed into a happy, happy woman by the tiniest things. I made a to-do list of my plans for while there on Friday. Thinking about getting out of here is like imagining a great cloud breaking inside my head, and the sun coming through.
Lots of new people have arrived in the last few hours, and some who have been here a long time are getting ready to leave. The place is loud with many animated conversations.
I have new p.j.s from Target, Halloween socks, a Halloween hand towel, and just took a shower using new body wash, a new poof, new conditioner and new face cleanser. I feel and smell delicious.
Oh, Sunday, come soon!

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House Dems unveil post-Katrina wish list

2006-10-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

Chris Kromm ("Facing South," Institute for Southern Studies):

Democrats on the House Katrina Task Force yesterday released a report summarizing their recommendations for improving the sluggish-at-best recovery effort along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Titled 'Response, Relief, and Recovery: Katrina and Beyond,' the report offers legislative proposals that task force members intend to champion once Congress returns to work after the Nov. 7 election, when Democrats need to pick up 15 seats to regain control of the House and set the agenda for Gulf recovery.

'This report is a detailed plan of action for how we in Congress can better help Louisiana and the entire Gulf Coast recover from Katrina and Rita,' said U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.), who spearheaded the effort along with Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.). 'Better levees, reforming FEMA, and fast-tracking coastal restoration and comprehensive hurricane protection projects are all included. This report is also a blueprint for how we can better respond to disasters in the future, wherever they may strike.'

October 23, 2005

2006-10-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

Sunday. 5 working days left. I’m so anticipating getting home. The little world here is making me claustrophobic. I just finished telling J. about my plans for my day off, Friday. Going to the French Quarter, doing a walking tour, hitting the Café du Monde for beignets & café au lait, trying a real NOLA Hurricane, maybe seeing a cemetery, and on the way home, getting a drive-through daiquiri. I realized I was getting better when I noticed myself laughing and getting animated. It’s the first time I found myself excited about anything for a long time---since before I was sick.
I may take a couple sick days when I get home, using the strep throat diagnosis from the clinic and just telling them I hadn’t had a chance to recover. Which is probably closer to the truth than I want to admit, anyway.
Today I admit I dread who I’ll be assigned with. I still don’t know why everything was so hard yesterday. When a driver is off, it makes everything difficult.

9:18 p.m.---So tired. Went out on 2 ERVs today. AM was great! Back with L. and 2 new folks: older woman, B., and young Americorps number, M. It went like a dream.
We got back to the yard about 2:00, and L. didn’t need to go out again. She put us on another ERV driven by N., who I didn’t know, with 2 crew members: T., and some guy who introduced himself as “P. the Apostle”. Okay... There was some problem between them and the driver, (many snarky comments that seemed out of line), but we did all right. I felt bad for N., who seemed a little out of her depth, stuck with a couple crew people not at all inclined to make her life easier. We didn’t get back until 7:20. I didn’t really eat all day till after I got my shower.
So tired. Finish this tomorrow.

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October 22, 2005

2006-10-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

My first day back on the ERVs. I lost my wonderful laminated map of NOLA, and despite a search of the trucks, can’t turn it up. Went to mention it to J. and she said, “Good luck”. And it’s a good thing, because she said, “Oh, I forgot to put you on the list” for an assignment. Christ. She sleeps right next to me, you’d think she could remember me.
Last night I had a lot of trouble getting through to call K.---the call kept dropping. When I finally got through he didn’t mention any problems on his end. Now I tried again and it’s started all over again. The problem appears to be with my company’s (Cingular’s) receiving end. They are the worst. J., who sleeps next to me, also has Cingular, and I had the same problem trying to call from his phone. Possibly there is work being done on the towers at home, but it’s a lonely feeling.
One of the things M. asked me when I was venting to her was if I had developed any friendships with anyone down here. Sadly, no. I try to get on with everyone, but I just can’t seem to become animated enough to want to hang with anyone. It’s been a problem all my life—not being able to form superficial relationships, easy alliances. I need to get to know someone well before I want to commit. Not a good way to relate in a situation like this. But small talk bores me and I feel awkward and artificial when I make it, even though I know it’s the first step toward establishing a relationship. Plus, it’s hard getting attached to someone as I started to do with J. and R., then seeing them go.
Oh, well. It’s cold and breezy today, just the opposite of yesterday’s hot and humid. I’ve spent as much time down here chilly as I have sweaty. Unexpected.

LATER (9:20 p.m.): Got in at 7:40 p.m. Had a real problem with my driver, M., who was so over-controlling and obsessive-compulsive, while trying to act as if he wasn’t. Scatter-brained while trying to run everything. A driver is an organizer, someone who oversees the operation, keeps it moving, and pitches in to help when and where needed. The crew should be left to handle the way the back is run. He jumped in, trying to do everything, and not trusting us to do any of it right. We were supposed to have 3 in the back, but lost 1 along the way, so it was me and C., a young Americorps volunteer, and M. It was a difficult day between us. I hope I don’t ride with him again. When we came back to clean the ERV he became really weird, and compulsively clean-freakish about it. When I tried to explain that we (the crew) had already cleaned the shelf on which the cambros sat, as he was about to clean them again, he actually ran his hand over the shelf repeatedly, looking for proof. The whole thing, which usually takes just 10 or 15 minutes, probably stretched out to a half hour. As a result, and with the new unproved protocol (clean the ERV and go back to the yard in the dark to load up on water and snacks) we got back much later than necessary---we unloaded our food at 5:00 p.m.) No matter what I said or did, it rubbed him the wrong way, and he kept saying he didn’t want to step on my toes. C. and I got along wonderfully. She learned fast and knew just what to do though it was only her first day. My conversation with her later made me sure the problem hadn’t been with me. And the more I tried to get him to tell me what he wanted me to do (so he could get his way) the worse things got.
I think this work naturally brings me into contact with men who don’t like to feel women are telling them what to do. I run into this more and more. K. pointed out that I’m not used to working with men who are bossy and maybe that’s why it’s hard for me to get used to this kind of entitlement that they carry around when they are with women.
On another note, the area we went into today, Lakeview, was truly a moonscape. Cars lying rear end up against trees, or across fences. People coming back to their houses to see them for the first time. It was a pretty well-to-do neighborhood, and it must have been pretty once. A man cleaning out his house and crying came up to the window of our ERV and spoke to me while sobbing about the ruination of the house. It was heartbreaking. I held his hand, put my hand on his shoulder, and cried with him. We were all in tears. I still can see him.
The doctor I saw was right. This area is in tremendous need. I told W. about it, and he was encouraging.
I feel bad about M. My second run-in with someone since I’ve been here.
I need to stop taking this so seriously.
I need a drink.

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(Some of) Houston vs. New Orleans

2006-09-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Writing for "THE THIRD BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS" blog, Fitch N. DarDar writes:

I guess the hospitality of Houstonians has now taken a nasty turn.

Gun dealers in the Lone Star State are now encouraging Houstonians to take up arms against people they are calling 'Katricians.'

It's nice to see opportunistic Houstonians making a move to take back the city from outsiders. Here's an excerpt from the story:
'When the 'Katricians' themselves are quoted as saying the crime rate is gonna go up if they don't get more free rent, then it's time to get your concealed-handgun license,' warns the radio ad by Jim Pruett, who co-hosts a bombastic talk-radio show and owns Jim Pruett's Guns & Ammo, a self-styled 'anti-terrorist headquarters' that sells knives, shotguns, semi-automatic rifles and other weapons. As Pruett describes the dangers posed by 'Katricians,' glass can be heard shattering, and a bell tolling ominously.

Fitch adds:

Yep, Barbara. This is really working out well for them.

"It looks really good down there"

2006-09-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Scout Prime ("First Draft"), New Orleans Lower 9th Ward --One Year Later:

On my last day I had asked lb0313 if I really needed to post all the videos I took on this trip. Surely people must know how bad it is here I thought. Then something happened on the plane.

I hadn't spoken with the woman sitting next to me during the flight but when we landed in Chicago she asked if I lived in NOLA. I said no I'd been down there working. She said she had been in NOLA to drop her son off at Tulane for his first year. Then she said, 'It looks really good down there.'

I took a breath and asked if she had been to Lakeview or Gentilly or the Lower 9th or St. Bernard Parish. She said no. She had been in the CBD and the Quarter. I told her well it's pretty bad outside those areas. She asked why and I started to explain about the problems with insurance and the federal money not coming to people. She stopped me and said, 'No, No. Why aren't businesses coming back. I would think they'd be clamoring to invest there.'

I simply said, ' No one knows if the levees are safe for a hurricane or even a tropical storm so they don't want to invest only to have it all washed away again.'

She looked away and never said another thing. I think it hit her where she'd just left her son.

Via Avedon Carol ("The Sideshow").

October 21, 2005

2006-09-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

I cranked most of the evening after that. It made me feel bad, acting that way, but it seems nothing gets through to our “supervisors” when someone tries to get their ear. This a.m. I’m on shelter chore duty. I just swept the entire floor and mopped half of it. Finally someone (no, two people) offered to help, and I’m letting them have the rest of it while I rest. I’ve been at it for 2 ½ hours, and I’m bushed.
I spoke to MH person M. this a.m. for over an hour in her car. It was a good hour. I explained all my concerns about the shelter and went over all the kvetches I’ve been making to others. Then explained that my concern is that I hate myself when I start talking like that---that I’d promised myself to remain aloof from all dramas, intrigues, and politics while here.
She validated how I felt, because she sees it, too, which made me feel better. She advised me to try to keep a sense of humor and to take care of my own needs.
Funny though, I’ve kind of lost interest in expressing my concerns to K., M., or J. I’ve lost interest in anything except making it through the next 9 days. The last 3 are non-work days---Friday, my next day off, Saturday, for outprocessing, and Sunday for the flight home. So it’s really only 6 more hard work days.
I can make it.

Life in a shelter is:

Discovering earplugs.
A constant search for privacy.
Overhearing all the little dramas and gossip that go on, and sometimes finding yourself pissed that you discover others conning the system or getting special treatment while you work so hard and play by the rules.
Discovering you’re on your own, even when you’re sick and depending on medical personnel to get you treatment.
Having a kitchen that makes only coffee and provides salty, starchy, sugary snacks as the primary food; getting ecstatic at the sight of tuna or a bag of lettuce.
Eating the food doled out on the trucks to the needy for dinner (and lunch if you’re on the ERV crew) and finding out how little the procurer/”dieticians” in charge of the menus care for the health or tastes of their clientele.
Unexpected kindnesses from people you don’t even know.

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October 20, 2005

2006-09-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

I didn’t update yesterday’s entry because I didn’t get in until 9:05 p.m., and after showering & prep, into bed at 9:50. I was so exhausted I could hardly move. Stupid logistics, sending us out of the yard at 11:00 a.m., back in for a 2nd run at 5:00 p.m. to a place in Kenner (3rd & Fillmore) that hardly anyone was at, and to which a 2nd ERV had also been sent. Ended up going to CVS to get rid of over 200 meals, but by 8:00 p.m. there wasn’t many of them, either. Another ERV lost it’s inside lights and couldn’t serve, so they came by and gave us their food. They were kind enough to stay and help serve, but eventually we had to give up and go back.
Our driver, M., was good fun, and earlier took us for a ride around the broken levee (17th Street) and through the Bucktown neighborhood destroyed by it. I got some photos.
I was angry when I got back. They had ramped up to 2 or 3 times the number of meals we’d been serving when we first got here, and there are more than twice the ERVs now. Everything takes longer. The meals are numbers that make somebody look good, but the last couple days I’ve been out, enormous amounts of food have been wasted, and I don’t remember that happening. Plus the food is getting worse and worse, and the Baptists are having a harder time getting it.
So today is my day off, and I wake up with more deep yellow gunk coming out of my nose and chest, and yellow pus gluing my eyes shut. I spoke to the nurse, who wants to take me to the doctor. Nice way to spend the day off.

LATER: The nurse, N., was a chatterbox and kind of a scatterbrain, who couldn’t even find her list of clinics/doctors to take me to. I ended up calling around myself till I found a walk-in ER clinic. (I was in tears as I did this, feeling like utter shit and about to collapse any minute, feeling like I’d lost my last friend.) After a very long wait (they accidentally took someone else first who answered to my name, then continued to respond to it until they asked her straight out, “Are you X?” at which time she seemed to regain consciousness, but it was too late.) I saw the doc, who ran a test that was 85% positive for strep throat. I had visions of being sent home as a “Typhoid Mary”, but the nurse spoke to Public Health and someone else, both of them telling her it was not a concern. So I was given a cortisone shot, a couple prescriptions for amoxicillin and Allegra-D (allergy med w/decongestant in case I was having allergic reactions kicked up by the infection or the mung in NOLA) and a recommendation for a day of rest and fluids.
We stopped to get N. a meal and (this was before she told me I could stay) I looked at the menu thinking this could be my last chance to get a shrimp po’ boy, so I ordered one, with fries. Since I wasn’t the least bit hungry, it surprised me to finish the whole plate.
I’m full even now, at 8:00 p.m., and that will be my one and only meal of the day.
I picked up another $200 at the ATM since my bill at CVS came to $150 (and I have insurance!), most of it for the medication, plus some items for work.
In the meantime, concerns continue, as people are sent out on fools’ errands with too much food, too late, and the waste piles up. Neither management nor volunteers understand each others’ concerns, and a number of volunteers who have spoken to J., M. or K. feel they have been ignored or given the brush off. If management is under stress and pushed into making decisions or enforcing quotas that seem unworkable...
It’s bad enough sending people on 2nd runs at 5:00 in the evening. People working 10-12 hour days, physically punishing days, have a hard time keeping up that pace, but if the results seem worth it, at least morale is kept up. But to send people out to work that kind of schedule only to see their work wasted, again and again, is to guarantee disillusionment and anger, not to mention loss of interest and focus on the main goal---to feed people who need it.
Cars pull up in the yard waiting to load cambros that aren’t ready, only to prevent the cars at the end of the line from loading snacks and water. Maybe time could be conserved by simply sending them through all the way when the H2O and snacks are loaded, and making a full circle back to the cambros, by which time the first pallets might be ready to load, and the cambro-loading could be done more by then, as well.
I’m so glad I’m not going home.

NOTE: The shelter meeting, postponed from yesterday, is now being held almost an hour late. The so-called “guest” expected with such ballyhoo failed to appear (was it the President of the ARC?) So the shelter manager wants to know if everyone had an “awesome day”. Everyone obligingly assented for the cameraman from HQ who has been circulating amongst us. Did I mention how they got us a large-screen TV just before the “visit”? Which replaced the donated, battered, rabbit-eared one that we got shortly after I arrived? And one of the first things we saw on the TV was a report on how the NOLA cops had beaten up some poor schmuck in front of some ARC volunteers, and when they tried to help him, the cops threatened to arrest them?
R brings up morning routine: “How to save time?” “Leave earlier!”

I forgot to mention the handmade signs we saw along W. Esplanade Ave. today: “Evacuate Broussard” “Thanks, Aaron”. Jefferson Parish is pissed at the man who cried for them on Meet the Press. I’ll have to ask the residents why.

Useful info gleaned from the meeting from a case management worker: way to get shelter placement---call 337.281.xxxx. If they have a LA identification and can find a hotel room, they can just say “Bill it to the Red Cross”.

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October 19, 2005

2006-09-12T02:24:00.000-07:00

For some reason, the last 2 days have dragged endlessly, and it seems impossible that it’s only the 19th. Had the worst coughing spell yet last night about 3 a.m. This morning my throat doesn’t hurt so bad, but my nose seems to be running.
Today the president of the Red Cross is supposed to cruise into town, and management is all a-twitter. J. asked me to postpone my day off because of this, and I agreed. So I’ll take tomorrow off. The driver that drove me nuts, T., as well as several other new ones, have been taken off driving for awhile until they can be trained by observation. I’m going out with one of the drivers from Algiers, M. Crew includes P., another driver who needs to learn the ropes, and who yesterday ran into a telephone pole. I’m glad the word on T. confirmed my own experience.
My run today is Bucktown in the a.m., and 3rd and Fillmore in the p.m., both outside of NOLA. J. and R. said the latter site is beautiful in the evening, right at a levee overlooking the Mississippi River west, and that the sunset there is spectacular.
Yesterday, based on reports, was chaos: between the additional logistics of loading twice the ERVs that were here when I arrived, and the lack of training of the new crews and drivers, a lot of food was wasted, as well as time. At the yard I watched J. trying to herd crews and make the ERVs move out. Crew members came to sit in the tent and chat or eat instead of staying with their vehicles. This, plus problems getting supplies of food for us and the Baptists, made for a bad day.
From what I can gather, the word passes down from on high how many meals to serve, We were supposed to ramp up from about 5000-6000 to 10,000-15,000. But the way it’s supposed to be counted is: the driver makes the count before the run, after telling the crew what to get and how much at the yard. At the end of the run, s/he counts again. But the sheets used for this have not been used, except once or twice, meaning the count at the end of the run can be whatever driver and crew decide on. Most often clamshells used makes the hot meal count, and boxes of snacks & water used makes the rest. But it’s been very haphazard.
Plus, the temperature of the food is supposed to be monitored so that hot food doesn’t fall below 140 degrees. Only certain drivers make sure this occurs. Others think it’s unnecessary---though it’s in the ERV Driver training. This only becomes an issue when an all-day run is made, since it’s twice the food at one time.
So what happens is, it’s in everyone’s interest to keep the count up, so the ARC can look good. The idea is to “use the meals”, which means if you can’t get rid of them at one site, move to another, or mobile feed. Sometimes not keeping close records becomes a way to fudge the count, which is why management doesn’t seem particular about enforcing the record-keeping rule.
Now, what political opportunism has propelled the ARC president down here is unknown to me. But you can bet that’s what it is. I’ve been saying since I got here that the higher-ups needed to be down here in mobile communication trucks, visiting the sites and making personal assessments. But I doubt that’s what this will be. More likely a few stops at staging areas and meeting with supervisors, then off to D.C. or wherever.
Cynical, I know.
Ah, the sun rises. 7:25 a.m. I’m in the playing field. I better get some loratidine* into me.

*An allergy medicine.

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The Nation: Don't Mourn, Link

2006-09-08T09:50:00.001-07:00

The first paragraphs of Michael Tisserand's Don't Mourn, Link in The Nation:

By the first week of September 2005, New Orleans was in effect a virtual city. Most phones, cell and otherwise, were useless; only e-mails brought news to and from evacuees. Instead of neighborhoods, there were neighborhood forums on the Times-Picayune's website, for those trying to locate relatives and friends.

By then, activists had also discovered that the Internet was the only way to send and receive reliable information about what was happening on the ground in New Orleans. First-person accounts of the flood and its aftermath began circulating widely, including 'This is Criminal,' written by former Black Panther Malik Rahim, as well as a detailed account of a blockade that prevented New Orleanians from crossing to safety over a Mississippi River bridge, first posted by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky on the Socialist Worker website.

A year later, the Internet remains a crucial link in the effort to rebuild New Orleans and its communities. 'The Internet is now used like a telephone tree,' says Greg Peters, a Lafayette, Louisiana-based cartoonist and blogger who last fall helped evacuees access computers in that city's Cajundome shelter. 'When someone finds out about some hastily called planning meeting, they alert everyone through the blogs and get a crowd there to see what's going on.'

While it would have been nice to see some, you know, links in this article, they've been gathered in a second one, "Linking to New Orleans." Strangely, blogs are listed but not linked! there either, something I'll correct:

Most bloggers offer political commentary, on-the-ground reports of life in New Orleans, and links to other bloggers. The most insightful include "Your Right Hand Thief," "People Get Ready," "Suspect Device," "The American Zombie," "The G Bitch Spot," "Gentilly Girl," "Library Chronicles," "Suspect Device" [well, yeah -- ed.] and "Ashley Morris."

Well, we had one. :|

Wet Bank Guide: RICO for AllState?

2006-09-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Writing about this Times-Picayune article, Mark Folse ("Wet Bank Guide") asks:

Is there one remaining state or federal officials who is neither corrupt nor a vain careerist, one who is prepared to start treating the insurance industry for what is has become: a criminal, racketeering enterprise?

The definition of racketeering under the RICO statute is this:
(1) 'racketeering activity' means (A) any act or threat involving murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matter, or dealing in a controlled substance or listed chemical (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act), which is chargeable under State law and punishable by imprisonment for more than one year...' (emphasis mine)
If Allstate's announcement that owners must buy inflated cost car insurance from the company or have their homeowners insurance cancelled is not extortion, I don't know what is. I think the fact that Allstate's motivation is to try to cancel homeowners contrary to state law (in effect, using extortion as a means to circumvent state law) ought to be considered as well, to help demonstrate how the industry has devolved into a criminal enterprise.

I'll be adding "Wet Bank Guide" -- motto: "Remembering Katrina. Envisioning New Orleans." -- to the blog roll to the right.

October 17, 2005

2006-09-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

My cold was so bad that when I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee, I never fell back to sleep. Laying down just makes my nose stuff and run and I can’t stop coughing. I’ve never worked this hard while being sick. I feel better being up and about, but I know I’m going to crash when I get back today. R. who will be leaving Wednesday, told me she recommended me to J. M. for her crew when J. asked, so if that happens, I’ll be going back into the 9th Ward.
This morning I walked into the section of the parking lot between us and the road, and to the west, still dark, I saw the just-waning moon, full and in extreme detail. The stars above, chased by the rising sun, still shone. I could make out Orion’s belt. Then, when I turned to the east to walk back to the building, I saw bright layers of magenta and orange laying on the horizon, harbingers of the yet unseen sun. It was such a remarkable combination of sights that I called the guard over to show him. He said, “You’re from the city, right?”
Last night, J., the newly-made assistant supervisor, did not sleep in her cot. R., whom she asked to move next to her, said she had spent the night in the hotel in Harvey (just south of NOLA), where M. and K. stay. He noted that certain of the group go there, and had a kind of fatherly concern for her. She’s old enough to know what she’s getting into. While we’re on the subject of shelter behavior, there’s an odd incidence of some of the 20-somethings getting into bed together in the morning and before lights out.
I’m too old or too weary or too something to concern myself about much that goes on here. It seems to operate much along the lines of a sleepaway camp. Cliques, special privileges, high school stuff. I guess I expected more from the people who volunteered. Between this and the management/organizational/communication problems the agency has, I begin to understand why some folks have turned off so badly. I’ve lost interest in learning to drive the ERVs. I don’t even care whether I stay on a crew. Just so long as I don’t have to be sent on pointless travels from pillar to post with nothing to do, I’ll be content.
Wednesday is my day off and I’ve put in for a car.

LATER:
Short entry, as I am now sicker than ever and completely exhausted. They put me on an ERV with a completely inexperienced crew and driver, and I had to hold the driver’s hand through everything, including the light check. Plus I had to navigate us to the site, Municipal Auditorium in Louis Armstrong Park, downtown NOLA next to the French Quarter. We got off I-10 too soon, but drove right next to the Superdome. Not quite deserted, but the traffic was closer to 3 in the morning than a Monday rush hour. Things look sad.
I did so much work, my own and everyone else’s and the driver, T., did very, very little, and it was an extended run with no midday break, so it was tiring. I think it put me over the edge.
J. is not sending me out tomorrow. And Wednesday is my day off. Maybe I can recover.

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October 16, 2005

2006-09-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

One week. 6 days in ERVs. Just as I’ve gotten to know folks, they are leaving. It was a very good day---2 runs to an assisted living home and a needy neighborhood. Happy people, so happy to see us. So many “God blesses” and I really love these people. They are truly a breed apart.
I’m tired and sick. Yes, sick, I admit it. My throat has been sore since last Thursday, and the infection in my chest/head keeps getting worse. I refuse to let it stop me. Everyone here has a cough or worse, it seems.
So tired. I keep wanting to write about things---the dragonflies, the moon, the look of the place, the plants---but I never seem to get to it.
Lights out, 5 minutes. I didn’t use to stay up this late. It was the diet cola.

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October 15, 2005

2006-09-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

The month is half gone. Nonsense abounds here in the sleep-away camp/state hospital atmosphere of the Red Cross shelter. Some folks moved on this a.m., after being shunted around for 4 days to 3 other shelters. Others may have moved in—I don’t know anymore.

This morning as I was getting ready to leave on my a.m. run, one of the crew, a guy who calls himself “V.”, who I worked with on 2 other runs, came up to me and told me I was rude, my behavior was unacceptable, I wasn’t a supervisor but I acted like one, and he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. I thought he was joking and asked him if he was. He was serious. Saying I tried to boss everyone around. I was stunned. I had grown to dislike him during the last run we had together, but his take on me was like a blindside punch. I was stunned, not the least by the poisonous way he talked and the near-hate in his expression. I immediately went to J. and told her I would no longer work with him. She asked if I wanted moved to another crew, or wanted him moved. I said to leave it to R., the driver, and the upshot was he was moved while I stayed. Such weirdness.
Tempers are short and people behave in odd ways here. Rather than a group of adults who have thrown in their lot together to help others, the group sometimes seems more like a bunch of special needs kids in a state home. Not everyone. But enough so that the drama extends to the supervisors and managers.

I’ve been here (in LA) a week now, and done 5 runs. I’m beginning to feel like a long-timer.
The place is packed with cots.
Still fighting off what feels like bronchitis. This a.m. my sputum came out very deep yellowish-green, a sign of infection, and I have been somewhat hoarse-sounding. I try not to let it get me down. I keep telling myself I’m getting better everyday.
K. went to spend the weekend at Wildwood with J & H. I keep forgetting it’s Satuday.
I’m getting used to the devastation all around me. Today we were at the “Katrina Dump” by accident.

The workers there were talking to each other about casualties, and I think they are still pulling bodies out of the wreckage. This was only a few miles from my shelter.

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October 14, 2005

2006-09-05T03:03:00.000-07:00

I have postcards to send, but forgot about them.
Today things took a delightfully interesting turn. 3 of the older folks, R.(one of my drivers), L. (who worked with me a couple times), and La. (who lent me the eyeglasses kit) invited me to go on a sightseeing trip. R.’s ERV (I was on it today) was sent back after just one run, leaving me half a day to do something else. L. invited me, and I said yes.
Luckily, they stopped at Wal-Mart first, where I got my glasses fixed, got some fabulous maps, and some extra t-shirts. The place was inundated with shoppers, being one of the first major places to open in the area, and the lines stretched back halfway to the interior of the store. Only by sheer luck did I end up in a line that no one seemed to know existed, at the far end of the store, and was thus able to get out in less than an hour. Then we drove to NOLA and across the Causeway, the longest bridge in the world they said, that spans Lake Ponchartrain. We then turned east to Slidell, and then back down to NOLA via Rt. 10, which had been closed till today. The part of it that is bridge is actually 2 bridges, going north and south, and the northern bound bridge has great chunks of it missing from the flood waters of the Mississippi.

We drove down through vast swaths of devastated land across the Bayou Sauvage. There were dead animals---cows, deer, alligator—and broken, flooded cars. A boat lay upside-down by the road; a yacht!! Long stretches of city were vacant.

Nothing moved. Brick walls were torn asunder.

I have become so accustomed to wreckage everywhere I look.
So, eventually we turned back north on 610 and headed back to Metairie, next to Kenner, in search of a Steak & Ale the others had been to once before. After a brief sidetrack while lost, we finally found it. What a treat! L. and I had strawberry margaritas, La. had a Bloody Mary and a C & C, and I ate salad (at last! Greens!!) and a Bourbon Street NY Strip cooked in bourbon and brown sugar, with garlic mashed. After the food we’d been eating, it was heaven.
I got plenty of gossip about the bizarre behavior of current and past volunteers, and a sense of how rampant drinking and fucking around are.
What a drag. The place is a mess so far as management, and and now we have even more new people. The place is beyond packed. M., the supervisor, had some kind of nervous breakdown and put J., who came down with me, in charge for 24 hours while he disappeared.
Chaos. Looms.

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Part V

2006-09-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

October 13, 2005

Evening, sometime---Time drifts into limbo here. It’s easy to forget what day it is. Today I didn’t go to NOLA. New ERV, new driver, 3 of the same crew as yesterday.
Since yesterday my throat and chest have bothered me, since going into NOLA. Today it was worse. Mold spores in the air there can set off instant bronchitis, and that’s how this feels. I’m fighting it. Today they told us the health and safety people insist on stringent control of contaminants when people come back from NOLA, meaning shoes must be dipped in bleach, and clothes must remain outside the shelter till they have been cleaned.
Today was exhausting. I can hardly write. Everything hurts. It will take awhile before my body adapts and starts to get stronger, but I don’t think I will be the same person I was when I get back.
We got something like 30 new people yesterday, and are getting more today. Like us they come in with their ready-made friendships, but unlike us they doon’t readily adapt. They got up this morning and made too much noise before 7:00 (the official “lights on” time in the shelter). Last night there was too much noise after lights-out. A guy moved in next to me and snored like a horror. Thank God someone got me earplugs. On top of that, I broke my glasses (fixed now with tape), my throat and chest were killing me, and my head ached. I didn’t get to sleep until after 11:00, and I’m usually gone before lights out (10 p.m.).
Must find an optician to fix my glasses.
Funny thing…in the middle of feeding a neighborhood, I must have accidentally hit a speed-dial button on my cell phone, because suddenly D.E. was on the phone while I was trying to plate food. I explained what happened and quickly got off. They want you to keep your phone with you at all times if you have one, so they can reach you or your ERV. Most times Dispatch can call up on the truck radios, but once in NOLA they don’t work anymore, and the only way to contact them is by phone.
Of course, the fact that cell service is spotty and intermittent doesn’t help, either.
Good grief.

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Part IV

2006-09-01T03:18:00.000-07:00

October 12, 2005

9:00 p.m.---I can’t believe I’m only just now writing. Today I went into New Orleans’ 9th Ward with a new driver, R, and crew: J., L. and “”V.” It was a problematic trip. We were sent to a Naval Support base to feed the troops, who turned out to have catered their food and had no need of us.

Our dreams of a mobile feeding crashed when we realized it was the base we were being sent to. (Management hadn’t bothered to tell us till after we got there.) Even though we’d been briefed with scary stories, given 600 meals for an all-day trip, and warned to wear respirator masks and not to get out of the truck for any reason whatsoever, we took advantage of the otherwise pointless stopover at the base to use the bathroom, and gave the guards some fruit for their trouble.
This was extremely disappointing. When this turned out to be a bust we got permission to cruise the street we were assigned, which turned into a cruise of the neighborhood.

(All communication had to be via our private cell phones because the truck radio systems, as we discovered, did not reach from dispatch in Kenner into NOLA. The problem is, cell phone service down here--across the entire area---is really problematic, too. You never know when you'll get through.) We were able to feed some folks, but there were very few there aside from some military personnel sitting in the streets and a group of folks with masks on gamely trying to sweep up an intersection. "V" completely ignored the directionswe'd been given and jumped out of the truck, carrying food up to people and running around in the streets. We ended up getting back on I-10 and trekking east across NOLA and back,

then back into Kenner to what may have been a FEMA distribution center at a church, where we unloaded everything.
I’m pretty tired. It was a long, long day. Started at 5:30 a.m. when I got up, ended when I got back to the shelter about 7:15 p.m. The devastation was endless. And vast, and numbing. Being able to do some good was healing. And when I got back I ended up being a shoulder to cry on for the assistant shelter manager (J., one of the women I rode down from Baton Rouge with—her cot is beside mine). I also told M., the supervisor, that I wanted to get certified to drive the ERVs while I was there, and he seems open to it.
So tired. More in a.m.

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Rising Tide conference and blog

2006-08-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

Rising Tide Blog explains its origins:

The Rising Tide Conference will be a gathering for all who wish to learn more and do more to assist New Orleans' recovery from the aftermath of the natural disasters of both Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the manmade disaster of the levee and floodwall collapses, and the incompetence of government on all levels.

The conference ran from August 25 to 27. From the one of the first posts after the conference, "Look what washed up":

Well the conference is over, and the Rising Tide Blog begins its roll. (Hey Po' Blog, want to join the party? You seemed into the idea.) Being a gathering of bloggers we even have some lovely detailed notes and quotes provided by both Maitri (the loud indian girl) and Scout Prime (one of our favorite adopted NOLABloggers. So as of this evening here are links to the posts made about the first Rising Tide: Matri -Liveblogging and retrospective presented with her legendary attention to detail. If you want the rundown on what you missed look here...

The blog relies a lot on wireless message posts, an interesting wrinkle, I think. Via "da po' boy", who distinguishes between two kinds of so-called "carpetblogging":

Carpetblogging should be defined as more than just “outsiders” blogging about a community. When we step out of our areas of expertise to comment on something that we feel is important, we all become outsiders to some degree. For example, I write about levees but I am no engineer. That doesn’t mean that my opinion should be instantly written off.

I think of carpetblogging as blogging from an outside perspective that shuts out local voices or hijacks the vehicles for local voices to be heard.

Louisiana Diary, by riggsveda

2006-08-31T06:11:00.000-07:00

This is a "home page" post for riggsveda's "Louisiana Diary" entries -- a single point of reference for other people to link to, if they like, and for readers to return to if they'd like to read the diary in sequence or skip to a particular entry. This post will be updated as new diary entries are added. The blurbs below are by no means a full description of each post, just a thumbnail phrase to jog the memory.

September 9 to October 9, 2005 -- Training, departure
October 10, 2005 -- Staging area, Susan Park gymnasium
October 11, 2005 -- First day on the job
October 12, 2005 -- Naval support base
October 13, 2005 -- Bronchitis
October 14, 2005 -- Across the Causeway
October 15, 2005 -- V; tempers are short
October 16, 2005 -- Good day, but sick
October 17, 2005 -- Cliques, etc.; newbie crew
October 19, 2005 -- Record keeping tricks
O ctober 20, 2005 -- Strep throat; mismanagement
October 21, 2005 -- "Life in a shelter is:..."
October 22, 2005 -- M; Lakeview moonscape
October 23, 2005 -- Laughing again
October 24, 2005 -- Cold snap; great day
October 25, 2005 -- Saw some zombies
October 26, 2005 -- Getting ready to go

The entries are about riggsveda's work as a Red Cross volunteer in Louisiana, and were posted between 8/29/06 and 10/26/06.

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EDIT, 9/14: post times summarized, blurbs added, subject to riggsveda's approval.

Louisiana Diary Part III

2006-08-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

October 11, 2005

7:45 a.m.---My first day on the job. Assigned to an ERV with L.B., driver. None of the folks I came down here with will be on the truck. Hope I do well, We’re going to Fat City, someplace in or near Metarie. No one can tell me much about it.
Woke up at 5:00 a.m., got into the bathroom and cleaned up before the rush. Slept okay---probably not as well as the night before last, but only because I was so dead tired back then.

7:30 p.m.---Back from the shower, clean, and amazingly, ready to pass out. The showers have only cold water, and it was my first time in them. Before that, we got back to the shelter about 6:15 and I had a hot meal, the first in 2 days. No, not true; I ate at 2:00 this afternoon as well.
We went out with our driver L., a very sweet young woman, and the routine runs like this:
Assignments are posted on the wall in the morning telling everyone which ERV they will be on and with which driver (usually 3-4 workers are assigned to a driver, but the crews and drivers are reshuffled to different trucks everyday.). You sign out for the day and head out to the parking lot to do a run-through of the ERV checklist: lights, gas, etc., and check the inside for what supplies you’ll need when you get to the yard.

You drive to the kitchen, the big outdoor kitchen run by the local 1st Baptist big motherfucking megachurch. They are very kind and cheerful. You pick up your supplies there in the yard, which include bread and fruit and snacks and water, then get the cambros, which are massive plastic heatproof coolers into which big bags of prepared food are poured. You haul all this stuff into the back of the truck and pack it in, in the most logistically-sound way, strap down the cambros, and you’re off. Sometimes you get MREs to supplement the food, but most of those go on the box trucks, which are driven around to specific sites where they and cases of water are handed out. You usually do 2 runs, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and take 300 meals out on each run.
Today we served fruit cocktail and beef stew in the first run (about 10 a.m.-12 p.m.), and chicken tenders & patties, green beans, and chocolate-acrylic pudding material in the second (around 3 p.m.-5 p.m.). After each run we take the ERV to the dumpsters across from the church and get rid of the garbage, then drive to the kitchen and unload the cambros, then either pick up more, or clean the utensils and head home, where we scrub down the inside of the ERV and get it ready for the next day. All day while inside the ERV you are cleaning cleaning cleaning up constantly, as food service is a messy business, especially in a moving vehicle, and constantly making bags of fruit and snacks to give out at the back of the truck, or filling foam clamshells with hot food to give out at the side window. You may do a stationary feeding, where you sit in one place till you run out of food, or you may do a mobile feeding, moving slowly through a neighborhood watching for anyone in need while the driver calls people out over the loudspeaker. The work is hot, heavy, and hard, and you are on your feet almost non-stop from the moment you enter the truck till you get back to the shelter.
This morning I helped R. bag oranges, apples, & bottles of water to pass out to the people who came for the meals. Then, when we had all the fruit bagged, I helped plate food into clamshells with L. and LD. R.’s wife N. served the food from the window of the ERV. It was much the same in the afternoon, except R. handled the fruit and water himself while I stayed in the truck plating food.

I helped load and unload, get rid of garbage, and set up and tear down. At the end of the day on our way back, we had to stop at a car wash and clean the truck. Usually the crew washes down the inside when they get back to the shelter, but it was mostly done when we arrived because while L. and I worked on the outside at the car wash, R., N. and LD. had done all but the floor inside.
Now I’m getting more tired by the minute. I’ll be sore tomorrow, and I have numerous bruises.
The exciting thing is that we (meaning not me, but a few experienced members of our shelter and one ERV) went into the 9th Ward of Orleans Parish for the first time today, with the long-awaited permission of the city. They hope that we will all be in there by the end of the week. We are tremendously excited. The 9th Ward is the very worst, ground zero of the destruction. People who’ve seen it say you’ll never forget it. We are needed desperately. They sent a team in today with double supplies and 3 mental health people. I imagine we’ll hear all about it at the briefing tomorrow. The managers hold a briefing meeting every morning prior to the day’s work, right after the assignments are posted. Managers are supposed to be riding through the neighborhoods determining where the need is, and in consultation with the drivers and ERV workers, make the decisions where to send us, how many runs to schedule, and how many meals we should take.
What was Fat City like? Like so much of the rest of the area, great swaths of destruction side by side with seemingly untouched buildings. A poor area, with titty bars on all sides (at least where we were), but some nice-looking restaurants, too. Not a place you’d like to be alone in, day or night. We pulled into an abandoned corner gas station, and people were already waiting for food before we were even set up. Some came by and sat in their cars just looking at us, waiting for curb service. We just looked back. Many were workers; the area is filled with restoration companies, insurance adjusters, “hurricane relief teams”, and others. Lots of Latinos, including migrants. Luckily, R. and N. are Puerto Rican and speak fluent Spanish, which came in very handy.
Signs pop up like mushrooms all along the highways and at intersections, advertising jobs, cleaning and restorations services, loans, or simply the fact that businesses that were here before the hurricane are back and re-opened again.

Places that look fine turn out to be closed or moved. Places that look devastated are putting handmade signs in the windows or on the streets that say “open”. Sometimes there’s no sense to it.

Everywhere they sell “Drive-Through Daiquiris”.

I was hoping I would lose weight from the work, but I eat like a horse.

Too tired to go on. Maybe I’ll turn in early.

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Louisian Diary, Part II

2006-08-30T03:11:00.000-07:00

October 10, 2005

8:05 a.m., Columbus Day, Staging Area---Dropped like a stone last night around 7:30 p.m. Somebody passing my cot said I looked like a dead woman. The shelter was in a church, set up for both volunteers and the displaced. The community room and meeting had been divided into 3 large sections: male, female, and co-ed. The women’s section had one tiny narrow window and was so dark I could hardly find my way around. I opted for the well-lit co-ed section, where there was food and a big-screen TV. Restrooms were very decent. Never did use the Hazmat shower, which everyone complained was too cold. Got a ride back to headquarters at 7:00 a.m. It’s now 8:15 and I’m still useless. I did get an official apron. I’m nervous about driving the box trucks—24 feet long. Maneuvering is an issue, and they’re diesel. Leave them running. Let them warm up a bit before turning them on. Told my assigner at Feeding I’d never driven anything that big. He didn’t seem concerned.
Now they’re saying lots of folks are needed again at Kenner. I get the feeling this may be a real horror show. More scary stories about it from others today.

10:45 a.m.---En Route to Kenner by way of Belle Chasse with a vanful of partners. S. and J. are the other women. R., J., S., JM., and A are the 5 men. They’ve been together since Montgomery, staying in hotels for 3 days, and have bonded very closely. Now I’m with them.
Our driver is a Latino from the Midwest who worked for Wal-Mart, and who asked them to transfer him down here so he could volunteer to help. They did, and now he works all day for them, and on his days off and after work he drives the van and does other odd jobs for ARC. And this is the kind of guy they underpay and force onto the Medicaid rolls.
R. says we’re supposed to drive food to the folks in the field. Supposed to be primitive conditions. He says this with relish.

1:30 p.m.---Drove past Kenner (Jefferson Parish) into New Orleans past the Superdome, on the very highway where they turned back the hurricane victims to keep them from “infecting” Gretna.

Too much mess to describe right now.

Came into Belle Chasse, stopped for lunch at Subway (one of the few places available to get food), arrived at the Best Western 10 blocks away from more “in-processing”. Waiting now for a ride back to Kenner. I’m getting to a point where I’m ready to give up trying to control anything---just send me somewhere and put me to work.

6:55 p.m., Susan Park Gymnasium---Kenner at last. This is the dream job. M., the shelter head-something, says it is the elite shelter. We will be doing ERV (Emergency Response Vehicle) work, delivering hot meals, water, and snacks to people, loading and unloading the trucks, and learning to drive them. They hope to be able to get into NOLA sometime, somehow, because currently the authorities refuse to let us cross into the parrish to deliver food.
Went through NOLA twice. Even though it’s bad here and everywhere we went, it’s nothing compared to the mess on the other side of the 17th St. levee, where we’ve been told the toxicity of the sludge combined with the rampant dead bodies of animals (and possibly still people) makes it dangerous to go near.

The atmosphere in the shelter, which is only for volunteers, is amazingly collegial, moreso than any place I’ve been so far. We eat mostly snack foods because the daily meals are from what goes out in the ERVs. Not a lot of micromanaging here. Cold showers in the shower truck. Pretty laissez-faire with the maintenance. Supposed to be over 80 of us here, but so far the number showing up has been sparse. Co-ed like Our Lady. My cot is much higher than yesterday, and it’s easier to get out of bed. Did I mention it’s inside a gymnasium? So if we want to get up a baseball game in the field beside us, it’s no problem. But watch out for the fire ants.
I helped feed some folks today on a brief run with M. to let the newbies see how it’s done. Just handed out MREs and water, but it felt really good. Just like this assignment.

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Louisiana Diary: previous, next, home

NYT on Katrina One Year Later

2006-08-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

You don't get more traditional reporting than the reporting done by the NYT and our mandate here is to explore non-traditional Katrina reporting, but this NYT Katrina site is something to behold. The photo essays alone are worth the time to wander around it.

NY Inquirer draws on "Recording Katrina"

2006-08-29T09:38:00.003-07:00

All of us at "Recording Katrina" are pleased to have drawn the notice of the New York Inquirer ("The first all-online alternative weekly"; "We don't break news -- we put news back together") where Andrew Bast and his team have assembled a feature one-year retrospective on the disaster: "Katrina: One year later, shameless silence." It's a perfect fit between two non-traditional news gathering teams -- Bast complimented "Recording Katrina" as a great resource as he researched the series, and the Inquirer will run one of riggsveda's accounts on Thursday. We thank him in advance for including riggsveda's story and mentioning our group blog, and invite everyone to have a look at the Inquirer series.

Some background, at least as I see it: this blog was fellow "RK" blogger eRobin's ("fact-esque") idea. She and I were outraged by what we were seeing in the news in the first weeks after the hurricane hit, the levees broke, and the Bush administration proved so incompetent and venal at everything (again).

We were also moved by the raw, first-person accounts we were finding around the Internet which we had started to mention in posts on our blogs, and we decided to collect links and excerpts in one place. Soon after, we were joined by riggsveda ("it's my country, too") and thatfarmgirl, who have posted first-person accounts about what they saw and learned as volunteers. Now riggsveda is adding new entries from her time in Louisiana in October, 2005.

Over time we've also included other "nontraditional" takes on Katrina, including everything from activist organization press releases, and key official documents and reports, to satellite photographs, innovative or freelance journalism, and more. When a post isn't a narrative by one of us, I think we've succeeded in keeping our own commentary to a minimum and letting the accounts and documents we've found speak for themselves. We haven't been all that different from everyone else in moving on to other topics as well, but maintaining this site has challenged us to keep paying attention to the story and continue recording what we found.

Personally, the main way I'd like to see "Recording Katrina" improve is to get some Gulf Coast residents and/or Katrina survivors to join us. If you're interested, leave a comment here or e-mail one of us, and we'll let you know.

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CROSSPOSTED in revised form at "newsrack." NOTE: banner by permission of the New York Inquirer.
UPDATE, 8/31: "My Darlin' New Orleans" at the NY Inquirer.

Arabi Wrecking Krewe

2006-08-29T09:15:00.000-07:00

"Working to bring home the musicians." About Us:

In New Orleans parlance a krewe is a group of people who get together and put on a Mardi Gras parade. This is not an easy undertaking because there are innumerable logistical details to work out: a theme must be decided on, floats need to be designed and paid for, costumes have to be prepared. The Arabi Wrecking Krewe faces an even more daunting task bringing back the music, which means the musicians, because music here is a living, breathing thing, like those stately live oaks that still stand to line the boulevards.

Anyone who knows this city knows it is nothing without its soundtrack. We live, love, eat and even die to a rhythm that is uniquely ours, but that we gladly share with the world. In New Orleans our thoughts soar with the trumpets, our bodies sway with the saxophones, our feet tap to the drums, our hands move over imaginary ivories, and our voices join together for song. You can rebuild the levees, restore the power, bring back the barrier islands, but if the music doesn’t return, my New Orleans, your New Orleans, our New Orleans, will be gone forever.

The Arabi Wrecking Krewe has wrestled rotten refrigerators, pounded sodden sheet rock, bailed out flooded music rooms and sorted debris to find mementos of a past which some say can never be revived. Whatever your talents may be, we can use you, as an administrator, a carpenter, a fundraiser, a counselor or a friend.

So help us bring the musicians and the music back, and remember it is not just for those of us who call New Orleans home, because music knows no boundaries.

Gallery.
Contact.
Wish list.
Donate.

People Get Ready: New Orleans, 1 A.K.

2006-08-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

From today's post, "New Orleans, 1 A.K.," on a blog by "Schroeder" called People Get Ready ([make levees, not war]):

The alarm on the cell phone I never had before Hurricane Katrina went off this morning at 5:15. There are so many things that are going through my head today, I don't even know where to go with this. Every time I touch that phone, I'm reminded that it's an artifact of Hurricane Katrina -- of the need to communicate with people in new ways from the diaspora. A lot of us carry around Katrina phones, but that's a petty observation.

So many things were different then. I was married and had a house note. Today, I'm divorced and I'm a renter again. [...]

Schroeder's blog comes with a long, long blogroll of Katrina blogs and forums, GIS and maps, photos, activist groups, and more. It's a superb go-to resource for anyone following Katrina's aftermath. More from the "1 A.K." post:

Today, writing this post from C.C.'s on Magazine Street, I'm grateful for many things. I'm grateful that I have a job. I'm grateful for new friends -- many of whom are local bloggers. I'm grateful that hundreds of people are pouring into the coffee shop talking about mundane things. Many more like me are reflective. But this is still not the norm.

The norm for most New Orleanians -- for well over 200,000 of us -- is what Ms. Regina is going through. [...]

(very nice photo of her)

Ms. Regina and Ms. Sandra drove down from Michigan, where they've been displaced for the past year, to deal with their mother's house. No one had stepped into the house since it was flooded to the roof last year. Neither Ms. Regina nor Ms. Sandra had driven such a distance before, and they had to rent a car to do it. They were forced to make the trip because the City Council voted to require all property owners to gut their houses within a year of Hurricane Katrina, and to make the property look decent, or the city would condemn the lot and confiscate the property. Both are in their 60's. Their mother is in her 80's. And they're still thinking about rebuilding the house. What else could they do? This is their home. This is their neighborhood. All of their family and friends have lived in the same neighborhood for years -- for generations. [...]

So much more is needed -- still. Groups like the Arabi Wrecking Krewe, which helped Ms. Regina and Ms. Sandra, continue trying to help residents put their lives back together in what may very well go down in history as the most incompetent recovery in the history of the United States. [...]

Ms. Regina called yesterday from City Hall, frustrated with the red tape that forced her to drive down to New Orleans, and asked if I knew anyone who could clear the vegetation growing around the house. She was in a hurry to get out of New Orleans, but was getting quotes from lawn services in the hundreds of dollars. I told her not to worry about it -- that if I had to do it myself, I would take care of it. She started sobbing.

riggsveda, the next part is for you:

It's vitally important to recognize the contributions of the thousands of volunteers who have donated resources and volunteered to come down here to help people salvage their lives.

Thank you. You are the most important part of this recovery, not just for what you do to physically rehabilitate the city, but for the quiet inspiration that your efforts represent to people who are losing hope.

And this is for the rest of us:

There's so much more to do. Please, if you read this, commit yourself to visiting New Orleans in the next year to do volunteer work, and be a part of the rebuilding of lives that are the heart and soul of this unique city.

Via "The Katrinacrat", a story in its own right.

Loiusiana Diary, Part I

2006-08-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

Fuck you, George Bush.

Welcome to America.

The following is a diary (including a few blog posts) related to my stint as a volunteer that I kept after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. I spent a mere 3 weeks in NOLA, working for the Red Cross as one of the first people to enter the city limits in an ERV to feed the neighborhoods. I entered the Lower Ninth Ward on the 2nd day that the Red Cross was allowed to go into the city limits. In honor of the anniversary, I 'll be posting it over the next few weeks.

Friday, September 30, 2005
I Wish I Was In New Orleans

Yesterday I spent all day in an expedited training in preparation to go south to do disaster assistance work with the Red Cross in the hurricane areas. The standard Disaster Assistance training takes days, and normally volunteers require some local experience responding to disaster incidents, before they can be sent off to a national disaster site. But as the trainers told us, this is the worst natural disaster to have ever hit the U.S., stretching over more than 90,000 square miles, and many of the olf protocols and practices have been streamlined in order to get aid to the survivors as quickly as possible.

I still have to get my doctor to sign off on a health status form to assure them I won't keel over dead while I'm down there. We will probably deploy within 2 weeks, but likely much sooner, to either Baton Rouge, Biloxi, or Jackson (not certain about Texas). I don't know where I will be going once I get to the staging area I'll be assigned, nor what I will be doing exactly. I asked to do bulk distribution, that is, travelling around the damaged areas in an ERV to deliver meals and/or supplies and check on the survivors' needs (my first choice), or I may do feeding, sheltering, or casework. They told us we could request specialties, but need to be flexible, as we will probably do a little of everything as needed, and will be put wherever they need us.

Regardless of what happens, I doubt I will have access to a computer, or that I will have the time to post anything if I do. People who were there during the worst of it spoke at the training session to tell us what they experienced, and as has come out the last few days, the reports of dangers and shootings and criminal behavior were very much overblown. But they worked 20 hour shifts, and slept in sleeping bags on the shelter floors, and the temps were 95 degrees with 80% humidity and bugs from hell, and people are traumatized and angry and in need of much patience and understanding. The weather and the bugs, they told us, will probably be the same till mid to late October. We may stay in hotels--there is more of that now--and electricity and water are available more widely, or we may be put in shelters. The shifts will probably be closer to 8 to 12 hours than 20. It's much better now than it was a few weeks ago. Traveling down will require going light, so I'll pretend I'm going backpacking. Toilet paper, insect repellent, sunscreen, and every expectation of living in dirty clothes for much of the time...sounds like the woods to me, except that I will have my cell phone with me at all times, as they recommended.

Don't think that just because a few weeks have passed that things are almost wrapped up. On hearing about me going down, some have said, "Oh, I thought they stopped sending people down there." They haven't, obviously. They need volunteers badly. The Red Cross chapter I will be part of, Southeastern PA or SEPA, is the 2nd largest in the country, and they have only gotten 90 people down there since Katrina hit, for 2-3 week stints. That's just 2 waves of volunteers. They expect to need people at this level through December, and the holiday season may be a time of even greater need. In Philly alone they have been working with over 700 families displaced by the storms, and over 600 of those came up here on their own without government or NGO aid. Just this morning the NYTimes reported that FEMA has only been able to house 109 families from Louisiana, which means hundreds of thousands remain homeless and in shelters and hotels.

Anyway, that's the situation so far. I have my employers to thank for allowing me to take this time off when it comes, and for paying me for it while I'm gone; otherwise I would never be able to afford to do it. It's a gift that's been offered to me, so I want to make it a gift to the people of the hurricane. I know many, possibly most people, are unable to afford the time away from work or their families, and this kind of work is not for everyone. But if you can possibly do it, if you are physically and emotionally and financially able to do it, please consider volunteering. The need is desperate.
More updates as the time gets closer.

Thursday, October 06, 2005
Good Night And Good Luck
If you read my previous post on the subject, you know I signed up to do Red Cross disaster assistance for the hurricane survivors. Well, today I got the call, and at the ungodly hour of 5:40 a.m. on Sunday morning I'll be leaving Philly for Baton Rouge. That's the staging area I'm being sent to, and the place whose hurricane damage Bill Clinton, upon his visit there Tuesday, called "astonishing." I heard him talking about it on the radio, and in a few brief minutes he spoke more sense about the disaster and its ramifications for the region and the country than I have ever heard come out of George Bush's mouth in 5 endless years of stumping and photo ops.

Anyway, I'll be away for 3 weeks, so this my temporary sign-off till I get back in November. Lately I've missed a lot of great opportunities to write loud and bitter polemicals against the increasing stupidities of the age, and now it's too late. And I'll miss being here for my favorite month of the year, and my traditional October reading of stories of the supernatural on my daily commute. I'll miss my family, and my home, and my pets, and all the old familiar things that I usually bitch so much about. And it's kind of scary, not knowing what lies ahead, or what people will think of me when I get there.

Then I think that the people who suffered through the storms are also missing many of those same things, and the difference is that I'll get to come back to my life and my precious things pretty much the way I left them, whereas those folks will never be able to. And the people who have been uprooted and forced to disperse to strange places where they have no friends or family are also scared, and the stakes in not knowing what to expect are so much higher for them.

So I think I'll just shut up now, and wrap this up. Wish me bonne chance, and that I can make myself useful.

The Diary
Sunday, October 9, 2005---Philly to Atlanta

6:05 a.m.---Left home at 4:00 a.m. K. drove me to the airport. Missing everything. Yesterday felt like a condemned woman, trying to enjoy what she could for the last time. I hate to leave him alone for so long. Never been away from him this long in 30 years.
Flight was scheduled to leave @ 5:40 a.m. Even so, the number of people waiting to check in was horrendous, and they all had weeks’ worth of baggage. Luckily the Delta employee announced all those with “E” tickets could move over to the kiosk check-in, which was much sparser. However, the fancy computer self-service was not finding me, and it turned out the system had me as “R.”, and my driver’s license read as “R. X.”. Once that was cleared up I proceeded to the security check (take off your jacket, leave your shoes on), then on to the gate.
Last called, seat assignment at the last minute, and they overbooked. I feared the worst, but instead got a 1st class seat on the aisle (2C). Luxury! The flight to Baton Rouge, though, looks like steerage. At least it’s short.

9:45 a.m.---About ½ hour delay due to traffic on the runway. Lots of sleepy people on this flight. From the conversations overheard here and in the airport, many may be with the Red Cross or similar agencies. Other people seem to be flying home, or off to visit friends or family.
The clouds never fail to amaze me, no, enchant me, when I fly. Looking out on their endless banks you can forget what they are. They look so solid—sometimes like stretches of Antarctic ice and sea, broken by small icebergs. Or dark, hulking mountains on a horizon of lakes and hills. They are always remarkable.
K. prevailed on me to wear my anorak before leaving since it was cool and rainy, and all I could think of was how hot it would be in LA. But the trip has been chilly---the airports, the planes---and I’m glad to have it. I called him from Atlanta just to say high.
I’m so sleepy. I feel like I’ve been sedated.

12:15 a.m.---Staging area, Baton Rouge, at the old (read “ex-“) Wal-Mart. They put me in “Feeding” and sent me off to get my photo ID. I have to participate in the orientation before I can be assigned anywhere. I kept saying to the woman who processed me, I wanted to do Bulk Distribution. She said “They need you in Feeding.” So off I went. When I went to talk to the supervisor of that section, she said they could use people who could drive, and could I drive a box truck? Well, I said, yes, though I’ve never driven one in my life. But she didn’t say “Did you ever drive a box truck?” Only whether I could. Well, I’ll give it a try. It’s what I get for insisting on trying to have it my own way when I should have said “Put me where you need me.”
Walking around the place. It’s set up like some kind of cheesy health fair, but the breadth & depth of the services is amazing, for both infrastructuring and staff support. All our luggage is living under a couple tents inside a fenced area that looks to be where Wal-Mart once had its garden center.
I wander like a lost soul. Won’t know where I’m going until after orientation, and maybe not even then if I don’t get picked. Means staying in a shelter here overnight.

1:30 p.m.---Had a very nice BBQ chicken lunch thanks to the efforts of the local union (Electricians/AFL-CIO). Found out I’m going with 5 others to Kenner, just outside of New Orleans. From one staffer I heard it was bad: depressing, hard times for the folks there. On the other hand, other staffers said it was great: a hot shower truck, great food, next door to the police, near the NOLA airport.
This is the closest I’m going to get to being right inside the city. I’m pleased.
7:30 p.m.---Our Lady of Mercy Shelter, Baton Rouge. Since I had to complete orientation before leaving, and they couldn’t wait for me, they sent off a vanful of folks to Kenner without me. I got sent here to spend the night, and have to return tomorrow by 8:00 a.m. to the staging area (Headquarters) for a new assignment. They need to send people to Covington, directly opposite NOLA on Lake Ponchartrain, and as of 3:20 today, that looked the most likely. But who knows?
I had dinner with two older women this evening, both case managers, S., originally from Wales, and C., who told me she spent much of her time in Lafayette and at the Cajundome in a smaller version of the Superdome/Astrodome paradigm. They had her running a 70 mile circuit every day in a rental car, starting at 6:00 a.m. when she got up in her little motel room and set out, ending at the Cajundome to do 3 hour meetings with Family Services people. Got back about 10 p.m. Exhausting. She had the day off yesterday (we’re supposed to get 1 day off every 7 days), and spent it traveling around Lake Charles. She said the devastation was endless—for miles and miles, as far as they could travel, trees flattened or twisted into impossible shapes, building simply vanished!
A woman is just now saying she’s working at the River Center. Others saying I thought they were closing that. She saying no one told me. They’re down to 6000+ residents from over 11,000.
The food down here is all sugar and salt and fat. C., S. and I went to a place called Piccadilly’s a jumped-up cafeteria with pretensions to a clubbiness hopelessly destroyed by bad paintings and absurd Jetsonesque chandeliers.
Tired.

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Louisiana Diary: next, home

NOVA: Storm That Drowned a City

2006-08-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

The PBS science documentary series "NOVA" has released "Storm That Drowned a City"; the program can be viewed online, and the web site features, among other things:

a visual chronology of "exactly where and how 85 percent of the city wound up underwater"
flood proofing cities: lessons from Venice, the Netherlands, and elsewhere,
links and books (...including a link to this blog!) and
The Man Who Knew: "Hurricane expert Ivor van Heerden has long predicted the tragedy brought by Katrina."

...among others. From the transcript of the October 29, 2004 interview with Mr. van Heerden:

NOVA: If this region—New Orleans, the wetlands, and all—were a patient in the hospital, how would you describe them? At what stage are they?
VAN HEERDEN: Close to death.
NOVA: Really? Don't hold back.
VAN HEERDEN: (laughter) Thank you. Louisiana is a terminally ill patient requiring major surgery, a patient that if it was given a new heart and new lungs and a new liver would live. If it isn't, it's going to die. That's the equivalent. [...]

NOVA: Walk me through the worst-case scenario—if a hurricane hits New Orleans.
VAN HEERDEN: If we look at the case of a slow-moving Category 3 passing west of the city, the floodwaters push into Lake Pontchartrain, and then they push through some highly industrialized areas. As they pass through these areas, they pick up a lot of chemicals. Remember, the flooding is occurring at the same time as a lot of wind damage, a lot of things breaking and coming apart. So these highly contaminated waters then flow into the city.

TPM Reader DK: Getting out in time

2006-08-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

Talking Points Memo pinch-blogger "TPM Reader DK":

Those who were prudent and cautious by nature had started paying attention to the storm--really paying attention--earlier in the day. They had evacuated once already that summer, for Dennis, and the year before for Ivan, both of which hit the Florida panhandle. The Mississippi and Louisiana coasts were largely spared by those two earlier storms, and many residents there were perhaps reluctant to pack up again. The only thing more tedious than evacuating for a hurricane is evacuating for a hurricane that ends up striking somewhere else.

But if you had ever experienced the traffic jams during a hurricane evacuation, especially leaving the cities along the Gulf Coast, then you knew that you better get out while the getting was good. And Friday night, the getting was still good.

Traffic was a little heavier than usual, but drive times were about normal. Gas was available. Weather conditions were good. If you wanted to avoid the chaos that the weekend might bring, you went home from work, packed the car, and headed out before dark. If you had the means to do so. If you had someplace to go.

pico: Coming home (Katrina Blog Project)

2006-08-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

From the diary entry Coming home - Katrina Blog Project, w/pics by pico, at the DailyKos "Katrina Blog Project." From the November, 2005 part of the entry:

I hesitate to use the expression "like a war zone," because I've never been in a war zone, and I don't want to devalue the gravity of that. But here the destruction just sinks into your head in ways I can't explain - it's the pervasiveness of it that's worse than the magnitude. On the lawn next door, I looked inside an abandoned vehicle full of dirt, water, papers, and a teddy bear. The little things of everyday life are scattered everywhere, mutilated. Not a single house isn't covered with people's private lives, but the mix is so heavy and widespread you can't even associate the objects you see with the houses they're near. [...]

S. is another high school friend of mine whose fortunes have been up and down since graduation. He started working at a funeral home a few years ago as a sales representative, mostly selling flowers and coffins. Now, thanks to an increased demand and slimmer workforce, he's been put on the line dressing corpses. Recently he got the corpse of someone he knew:
Hey, do you guys remember so-and-so? He committed suicide; I had to dress his body the other day. He was 30 years old. Apparently he stayed behind and survived the storm, and he got pulled into working with rescue teams. After a week, they found him face down in his trailer with a bottle of antifreeze.
So, like I said, the suicide rate is up with a vengeance. Stories especially of police officers who've taken their own lives are rampant. [...]
We ran into the rest of our family down the road in Violet, at our aunt's house. Here, among the other sites, there was a fridge in a tree, and at this point, you had to laugh. My grandmother was visibly exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and for the first time, she started railing on the politicians. My gradmother is not the type to get angry. "The government abandoned us," she said, between clenched teeth. The people of St. Bernard are getting more and more worried with each day: no one knows what's going to happen, if everything has to be destroyed, if anyone can ever move back, what kind of timeline there will be... nothing.
While my mom, dad, and my cousin went into the aunt's house, we sat outside in the heat, which is getting unbearable: the sludge is drying into a hard, cracked clay that covers everything - grass, sidewalks, roads, houses - with a creepy grayish color. They asked if we'd driven through Lexington; they had just passed through, as well. In a lowered voice: "Did you see the house with the 7 on it?" We hadn't. That comment ended the conversation, and everyone stared at the ground.

From the December, 2005 part:

My cousin started telling us about his experiences during the hurricane, some of which I knew, some of which I never heard until then. He stayed in his house during most of the hurricane, only coming outside during the eye. He and his neighbors who stayed were scanning the damage from the first half of the storm, when one of them noticed something odd.
"Those boats shouldn't be so close to the highway." By boats, he meant he could see masts just on the other side of the highway, miles away from water.
As soon as the words left his mouth, the wall of water came rushing around the highway bend. They scattered, some to their cars, some to their homes. My cousin ran inside to grab his dog and cellphone, but before he could grab anything else, the water had already forced its way in through his front door, and was rising fast. He took the best option and ran (waded/swam) outside to his boat.
He spent the rest of the storm huddled at the bottom of his boat while hurricane winds battered the hell out of everything around him. He told us he bawled like a baby.
After the storm, he tried to get his boat of the canal. It was clogged with so much debris - roofs of houses, trees, vehicles - "you could almost walk across it." He took his boat around, looking for survivors. Until the water started going down, he was deputized 5 times ("Until then, I didn't even know what the word 'deputized' meant.") and sent all over the Parish picking up whomever he could.
Many of the people were taken to shelters, of which there were few, overcrowded, and badly stocked (if at all). They broke into a doctor's office to get the last remaining tetanus shots. Many people were kept in the gymnasium of a local high school - but the water had risen too high for the entrance, so people had to lie down in small boats while they passed under the front door.
The stories kept coming. He found an abandoned truck, with a dead dog still in the dog cage hooked into the bed. The drivers? "Probably lying around there somewhere, in the woods. No one would leave their dog like that. Most likely, they got in their truck and thought they could outrun the water. They couldn't." They weren't the only ones who tried it, either. "Some people were smart. Instead of trying to outrun it, they turned left and drove straight onto the levee, 'cause it was much higher. The rest?..." He shook his head sadly. [...]
"Where were our people? The Canadian ships, they were there in two, three days. I didn't see any of our ships? Why couldn't our people get down there?"

Go there for the rest, and lots of photographs. Via eRobin's 8/22/06 entry "Katrina Blog Project at Daily Kos"; there are more links to other Katrina-related diaries there.

Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch: "One Year after Katrina"

2006-08-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

From the announcement:

Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch has published "One Year after Katrina" (pdf), a 96-page report that reveals the state of Gulf Coast rebuilding on the anniversary of the storm. Through statistics, status reports, in-depth investigations, and profiles of community leaders, "One Year After Katrina highlights the challenges ahead for a just and sustainable renewal.

The report analyzes over 250 indicators and reports on 13 major issue areas, including Demographics, Housing, Economy, Schools, Healthcare, Arts and Hurricane Readiness. The report also lists an index of some of the organizations working on Gulf Coast issues.

From the introduction to the report (.pdf file):

A year after Katrina, how much progress has New Orleans and the Gulf Coast made?
To answer this question, the Institute analyzed over 200 indicators in 13 categories. We have also conducted status reports on key Gulf issues, launched in-depth investigations into the region’s economic power brokers and interviewed leading community activists in the Gulf region.

The conclusion is unavoidable and devastating: One year later, New Orleans and the Gulf region still face basic, fundamental barriers to renewal. Further, lack of federal leadership and misplaced priorities are preventing the region from achieving a vibrant future. For example:

Lack of HOUSING still keeps tens of thousands of Gulf residents from coming back home. Aid for homeowners in Louisiana and Mississippi was approved 10 months after the storms, and none has been disbursed. Little money has been earmarked for rebuilding rental units—none in Mississippi— and rents are skyrocketing. Eighty percent of public housing in New Orleans is still closed, despite minimal storm damage, and Mississippi residents learned that three coastal facilities will be shut down soon.

Problems continue to plague SCHOOLS in the region, making it difficult for many families to return. Only 57 of the 117 public schools in New Orleans before Katrina are scheduled to open in the 2006-2007 school year.

CONTRACTING SCANDALS and other special-interest dealings continue to plague the recovery. Institute analysis has found $136.7 million in corporate fraud in Katrina-related contracts, and government investigators have highlighted contracts worth $428.7 million that are troubling due to lack of oversight or misappropriation. Altogether, the Institute finds that corporate contracting abuse has cost taxpayers 50 times more than widely-publicized scandals involving individuals wrongfully collecting assistance.

Threats to the ENVIRONMENT are exposing residents to a wide range of toxins and making many think twice about returning to the region. Federal officials also have yet to commit the resources to restore coastal wetlands—the region’s best defense against future storms.

Katrina death toll revised down to 1,723

2006-08-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

Robert Lindsay:

As the 1-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms, the death toll from the Hurricane has taken a serious drop, as Louisiana has apparently weeded out many of the out of state deaths in a short post-Hurricane period as not related to the Hurricane. The death toll has dropped from 1,836 to 1,723, a drop of 113 deaths. [...]

...the official missing list for Louisiana has not been updated since February 2, and still contains the names of 2,371 people. That list seriously needs to be updated.

Lindsay provides links to other people following this story, including Seth Abramson, who doubts all the Mississippi Katrina-related deaths have been counted. The numbers Lindsay has, as of August 22, 2006:

Louisiana..: Mon., May. 16, 2006: 1,464
Mississippi: Tue., Jan. 24, 2006: ..238
Florida....: Mon., Jan. 9, 2006: ....14
Georgia....: Mon., Jan. 9, 2006: .....2
Alabama....: Mon., Jan. 9, 2006: .....2
Ohio.......: Wed., Aug. 31, 2005: ....2*
Kentucky...: Wed., Aug. 31, 2005: ....1*
Total......: ......................1723

Via Lindsay Beyerstein ("Majikthise").

=====
* The Ohio and Kentucky deaths are somewhat indirectly related to Katrina, see Mr. Lindsay's post for details.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

2006-08-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

HBO: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts:

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina's catastrophic passage through New Orleans. All four acts will be seen Tuesday, Aug. 29 (8:00 p.m.-midnight), the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Read more.

My Darlin' New Orleans

2006-08-23T03:13:00.000-07:00

August 29th has become the accepted date representing the anniversary of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans, as well as the rest of the Gulf Coast. The blogs, the press, the networks are alive with the rediscovery of the fact that hundreds of thousands, of the orginal estimated 1 million displaced, are still in limbo:

As of April, the last time such figures were compiled, there were still 750,000 displaced by Katrina and the two hurricanes that followed, Rita and Wilma, according to Bob Howard, communications director for the Washington-based Red Cross Hurricane Recovery Programme.

And of course, there are the apparently bottomless scandals and exposures of incompetence. Katrina was not just a New Orleans tragedy, but my personal experience was with NOLA. I sat in helpless horror in front of the television day after day, and read seemingly endless reports of the spiraling ante of deaths, horrors and bureaucratic ineptitude. My posting at that time here, on Corrente, and The American Street, was as much an attempt to make sense of the thing as it was to gather and transmit information, but the more I posted, the less sense it made. Clearly, what stands out most in my mind from that time was how George Bush played the fool for days while people died, then puffed out his chest and rejected international offers of aid, purely out of personal pride and vanity, until Condi slapped him around a little. We all know now how well he handled it on his own...just about as well as he handles everything else. (See Think Progess' excellent Katrina Timeline.)

It was my great good fortune to have an employer who gave its people a chance to volunteer our services to the Red Cross for disaster relief after it became apparent that this was not going to be any ordinary natural disaster (how much out of the ordinary wouldn't really come to light until many months afterward). In September we were notified that we would be released on civil leave to work up to 3 weeks on hurricane relief. I wrestled with the idea for a few days, then told my husband I wanted to go. He stared at me as if I was mad. A day or two later as we sat in the dark watching the images flicker past on the screen with tears rolling down our faces, he turned to me and said, "Go."

So I did.

The ensuing struggle to get enrolled as a volunteer that eventually led to my training and subsequent deployment took several weeks, but I was finally called up to serve, and took a flight out of Philadelphia on October 9, 2005. At the staging area in Baton Rouge I was in-processed and assigned to "Feeding", and the next day was sent to a volunteer shelter in Kenner, set up in a local gym, where for the next 3 weeks I served food from trucks to residents in the Jefferson and Orleans Parishes, and was one of the first Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicle teams to enter New Orleans.

On August 29, and for as long as it takes thereafter, I'll be re-posting the Katrina posts I made in the run-up to my deployment, and the diary I kept (identities will be protected) while working in NOLA. I'll also intersperse it with photos I shot while there. It's not great literature, just a sometimes mundane chronology of what I experienced, but it may offer some additional piece in the puzzle that understanding Katrina has become.

Chris Rose on NPR

2006-08-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

NPR has a series called Porch Stories. New Orleans Times Picayune, Chris Rose, was part of it. He read from his book about Katrina, 1 Dead in Attic.

The site provides links to several other Chris Rose apperances on NPR.

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

2006-08-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

From the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank:

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans organized this project in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and other partners. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, it builds on prior work by CHNM to collect and preserve history online, especially through the ECHO project and the September 11 Digital Archive.

It's a very sophisticated site that catlogues stories and images from Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Katrina Blog Project at Daily Kos

2006-08-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

Kossacks have put together a collection of Katrina diaries under the Technorati tag, "Katrina Blog Project." It's a fantastic accumulation of images, first-person accounts and observations of the destruction of the Gulf Coast. I recommend taking time to read through the entire collection but I'll highlight some of the diaries that caught my eye here:

Katrina - The Abandonment of New Orleans features photos from New Orleans in the aftermath of the failure of the levees.

In Katrina Then and Now: A Bush Photo Op, luckydog visits two of the homes that BushCo toured, when he finally made it down to where, on his watch, a major American city had drowned.

Some diarists are posting journals they kept around the time of the disaster and during the clean-up, or re-posting diaries they wrote closer to the event. Coming Home features journal entries and photos from November and December of 2005. Some diaries, like Lakeview and the Ninth Ward, August 3, 2006 feature current photos and writing.

It's hard to tell the difference.

There is at least one diary about Mississippi.

azureblue posted a detailed timeline of the disaster dating back to budget cuts in 2001.

Let Them Walk out of Here revives the Shepherd Smith/Geraldo Rivera FOX News video, in which Smith and Rivera come face to face with what Starving the Beast means in human terms and break down under the weight of it, while Sean Hannity struggles to put their rage "in perspective."

ACLU report on Orleans Parish Prison and Katrina

2006-08-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

"Abandoned and Abused":

In a comprehensive report from our National Prison Project, the ACLU documents the terrible conditions and dangerous lack of planning at the Orleans Parish Prison during and after Hurricane Katrina.

This report focuses on the experience of thousands of individuals trapped in the prison during and after the storm, and recounts the nightmare many of them later faced at various receiving facilities around Louisiana.

The approaching anniversary of the storm creates an opportunity to reevaluate the systems that were in place leading up to Katrina and to assess whether those systems have since improved.

(Link added.)

Why On This Night...?

2006-08-14T05:29:00.000-07:00

The one and only Chuck Taggart links to Justin Lundgren, who proposes a ritual dinner for NOLA refugees:

How powerful would it be if every New Orleanian currently living in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and every other town across the country, sat down at the same time to recognize the losses of the last year and to reaffirm their connection to the city? And how great would it be if this ritual centered around the favorite activity of every homegrown New Orleanian, eating? The entire New Orleans diaspora could sit down simultaneously, fork in hand, to tell the world that this was a special place, a special community, one worth fighting to restore.

Amen. I was only a New Orleanian for a month, but my heart is still down there. In solidarity with the folks, I plan to do the same (and ironically, I'll be away from home, too.)

UN Human Rights Body Slams Louisiana Actions During Katrina

2006-08-07T11:58:00.000-07:00

American Civil Liberties Union, 7/28/2006:

A United Nations human rights body today criticized Louisiana officials for their actions during Hurricane Katrina, including a police blockade on Gretna New Orleans Bridge, which left thousands of mostly black residents trapped in the city, and the failure to evacuate prisoners from the flooded Orleans Parish Prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, which has long called for investigations into the conditions at the prison and on the bridge, welcomed the report and its recommendations.

'The state of Louisiana should be ashamed of its dismal human rights record as showcased to the world on its handling of the evacuation of those left behind after Katrina and the flood, mainly people of color and the poor,' said Joe Cook, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. 'We have twice called for the Attorney General to complete his investigation of the Gretna Bridge incident and for the Department of Justice to look into the matter as well.'

Hurricane Katrina and Violations of ICCPR Articles 6 and 26

2006-08-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Introduction
1. Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast area of the United States on August 29, 2005. The resulting floods, deaths, displacement, and humanitarian crisis made this hurricane one of the most devastating the United States has ever experienced. The public watched on their televisions as death and destruction unfolded in New Orleans and its surrounding areas. The question asked by nearly every viewer during those days was, “if the media can get there, why can’t any assistance? Why are these people dying?” The fact was that assistance could reach the people of New Orleans. It simply didn’t.
2. Although death and destruction was inevitable given the magnitude of this hurricane, a great many deaths were a direct result of the State party’s failure to provide adequate evacuation plans, evacuation assistance, and humanitarian aid. These failures constitute a violation to the State’s obligation under article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the “Covenant”) to protect, and fulfill the right to life. Further, the failure of the State party to provide appropriate remedies to the victims of article 6 violations constitutes a separate violation under article 2, paragraph 3 of the Covenant.
3. In addition to violations of the right to life, the State party also violated article 26 by violating the principle of non-discrimination in the way it prepared for Hurricane Katrina. The State party’s evacuation plans discriminated on the basis of property ownership, which resulted in discrimination based on race.

(Links added)

The statement is subtitled "A Response to the Third Periodic Report of the United States of America," which seems to have failed to address Katrina-related human rights issues in the course of a detailed account of the U.S. actions relevant to each of the articles of the ICCPR.

TruthOut.Org "Katrina Plus Ten Months"

2006-08-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

"virtualmatter" interviews New Orleans residents including Loyola University's Bill Quigley:

"A local congressman said a week after Katrina "God came in and did in one week what we've been trying to do for twenty years... so this is an opportunity for developers, for speculators, for real estate folks to come in and develop some very valuable property and turn it into middle and upper income property."

By the way, the congressman was Richard Baker (R-Baton Rouge), although the quote I have on my other blog (via the Progress Report) is different in minor ways: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

Incidentally, there are currently over 2000 "Katrina" videos on YouTube, most about the hurricane disaster.

They Are Not Coming

2006-08-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

Luckydog starts the rememberences of Katrina with a personal look back at how he and his family were affected by the storm and the response. From the diary:

Here is where I must depart from a straight timed narrative. 'Cause here is where time breaks down. Where everything breaks down. From Tuesday until Friday morning, the radio, the people, everyone kept saying the same things, over and over. If you went into New Orleans, what you heard was...

"Oh. My. God."

and...

""We gotta get them folks outta there."

and...

"They are not coming."

"They" were the Federal government. Regular ol' civilians brought their little flat-bottomed aluminum fishing boats into New Orleans because "We gotta get them folks outta there." Alotta those regular ol' civilians were named Bubba, alotta them were the folks that some few people here call "rural Southern fucktards". The Coast Guard went to work. The Louisiana Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries went to work. And the "rural Southern fucktards" went to work, too.

But the Feds...They are not coming.

I don't have to tell you what happened. You saw it on tv if you were not here. They are not coming. Everything broke down. Everything. They are not coming. How could this be happening? They are not coming. Why the fuck? They are not coming. They are not coming. They are not coming. They are not coming. They are not coming.

Archived sidebar links

2006-08-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

The sites below have been archived here from the sidebar for future reference. They are either (1) inactive or defunct, or (2) have "moved on" to topics other than Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

This entry may be revised from time to time.

Baghdad on the Mississippi

2006-07-28T02:52:00.000-07:00

Human nature never disappoints he who expects the worst:

"My neighborhood was surrounded today.

By the same Humvees, troops and large-caliber machine guns that surround villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Roadblocks were put in position across streets, and men in camouflage helmets and bulletproof vests have started searching house-to-house.

The worst part is, I welcome it.

For the last months, increasingly large gangs of feral animals from across America have begun to congregate here in New Orleans, knowing how easy it is to hide among mile after mile of crushed, abandoned, open homes. The word is out that the New Orleans Police Department is in disarray.

The word is correct."

Jim Gabour, a photojournalist in New Orleans, writes a mournful update on the situation in his town in the piece, "A Letter From New Orleans-So That's a Glock 9"--and it's uglier than you could imagine. Gangs of opportunistic lice have been forming their own death squads and criminal enterprises in the carcass of America's worst natural disaster. So don't be dismayed that the richest, most powerful nation ever to squat astride the world is fumbling incompetently with Iraqi lives. It's not only Iraq that poses a challenge too great for the soporific mind in the Oval Office:

"The rest of the world thinks the crisis in New Orleans is over and that things are getting back to normal. Or, they are sick of hearing stories about what they perceive as a city inhabited by whiners. I guess I am one of those whiners.

But allow me:

Our water is completely cut off every other day. Hot water tanks empty and shudder and boiling fluid spits from open faucets until lines fill again. The rest of the time water pressure is so low that fire hydrants are all but non-functional. Helicopters with bags are now the main source of fire dousing.

EIGHTY-FIVE MILLION GALLONS – the City confirmed the official figure - of water are now lost EVERY DAY through cracked pipes, seeping into the soil. The City is below sea level already, with the water table right at the soil top, so this much additional flow is causing many of the remaining undamaged houses to sink and topple from their foundations and piers.

What water does get through to homes is undrinkable, doctored with so much chlorine to rid it of bacteria that a glass of water is almost literally a glass of bleach.

Bottled water services are understaffed and overwhelmed by demand for drinkable water, so numerous, occasionally dangerous home remedies have been concocted to make tap water palatable.

Electricity is available to only 40 percent of city. I am lucky and have access to power at my own home. But even here the juice pops out three to four times a day, causing multiple fires when it surges back on. An incredible commercial museum of irreplaceable Mexican Day of the Dead artifacts, six blocks away, caught fire in just such a surge night before last."

NOLA has become a free fire zone, where anything goes, while the rest of the country yawns and goes back to its diddling:

"More stoplights have come back, but between lost relief workers crashing into them, and frequent gangster car chases, at least a quarter of the lights have been re-damaged and still do not work. Half the missing street signs, one-way signs and stop signs in the City have not been replaced.

An especially frightening phenomenon: The gangs have been switching one-way signs' directions to confuse both the cops and nearby residents, to keep people out of neighborhoods where they are marshalling their forces and hiding their loot. There is, if you obey the signs, no way to get into certain blocks of empty houses. And there the Bad Guys congregate, invisible.

They use stolen trucks and SUVs for their commerce, and they prowl rebuilding neighborhoods at night, looting the same houses three and four times.

They wait for locals to install new appliances or piping, or doors and windows, in their gutted houses. And then, when the residents go back to their temporary homes at night, the looters run free, taking whatever they find.

In the morning the rebuilders return, of course, to find that, once again, they have lost everything."

Read the rest at The Digital Journalist.

(Also posted on my own site.)

FEMA to Katrina victims: shut up

2006-07-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

firstamendmentcenter.org: news:

"Residents of trailer parks set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house hurricane victims in Louisiana aren't allowed to talk to the press without an official escort, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reported.

In one instance, a security guard ordered an Advocate reporter out of a trailer during an interview in Morgan City. Similar FEMA rules were enforced in Davant, in Plaquemines Parish."

I'd say "beyond belief," but I recall other instances of FEMA's heavy hands when it comes to freedom of speech and of the press. "You want help? Check your rights at the door -- it's our door."

Via Steve Benes ("The Carpetbagger Report").

Harry Shearer in New Orleans

2006-06-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

Harry Shearer: A New Orleans Diary, part 4:

It's been a squint day. That is to say, one of those days when, if you squint sufficiently, it's easy to convince yourself that New Orleans is back to normal. The first big convention is in town, the librarians, and a couple of my author friends are in town for the occasion. I, being an upcoming author (novel coming out in the fall, details to follow), bought a badge for $25, and wandered the floor looking for librarians who might want to buy a funny novel. And, no squinting required, we were in the Convention Center, and, after that first moment when your mind reruns That Footage, you forget anything but the fact that Google seems to have the biggest display space at the library convention.

Speaking of rerunning footage, the head of the local convention and visitors' bureau has complained more than once that, when he pitches convention organizers on coming back to NO, he frequently gets this response: 'But isn't your city still under water?' My friend John chooses to assign that response to the file summed up by the classic NO t-shirt slogan, 'It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.'

(Link added.) See also parts 1, 2, 3, and 5.

Librarians descend on New Orleans, read, unpack, blog

2006-06-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

Making Light: Notes from New Orleans 1 (Patrick Nielsen Hayden):

I’m in a high-rise hotel on Canal Street. I’ve been to New Orleans three times before, in 1988, 1993, and 1994. Things down here look largely as I remember them, that peculiarly New Orleanean blend of comfortable wear, piss-smelling grunginess, heart-stabbing beauty, and civic boosterism. There are some large buildings visibly out of commission, like the medium-rise Doubletree Hotel that lost most of its windows. Despite the presence of the American Library Association (which I’m here for) and another convention or two, the French Quarter and downtown seem oddly uncrowded. This could be because the city has half the population it used to. Or it could be because it’s hot and humid enough to strike strong men down in the street.

The T-shirts for sale in French Quarter tourist shops include some interesting new flavors in the mix. Along with the usual (I GOT BOURBON-FACED ON SHIT STREET) and the predictable (KATRINA GAVE ME A BLOW JOB I’LL NEVER FORGET), there’s a distinct streak of the overtly political. A whole subgenre is devoted to mocking a certain Federal agency: FEDERAL EMERGENCY MISMANAGEMENT ASSHOLES, or, somewhat inscrutably, FIND EVERY MEXICAN AVAILABLE. But what’s striking are the overtly anti-Iraq War shirts, which seem just as prevalent: MAKE LEVEES, NOT WAR. And, more directly: SCREW IRAQ, REBUILD HERE."

Paperback Girl: American Library Association Conference in New Orleans (Iris):

11 am--Starving in New Orleans.. during the final decent, the plane is silent as everyone cranes their necks over to see if you can tell half the city is destroyed.. My middle seat doesn't afford much of a view, but the girl next to me is a Folklore major studying for test on Proverbs.. I read over her shoulder the whole flight.. yeah I'm annoying like that. [...]

HOLY CRAP ITS HOT AND HUMID. Glad I brought lots of cotton and linen.

12 pm--Doubletree. Its kinda crummier than I thought it would be, (black hair in the sink!) but they gave me a warm cookie at check-in, so I will survive. Unpack my three dresses, three skirts, seven shirts.. for three and a half days. But I have a BIG Carry-on, so it was fine. My roommate will arrive at the hotel probably around 2 am. yay.

3:52 pm--I am now at the convention center, having registered. At 4pm I will go to a YALSA event. I am sitting in the CC lobby peeking into the exhibit hall where a GIANT Google sign is winking at me through a proped door. The CC is UGLY UGLY UGLY and HUGE.. even though half of it is still being renovated.

=====
UPDATES: 6/26: More Paperback Girl notes here.
EDIT, 6/27: dumb title changed. However, Patrick Nielsen Hayden is not a librarian, he's a science fiction editor.

Blogpulse: Katrina, New Orleans

2006-06-08T08:03:00.000-07:00

Not surprisingly, blog posts about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans have tapered off.

December 2005 (via Bloggers Blog):

June 2006:

The second graph plots the percentage of all BlogPulse-censused blog posts with the phrases "Hurricane Katrina" or "New Orleans" (NO). The peak in early March was when footage of Bush's video conference with Mike Brown was made public. Click here for the current 6-month trend.

Army Corps of Engineers: Katrina Draft Final Report

2006-06-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

Performance Evaluation of the New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Protection System
Draft Final Report of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force
Executive Summary (Acrobat .PDF document):

Overarching Findings

The System did not perform as a system: the hurricane protection in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana was a system in name only. Flood protection systems are an example of a series system—if a single levee or floodwall fails, the entire area is impacted. It is important that all components have a common capability based on the character of the hazard they face. Such systems also need redundancy, an ability for a second tier of protection to help compensate for the failure of the first tier. Pumping may be the sole example of some form of redundancy; however, the pumping stations are not designed to operate in major hurricane conditions. The system’s performance was compromised by the incompleteness of the system, the inconsistency in levels of protection, and the lack of redundancy. Incomplete sections of the system resulted in sections with lower protective elevations or transitions between types and levels of protection that were weak spots. Inconsistent levels of protection were caused by differences in the quality of materials used in levees, differences in the conservativeness of floodwall designs, and variations in structure protective elevations due to subsidence and construction below the design intent due to error in interpretation of datums. The presence of closure gates such as those for the CSX railroad that must function as a part of the system, but are separately controlled, add to the inherent risk in the system. Redundancy was simply not included. Continuity of pumping could have significantly reduced at least the duration of flooding and in some areas the extent. Armoring the back sides and crests of levees and the protected side of floodwalls would have added significant redundancy and reduced breaching. Surge gates at the mouths of the outfall canals are an excellent example of providing redundancy. The combination of the surge protection for the canals and resilient levee-floodwall systems will dramatically reduce risk in Orleans East Bank.

The storm exceeded design criteria, but the performance was less than the design intent: sections of the hurricane protection system were in many ways overwhelmed by the conditions created by Hurricane Katrina. This is particularly true for the sections of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) along New Orleans East, and the levees in St. Bernard and Plaquemine Parishes where the combination of record high surge and long period waves exceeded the design conditions and devastated the levees. This devastation, however, was aided by the presence of incomplete protection, lower than authorized structures, and levee sections with erodible materials. While overtopping and extensive flooding from Katrina were inevitable, a complete system at authorized elevations would have reduced the losses incurred. The designs were developed to deal with a specific hazard level, the Standard Project Hurricane as defined in 1965; however, little consideration was given to the performance of the system if the design event or system requirements were exceeded.

(Emphases added) Via New York Times: Army Builders Accept Blame for Flooding, Harry Shearer, and Arianna Huffington (" Huffington Post")

From the full report web site:

The IPET is seeking eyewitness accounts describing the behavior of the hurricane protection system during and immediately after the passage of Hurricane Katrina (29 Aug. 2005). If you have information that you think may be useful, please click here to provide information. You may also contact us at Katrina.Accounts@usace.army.mil or 1-866-502-2570, ext. 5004.

The information you provide will be combined with information from other witnesses in a general summary for our report. We are asking for your name and contact information (phone number or address) to allow us to contact you if we have additional questions about the information you provided and to credit your information to a specific location. If you provide your name and contact information it will be made available to others outside the Corps, with your statement. You do not need to provide a name or contact information to submit nformation.

NASA image: Subsidence in New Orleans

2006-06-03T17:18:00.000-07:00

NASA Earth Observatory

Most people know that New Orleans has been sinking, but exactly how much has it sunk? In a paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists determined the subsidence (sinking) in New Orleans in the three-year period prior to Hurricane Katrina. The team used data collected by Canada’s RADARSAT satellite between April 2002 and July 2005. The researchers found that most of New Orleans subsided 8 millimeters per year relative to global mean sea level during that period. [...]

Scientists have proposed several causes for subsidence in New Orleans. These causes range from natural ones, such as settling of coastal sediments and movement of the Michoud fault, to human ones such as draining wetlands, diverting sediment-bearing floodwaters from the Mississippi River, and pumping ground water.

Democracy vs. the market in New Orleans

2006-06-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

Stephen Griffin, at Balkinization, notes that Nagin and Landrieu appeared not to disagree with eachother about much during the New Orleans mayoral campaign, making an election about issues difficult. He writes:

Perhaps there is a deeper reason why the election seemed to stay on the surface. People in New Orleans have been led to believe that they live in a sort of populist democracy. Who will determine how New Orleans will be rebuilt? Why, the people of New Orleans. From this perspective, all of the major decisions will be determined democratically. There is no doubt that civic participation is up post-Katrina. People search everything their elected officials say for signs and portents of the future. They expect their officials to solve the problems of the city. But perhaps as a decider of the future, democracy is a relatively poor cousin of the market. Many in the New Orleans area have already voted with their feet – they moved across Lake Pontchartrain to higher ground. Home insurance is difficult to obtain – the major insurance companies are pulling back from the coast. The tourist industry is having difficulty restarting.

At this point, for every challenge there is still a solution. The full weight of the coming federal homeowner bailout, for example, will not be felt until late summer or the fall. People will of course feel more confident about the future if no hurricane troubles the city by November. But the market will eventually make its own judgment on New Orleans, perhaps to the deep disappointment of many residents.

Video of the Devestation

2006-06-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

Scout has set some of her NOLA video footage to music. As I watched it, I caught myself growing restless because the scenary is unchanging. It's a unchanging survey of disaster that lasts nearly five minutes.

The video opens with the following stats:

Over 200,000 homes destroyed by Katrina.
Over 184,000 apartments destroyed.
Katrina Dead: 1531 to date.
Katrina missing: 1502
Additionally an unknown number were washed out to sea.

The Invisible Coast

2006-05-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

The Invisible Coast: Mississippi's continuing struggle in the wake of Katrina:

A DOCUMENTARY CREATED BY STUDENTS AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE
"Student volunteers from Dartmouth College travelled to the Gulf Coast to join in the relief efforts..."

SHOT IN DECEMBER AND MARCH 2006, RELEASED MAY 2006
"...once things like Katrina are out of the news, you think that they're fixed... and this place is just nowhere near fixed."

The site links to a Quicktime movie (low-bandwidth connection site here) as well as to additional information: WHAT YOU CAN DO, and the film site.

The students thank WLOX-TV in Biloxi for access to TV footage. We thank them for their work; we also thank Ted Mathias for his part in that, and for letting us know about this site. Mr. Mathias welcomes comments sent to TEDDYM@DARTMOUTH.EDU.

1,577 and counting

2006-05-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

New Orleans Times-Picayune's Michelle Hunter, May 19: Deaths of evacuees push toll to 1,577:

The first stories of death came quickly and immediately: New Orleans area residents drowning in fetid floodwaters, succumbing in sweltering attics or being swept out to sea.

But state officials say that for weeks after it made landfall Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina kept claiming Louisiana victims, often in more subtle fashion and often in other states: elderly and ill evacuees too fragile for grueling trips on gridlocked highways, infants stillborn to mothers who were shuttled to other cities when they should have been on bed rest and residents overcome with anxiety by 24-hour television broadcasts of the devastation back home.

Because of a continuing rise in reports of out-of-state deaths, Louisiana's official Katrina toll jumped 22 percent on Thursday, to 1,577 deaths, when the Department of Health and Hospitals added 281 more victims to the count. Texas alone accounted for 223 deaths of the increase.

Via After the Levees' Lois Dunn, who points out there are still 274 people missing from Louisiana, and bodies continue to be found.

Blogospherics of Nagin's re-election

2006-05-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

Roy Edroso quotes Glenn Reynolds ("Instapundit"):

I predict substantially less support for New Orleans reconstruction. Betweeen the Louisiana delegation's absurd overreaching in demanding a huge amount of pork-laden funding, and this, they've managed to squander a lot of the sympathy that was present in in September. Louisiana's political class isn't just greedy -- it's greedy and stupid. Louisiana will pay the price. And probably complain of unfairness when it does.

...and comments:

It is interesting that the Perfesser portrays the voters of New Orleans as part of the "political class." Given the general American non-involvement in political decision-making, maybe they do qualify. From that point of view, voters who pull the wrong lever are as blameworthy as their politicians, and as deserving of retribution. In fact, from the Perfesser's formulation, we may further infer that the minority that did not vote to reelect Nagin -- and the rest of the state's residents, I guess -- deserve what they get, too.

Vote right or lose your Federal aid -- an intriguing new vision of political reform. It puts the Perfesser's Porkbusters enthusiasm in a whole new light.

Glenn Greenwald reviews some of the other unfavorable reactions to Nagin's re-election, and comments:

The people commenting on this municipal election have no idea why Nagin was re-elected. There are all sorts of reasons why that might have happened. Perhaps the voters thought he was not to blame for what happened with Katrina. Perhaps they thought he was heroic in how he stood up to the Federal Government and pinned the blame where it belonged. Perhaps they thought he did the best he could and was satisfied with his governance in other areas. Perhaps they had no faith in his opponent that he could do better. Those who are claiming that he was re-elected by a bunch of stupid black voters strictly on racial grounds have no idea whether that's true and they don't care either.

All they know is that they excitedly see an opportunity where they think this sort of spiteful racial commentary -- which is normally beyond the bounds of what is acceptable -- is permissible here, and they can't pass up the chance to spew playground epithets about Ray Nagin's race and about the intellectual level of the voters who re-elected him. These ugly sentiments are never far from the surface in many people and it doesn't take much for it to come spewing forth.

Fixing the Pianos of New Orleans

2006-05-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

NPR: Fixing the Pianos of New Orleans:

Peter Spring went to New Orleans to offer his skills as a piano tuner. He's helping repair instruments damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

There are also other post-Katrina New Orleans culture and music stories you can visit via links on the same page.

Katrina and the Common Good

2006-05-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Katrina and the Common Good, Boyd Blundell, TPMCafe:

For example, it's worth asking why Katrina was such a tipping point for the President's approval ratings.
The answer is that it offered irrefutable images that he was not looking after the common good. It undermined the average American's self-image of being part of a country that actually worked. Without consciously changing their mind on a single policy, a good quarter of the country just stopped believing in the President.
Remember, this change of heart happened mostly in people who were not personally affected by the disaster at all.

...an excerpt from what appears to be an excellent blog within TPMCafe, After the Levees.

The Story of Our Lives

2006-04-07T12:27:00.000-07:00

From the Society of Professional Journalists' site, "Eight months after Hurricane Katrina, Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss looks back on his newspaper’s role and the everlasting effects of the disaster":

But contrary to a widely held belief that persists outside of New Orleans, it was not the storm itself that would devastate New Orleans. As we worked the story throughout the afternoon, the magnitude of a much more epic catastrophe would reveal itself.

On the northern reaches of the city, hours after Katrina’s worst had passed, water from Lake Pontchartrain had risen inside the canals lined with concrete floodwalls and built to funnel rainwater out of the city. In the course of Monday, key floodwalls, designed and built by the federal government, collapsed one by one — an event that our reporting since the storm has revealed to be one of the greatest engineering failures in our nation’s history.

The water poured in through the gashes in a cruel black torrent that not only destroyed vast swaths of the city, but ultimately claimed more than 1,000 lives.

By Monday afternoon, what was a fierce but survivable hurricane had been overtaken by an epic flood whose magnitude and duration have no modern American equal.

Scout Prime in NOLA

2006-03-05T15:52:00.000-08:00

Scout Prime is writing a fantastic series of posts with videos from New Orleans. This is a long excerpt from one of the best posts - and they're all terrific:

Though I'd welcome a discussion of race and poverty, guess what? It's the wrong discussion if you're talking Katrina. There ought to be a discussion though and it does include You.... IF.....
You are white....
or
You are black....
or
You are poor....
or
You are working class....
or
You are middle class....
or
You are upper middle class....
or
You are educated....
or
You are illiterate....
or
You are Catholic or Protestant or Muslim....

Because those are the people who have taken the bottom line hit of Katrina's destruction here. It's Everyone here.
And if it can happen to them and it is still very much happening........
It. Can. Happen To. You.

Destruction in the poor black 9th Ward is horrible. But go to white working class St. Bernard's Parish. It's devastated. Go to the white upper middle class area of Lakeview. Those folks are wiped out too. They have more means to come back??? Think about how you would pay the mortgage on your $450,000 home that is nothing more than a pile of debris and also pay rent on an apartment that you now must rent...if you can find one and with no job. (BTW $350 apartments are now going for $1500 where I'm staying here). That's just your own personal hell.... there's more outside your door.

The infrastructure is devastated. And it hits Everyone. It's great to see stop lights...they are few and far between in many areas. Wonder when someone will pick up that pile of garbage outside your home much of which was the inside of your home? No one can tell you. Want a phone? Sorry for many it will be months like 6. Trying to get electricity turned on? Perhaps soon and then perhaps not. You may get mail service.... sometimes. You need to get groceries? Be prepared to drive far and wait in long lines. You have children? It's best to find an out of state relative for them to live with for this school year at least. And whatever you do don't get hurt or sick. A small injury could be a Major problem. Ambulance drivers tell of sitting outside the few "hospitals" caring for people in their rigs cause it's better than what's available inside.

But you say I don't live below sea level in the path of Hurricanes?
2 things......

Terrorist attack (maybe Osama has a notion about Des Moines)
Avian Flu (maybe it Will jump from birds to humans one of these flu seasons)

Every mayor, governor and citizen in America ought to be scared. Because the federal government was not prepared and still is not.
That ought to be our discussion.
And it very much involves you and requires your participation.
Katrina is a Cautionary Tale for all of us which we ought to be forcing the Bush administration to act upon in a myriad of ways. I know that won't happen though. So hope, pray, sprinkle fairy dust in the meantime. And as for our personal wiggle room.....

Well wiggle room ......meet the Lower 9th.
Just don't forget the same in St. Bernard Parish, New Orleans East, Gentily, Lakeview.....
and on and on and on.........

Katrina humor

2006-03-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

Via Amygdala:

[...] The restaurant on cobblestoned St. Peter Street has served up platters of sweet lost bread and savory jambalaya for more than a century. After Hurricane Katrina, the staff added an entree: 'M.R.E.: A hurricane Katrina favorite. Please order early. FEMA needs 4-7 days to ship. $782.90.'

[...] "Chasing after Moses, the Pharaoh came to the shore of the parted Red Sea, cast his eyes toward the heavens and asked God, 'Lord, may we also cross?' God replied, 'Sure, Pharaoh. I don't see why not. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers swears the walls are secure and it won't flood.' "

— Joke told by engineers in New Orleans

More at the L.A. Times, "The Joke is on Katrina."

Congressional Democrats Blog Their Trip to the Gulf Coast

2006-03-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

Sixteen House Democrats are currently on a bipartisan Congressional delegation to the Gulf Coast. They are spending several days touring the hurricane ravaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and meeting with Katrina survivors and local officials. The Dems are blogging their trip here.

"FEMA's Contracting Disaster"

2006-02-24T08:35:00.000-08:00

Sean Reilly, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch:

WASHINGTON -- Understaffed, unprepared and utterly overwhelmed.

Such was the state of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's contracting shop when Hurricane Katrina struck last August, according to a new congressional report.

'Procurement officials acknowledged the initial contracting response was poor, with little planning and inadequate resources,' says the report, released last week by a House committee probing the response to Katrina. While the panel's findings of failures at all levels of government have gotten widespread coverage, the press has paid far less attention to an illuminating chapter on flaws in logistics and contracting operations.

Although FEMA's 'acquisition unit' was supposed to have 55 employees, for example, only 36 of those slots were filled when Katrina hit. For more than two weeks afterward -- in what officials labeled 'the real nightmare emergency' -- FEMA generally didn't bother with written contracts for food, ice, buses and other supplies. Instead, the agency 'simply instructed companies to begin work and submit vouchers for payment,' the report says.

With no apparent irony, the report's authors note that 'this could raise issues of enforceability' once written contracts are issued.

(More...) Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch is a project of the Institute for Southern Studies.

Diane Rehm Show, 2/15: Katrina Recovery Update

2006-02-15T20:39:00.000-08:00

The Diane Rehm Show : Katrina Recovery Update, on WAMU -- "several perspectives on what is and is not happening along the Gulf Coast." Guests include:

Gregory Kutz, managing director, Forensic Audits and Special Investigations, General Accountability Office
Senator Ann Duplessis, Louisiana State Senate, District 2
David Dismukes, associate director, Center for Energy Studies. Louisiana State University
John Logan, professor of sociology, Brown University

Professor Logan is the leader of a Brown University study mentioned on January 28 in this blog, the The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods.

Windows Media stream
Real Player stream

"Facing South" back in New Orleans

2006-02-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

Chris Kromm, writing yesterday for the Institute for Southern Studies' "Facing South" blog:

We touched down at noon and have done a quick tour of the 9th Ward, Bywater and other hard-hit communities. We've also paid visits to one of the main center for the Common Ground Relief network and the NOLA office for Community Labor United.

Signs of definite improvement, with many towering piles of debris removed and individuals getting to work on their homes. But the main story is still of a city left behind.

Charity Hospital

2006-02-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

Charity Hospital is one of the hospitals in New Orleans that may be scuttled because of Hurricane Katrina-related damage. The decision to do so now is controversial, says blogger Concerned for Charity:

My position is that Charity may very well need to be torn down or significantly remodeled, in the near future. However, in the near term people must provide effective and efficient medical services.

The initial post of the "Concerned for Charity Hospital" blog shows photos of apparently unscathed parts of the hospital, and states:

Note Charity's basement was drained on September 14, 2005 by the USS Iwa Jima's damage control team. As for the asbestos in the basement of the building, the basement can be sealed off from the rest of the building in the short term allowing for people to be cared for in the building. Instead according to WWLTV the tent hospitals might be moved from the Convention Center to Grocery Stores. The Blanco administration will not even attempt to do what is right for the people of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana. Remember 70% of the doctors who chose to stay after graduation in Louisiana trained at Charity can we as state afford to loose this resource. As the state of health care in New Orleans so goes the state, too many of our professionals train there state wide.
This is state resource, when FEMA turns down a full buyout of the hospital what does Blanco's administration do it moves into the most vulnerable of the two state hospitals in New Orleans to flooding. This is a typical Louisiana temper tantrum you don t get your way so you deny services and tell the feds you need more money.

The blog refers to the Times Picayune article "Building repairs ranked by urgency," 2/6/06, which leads,

Prisons outrank charity hospitals, and repairing the Superdome is more urgent than fixing university buildings, according to a list that ranks the state's priorities for repairing government property damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricanes Katrina & Rita Web Archive

2006-02-06T22:39:00.000-08:00

From the home page of the "Hurricanes Katrina & Rita Web Archive":

Internet Archive and many individual contributors created a comprehensive list of websites documenting the historic devastation and massive relief effort due to Hurricane Katrina. The sites were crawled between the dates of September 4 - October 17th. This collection, containing more than 25 million searchable documents, will be preserved by Internet Archive with access to historians, researchers, scholars and the general public.

Brookings Institute: Katrina Index

2006-02-05T22:06:00.000-08:00

The Brookings Institute is monitoring economic indicators in the regions struck by Hurricane Katrina. From this month's Katrina Index: Tracking Variables of Post-Katrina Reconstruction, by Bruce Katz, Matt Fellowes, and Mia Mabanta:

Demand for essential services in New Orleans continues to overwhelm the supply. Only 32 percent of the city's hospitals are open, and waits for emergency room visits have exceeded six hours. Over 9,000 children have now enrolled in the city's schools but only 15 percent have reopened and some of those are reporting difficulty accommodating demand. Electricity has been restored to about 95 percent of former customers, but power is only being used by 30-35 percent of the former customers, as many customers have either not returned or wait for the city to certify the safety of their electricity connections.

The dramatic drop in the unemployment rate is almost entirely due to a decrease in the size of the labor force in New Orleans and Louisiana. In particular, the metro area lost 42,000 people in its labor force between November and December, while the state of Louisiana lost over 100,000 people.

Louisiana created over 11,000 jobs between November and December, but lost over 100,000 people in its labor force. Mississippi, on the other hand, lost 2,000 jobs and about 2,000 of its labor force.

Hundreds of thousands of households continue to face major obstacles restarting their lives. Nearly 750,000 households remain displaced by Katrina, of which about 650,000 are receiving rental assistance, or about $800 a month. Mortgage delinquency rates skyrocketed between the second and third quarter of the calendar year. In the state of Louisiana, for instance, nearly one out of every four loans is now 30 or more days past due.

Traffic in and out of the city continues to increase, along with the number of people flying in and out of New Orleans' airport. In particular, over 47,000 cars now make there way across the Huey P. Long Bridge on a typical day, and nearly 174,000 people arrived at the city's airport in December.

Brown University study details Katrina's disparities

2006-01-28T18:03:00.000-08:00

A Brown University team led by John Logan recently released a major study detailing the effects of Katrina on the city of New Orleans. The study, The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods (Acrobat file, 8MB, 17 pages), is summarized in the introduction as follows:

1. More than a third of the region’s 1.7 million residents lived in areas that suffered flooding or moderate to catastrophic storm damage, according to FEMA. The majority of people living in damaged areas were in the City of New Orleans (over 350,000), with additional concentrations in suburban Jefferson Parish (175,000) and St. Bernard Parish (53,000) and along the Mississippi Coast (54,000).

2. In the region as a whole, the disparities in storm damage are shown in the following comparisons (arranged in order of the degree of disparity):
By race. Damaged areas were 45.8% black, compared to 26.4% in undamaged areas.
By housing tenure. 45.7% of homes in damaged areas were occupied by renters, compared to 30.9% in undamaged communities.
By poverty and employment status. 20.9% of households had incomes below the poverty line in damaged areas, compared to 15.3% in undamaged areas. 7.6% of persons in the labor force were unemployed in damaged areas (before the storm), compared to 6.0% in undamaged areas.
3. These comparisons are heavily influenced by the experience of the City of New Orleans. Outside the city, there were actually smaller shares of African American, poor, and unemployed residents in the damaged areas.

4. Closer inspection of neighborhoods within New Orleans shows that some affluent white neighborhoods were hard hit, while some poor minority neighborhoods were spared. Yet if the post-Katrina city were limited to the population previously living in areas that were undamaged by the storm – that is, if nobody were able to return to damaged neighborhoods – New Orleans is at risk of losing more than 80% of its black population. This means that policy choices affecting who can return, to which neighborhoods, and with what forms of public and private assistance, will greatly affect the future character of the city.

The study was picked up by the New York Times and the L.A. Times.

The project, formally called "Katrina and the Built Environment: Spatial and Social Impacts," also provides fantastically detailed, interactive maps of the affected areas of the Gulf Coast.

Katrina Death Toll At 1,417

2006-01-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

Robert Lindsay:

The death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed sharply on January 24, with the addition of 25 new deaths to the count, 23 in Louisiana and two in Mississippi, according to several news articles published on that date in the The New Orleans Times-Picayune (two articles), The Birmingham News, The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Louisiana Weekly and The Insurance Journal.

That puts the new death toll over the 1,400 mark for the first time, at 1,417, up from 1,392 on January 17, a week before. [...]

Note that there are still around 3,200 people missing from Hurricane Katrina as of January 18, and possibly 5-10% of these may be dead.

I.e., another 160 fatalities may still not have been found. Click through for links to the various newspapers Lindsay cites.

September Morn Galleries

2006-01-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

This is a link to photos taken by my godmother, Coleen Perilloux Landry. She is a lifelong resident of Louisiana who suffered major damage to her home. Aside from the damage to her personal property, the city she has known and loved is no more. As are others who have known and loved the great Crescent City, she is suffering emotionally in the aftermath of Katrina. Her photos are part of the healing process:

http://www.pbase.com/septembermorn/root

No Time to Give Up

2006-01-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

Lindsay of Majikthise reflects on her trip to NOLA:

There was talk of a new New Deal for the entire Gulf Coast. Media watchers claimed that Katrina had awakened the obsequious press and ushered in a new era of aggressively critical journalism. People perched on cots in shelters talked animatedly about how they would rebuild their community--stronger, safer, fairer.

In retrospect, these projections seem naive. New Orleans drowned on Bush's terms. Now, it seems that the city will be rebuilt as another massive experiment in Republican crony capitalism: deregulation, cheap labor, environmental disregard, broken promises of assistance.

It's easy to be bitter about the situation on the Gulf Coast, but we can't afford to give up. The bad news is that the reconstruction process will take years. The good news is that we have time to turn the process around. We can only hope that the 2006 elections will begin to dismantle Republican power.

The links in the excerpt are Lindsay's. She found some good stories that you simply won't see explored in the corporate media.

The Green Family, Edgar Hollingsworth and More Stories of Death and Survival

2005-12-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

CNN has a Hurricane Katrina People Page up. (via RenaRF's dKos diary)

Also from dKos: This diary, which tells the tale of Edgar Hollingsworth, who you may remember being carried, near death, from his home sixteen days after the hurricane hit.

Emigrés

2005-12-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

NPR has a series that follows Selwyn and Chiquita Smith, a couple who left NOLA before Katrina hit and have settled elsewhere now.

Photos from the WaPo

2005-12-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

This end-of-year photo gallery from the WaPo has some Katrina photos.

How They Died

2005-12-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Blksista's dKos diary discusses a NYT article that looks at how 260 people who died during or shortly after Katrina actually died. From the article:

More than 100 of them drowned. Sixteen died trapped in attics. More than 40 died of heart failure or respiratory problems, including running out of oxygen. At least 65 died because help - shelter, water or a simple dose of insulin - came too late.

As Blksista writes, "What is worse is that most of them survived the hurricane itself. They died, however, from the flooding and the sometimes bloody anarchy that seized New Orleans and its citizenry in the aftermath."

There's more at the link. And even more at the NYT link, including a map of where people died and profiles of some of the victims. Here is the story of Ethel Freedman's final days:

Ethel Freeman was 91, long retired from her job as a university custodian. She used a wheelchair, a feeding tube and diapers. But her mind was still alert. When she and her son, Herbert Freeman Jr., reached the convention center on the Wednesday after the storm, she asked repeatedly for a doctor or a nurse. Her son told her a bus was coming to take them to safety. It did not come in time.

"When she asked me something, I could do it, I could dleiver, and this was one time I couldn't," said Mr. Freeman, who has made his new home in Alabama.

That morning Mr. Freeman had started early, loading his mother, her chair, water and food intoa small canoe. Ferrying it to shallow water, he helped Mrs. Freeman out and pushed her to the convention center. "She was getting sick then, and I told her, just hold on until we get there," Mr. Freeman said.

They waited all day and into the night. Her son told her they both should pray. Mrs. Freeman died. Mr. Freeman stayed with her until Sunday, when he was ordered to board a bus. The next time he saw his mother, it was in a photgraph, dead in her wheelchair outside, an image widely publishe das an illustration of the darkest hours of New Orleans.

Share Our Strength

2005-12-15T13:18:00.000-08:00

From an e-mail sent by Bill Shore, the head of an organization I admire, "Share Our Strength":

Last week, Share Our Strength did something that not many others have done. We returned to Louisiana. And in larger numbers. We returned with modest but heartfelt financial support and perhaps more important, a delegation we call Hinges of Hope consisting of more than 30 business, civic, media and philanthropic leaders from around the country.

Despite wanting to write immediately after that trip, an entire week has gone by. My only excuse is the challenge of making sense of what we saw as we drove for hours through an American city first flooded, then abandoned, and now paralyzed and alone.

The streets are still piled shoulder high with debris that may take more than a year to remove. Overturned cars dot the neighborhood. Every few blocks for mile after mile, a person can be seen standing by themselves on their porch, staring into the soggy shell of a mold and stench filled house. We spent several days in New Orleans and Baton Rouge visiting the flooded and abandoned lower 9th Ward, the FEMA trailer villages, schools that against all odds have re-opened, and meeting with families, students, teachers, legislators, and foundation officials. Still, we could not make sense of it.

It made no sense that Doris Votier the superintendent of schools in St. Bernard Parish, who was able to cobble together a new school from 18 donated modules and trailers but has not yet received FEMA dollars, couldn't get the city to install a street light on the dark corner where her students each night board the bus back to their trailer or hotel, and remembers that the first help to arrive was from a Canadian Search and Rescue Team.

It made no sense that tens of thousands of trailers could be purchased and congregated into makeshift FEMA villages but that with the onset of cold weather no indoor space could be constructed for residents to meet or families to eat.

It made no sense that the number of members of Congress, outside of the Louisiana delegation, who have come to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation in the state capitol to understand firsthand the rebuilding challenge, is zero.

Facing South headed to the Gulf Coast

2005-12-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

Chris Kromm of "Facing South," the in-house blog of the Institute for Southern Studies:

Instituter Elena Everett and I are headed down to Louisiana and Mississippi this week for a first-hand look at the rebuilding process in the post-hurricane Gulf, as part of our coverage for Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch.

First stop will be be New Orleans, talking to leaders and activists about what's happening 'on the ground' and the political landscape. Then we'll be in Jackson, MS for Friday's 'Survivor's General Assembly,' organized by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Then it'll be back to NOLA to cover the December 10 'March on New Orleans.' (For more about the Assembly and March, visit here.)

The Reconstruction Watch was mentioned in this blog a few weeks ago. Kromm concludes:

So the post-Katrina South remains a test, for both political parties: Why the lack of leadership to make sure the Gulf isn't forgotten? What does that say about the priorities of our national leaders? It's also a test for the public: Will people realize that it will take a national response to turn Washington around, and demand better?

We're hoping that through fact-finding trips like these and projects like Reconstruction Watch, we can not only promote a more open and accountable rebuilding of the Gulf. We also hope that it will help keep Katrina on the national radar, where the decisions will be made that will shape the region's future.

Ways to Help

2005-12-04T18:24:00.000-08:00

I live in the township where all the schools mentioned in this article are located, although my kids don't go to any of those schools. I especially like the backpack project. From the story:

As students in Bucks County schools bundle up to face winter, children who are victims of Hurricane Katrina are living in trailers and tents without heat.

To help keep them warm, kids at Afton Elementary in the Pennsbury School District are filling 200 backpacks with socks, hats and gloves to send to Hancock North Central Elementary in Kiln, Miss. The student council and PTO are organizing the project called "Backpacks from Bucks to Biloxi."

Principal Norman Gross said Cary Weiss, general manager of Kohl's department store in Turnersville, N.J., and an Afton parent donated the bags.

Rising from Ruin

2005-12-02T19:01:00.000-08:00

MSNBC is running a site called "Rising from Ruin." This is the mission statement:

In the coming months, MSNBC.com will focus its coverage of the Hurricane Katrina recovery on two cities on the hard-hit Mississippi coast.

Though Bay St. Louis and Waveland are far from the media spotlight on New Orleans, the intertwined fates of the people, businesses and institutions in these towns tell the story of an entire region's struggle to recover from the most destructive storm in U.S. history.

It's got a lot of very shiny corporate elements but it's also got a great section of Citizen Diaries. Here's a great entry from one "My New Trailer Vocabulary":

I never thought I would be able to say that I live in a trailer.

Now, however, I probably use the word "trailer" 15 times a day. Typical statements regarding the trailer include:

We need to refill the LP tank for the trailer.

Wow, this trailer has a laundry chute. My house didn't have a laundry chute.

Can you believe how much the trailer shakes when the cat runs through?

What's with all these fruit flies in my trailer?

We definitely need a mud room in the trailer.

My trailer has surround sound -- my house didn't have surround sound.

Close the door so the gnats and mosquitoes don't get into the trailer!

The trailer is very cozy.

There's not much room in the trailer for a bunch of useless stuff.

The power's out in the trailer again.

The shower in the trailer has a skylight. My house didn't have a skylight in the shower.

Do you know how to work the heater in the trailer?

There's no room in the trailer's fridge for my crockpot.

We're not actually in a FEMA trailer, since they lost our application the first time and ignored us the second. Steve's parents were generous enough to buy a fifth-wheel for us to use. It is very nice. We're the envy of the trailer park. I feel very cozy in it.

There's more at the main link.

Out Grrl: No Reference Polls. Just What the Good Folks are Saying.

2005-11-18T06:32:00.000-08:00

Out grrl, a resident of NOLA and a diarist at dKos, is keeping a record of her experiences in the city. This entry explains:

Last weekend I returned to NOLA for the first time since the hurricane. I left in July to get the house in Atlanta ready to use as a rental with a plan to return next spring or fall. This diary is a list of oberservation I made while I was there. I originally made the list for my personal friends, but have been asked to post it here. When I am a better blogger, I will drop some pictures if folks are interested.

Please keep in mind that these are things I heard and saw while on the ground with my Pirates. I don't have references or poll numbers. It is what the good folks are saying.

Later from the same post:

Good thing - F stepped thigh deep into the muck at D and B's house. He went out to find a clean pair of pants, some sanitizer and a shot of antibiotics. At the relief station, two older women flagged him down and asked "Are you a 30-32? We have been looking for a 30-32 all day." They had a pile of 30-32s and were on a mission to find a man to put them on. They gave him a pair of designer men's pants. So F kept working in designer dress pants.

Class action lawsuit against FEMA

2005-11-16T22:39:00.000-08:00

Benjamin T. Greenberg, blogger and "In These Times" contributor, is publishing details from a class action lawsuit against FEMA on his blog, "HungryBlues." Pamela Jackson is one of the plaintiffs:

Pamela Jackson is 37 years old and has seven children who live with her ex-husband. Hoping to regain custody of at least some of her children, Ms. Jackson saved for months and bought a trailer with room for her young children two weeks before Hurricane Katrina, with arrangements to move into it within a few weeks. When Ms. Jackson returned to New Orleans after having been evacuated, she learned that her trailer survived Hurricane Katrina with only minor, repairable damage. Ms. Jackson got the materials she needed to make the repairs, but when she returned to her trailer, it had been moved from its plot in the trailer park to an area where it is no longer connected to gas, electricity or plumbing. She had been evicted so that room could be made in the trailer park for FEMA trailers. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Jackson had dreamed of the day when she would once again have a home with her kids. Ms. Jackson has been told, however, that if she does not soon remove her trailer from where it was subsequently placed, it would be destroyed. Ms. Jackson has nowhere to relocate her trailer because FEMA will not permit her to place her own trailer on the land that FEMA has leased for its trailers and the other trailer parks in the area have raised their rates beyond Ms. Jackson’s means. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Ms. Jackson was living in St. Bernard Parish, where she rented a room. Although she received $2358 from FEMA prior to returning to New Orleans, she was never told how the money could be used. She used it for clothing, food, and shelter, and currently has almost nothing remaining.

Mr. Greenberg has posted numerous other stories like this one this month. The complaint itself is online at FindLaw. From the complaint's preamble, via Greenberg:

1. The federal agency charged by statute to care for Americans who are victims of natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“FEMA”), failed to fulfill its mandate before, during and after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. As a result, more than two months after the tragedy, thousands of Americans continue to be victimized, this time by bureaucratic inaction, indifference and incompetence. FEMA has failed to provide temporary housing assistance to these disaster victims in violation of the plain requirements of federal law. The poor and vulnerable – including children, the elderly, and the disabled – are suffering the most.

2. As of this late date, FEMA has:

• Failed to provide any temporary housing assistance to certain individuals and families, including those with disabilities, who applied for help as much as two months ago;
• Failed to provide basic information to disaster victims regarding the scope and conditions of the available temporary housing assistance, including how they can continue to receive financial assistance beyond the initial three month period;
• Denied temporary housing assistance to individuals who lived at the same address, but in a separate home as another, unrelated, person who also applied for housing assistance;
• Refused to provide additional temporary housing assistance to families that, because of their size, were entitled to more than the standard amount of housing assistance;
• Required disaster victims to apply for Small Business Administration (“SBA”) loans as a condition for obtaining FEMA temporary housing assistance; and
• Imposed retroactively inconsistent rules regarding funds some victims have already received.

A New York Times article notes that "The plaintiffs are not seeking damages, but immediate assistance."