Project Katrina

The Washington Post has a detailed, yet depressing story of the state of recovery in New Orleans:

The arched spine of high ground along the Mississippi River here pulses again three months after Hurricane Katrina — the $19 appetizer has returned to the French Quarter restaurant scene, guys in suits ride office-tower elevators, hipsters linger over chicory coffee on Magazine Street, and jazzy eighth notes pop and sizzle in the Faubourg Marigny.

But New Orleans’s beguiling bustle can be deceptive.

Nighttime tells the truth. Nighttime tells that the city is not whole. Then, the great expanse of the city’s center and much of its lanky eastern edge lie dark and silent and creepy. Block after block of homes, mile after mile, rot in pitch-blackness. Streets in the Treme neighborhood, home to so many musicians, echo in their emptiness, and fancy pads out by Lake Pontchartrain are hollow. Mid-City’s little camelbacks and side-hall shotguns, archetypes of New Orleans architecture, sit vacant, their doors smashed open by men in protective masks — the houses’ innards hacked apart and stacked on the sidewalk.

This city of feathery Mardi Gras masks and chilling vampire yarns grapples with its new realities: More than 100,000 homes and businesses remain uninhabitable. More than three out of four residents live elsewhere. More than 5 million tons of storm debris is still on the ground. The power company is bankrupt. Workers are in short supply. Its pro football team is playing in Baton Rouge, its pro basketball team playing in Oklahoma City, its thoroughbreds racing in Bossier City, La. Its first — and so far only — public school reopened Monday. The police force is in disarray. Scientists are recording alarming mold levels. Suburban suicide rates are spiking. Local doctors are operating out of tents. The Catholic Archdiocese is $40 million in the red. The mayoral election scheduled for February is in doubt because of logistical problems.

The  Pew Internet and American Life Project actually spent money to find out that a large number of Americans turned to the Internet for news about Katrina. CNN takes the story from there:

More than half of U.S. Internet users went online for news and information about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the vast majority having visited the Web sites of traditional news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC, a study finds.

I stumbled across this editorial in the Wall Street Journal and feel sick to my stomach.

Catholic schools in New Orleans. That damaged city’s public schools remain closed, but at least eight of its 35 private Catholic schools are already back teaching, less than three months after Katrina. Here’s a modest proposal to help that city’s poorest kids: Don’t reopen any of the old public schools, 102 of 117 of which were performing below the state average in any case. Make the entire city a charter and voucher testing ground, and watch the creative spirit of teachers, entrepreneurs and students start to flow.

In my opinion most conservatives honestly want to improve public schools by focusing on testing and accountability. However, others are just interested in destroying the public school system. I guess we can put the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in that second group.
 

Having just posted something from the Onion, I assure you this story is from a “real” media outlet. Scripps Howard in fact.

Ousted FEMA director Michael Brown, who was vilified over his handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, plans to make a fresh start in Colorado, selling his expertise about how emergency planning can go right or so very wrong.

“You have to do it with candor. To do it otherwise gives you no credibility,” Brown said Wednesday. “I think people are curious: ‘My gosh, what was it like? The media just really beat you up. You made mistakes. I don’t want to be in that situation. How do I avoid that?’ ”

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Brown acknowledged key mistakes he made while overseeing the federal response to the hurricane that ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi. He also lashed out at the media and discussed plans to base his fledgling consulting business in the Boulder-Longmont area of Colorado, where he lived before joining the Bush Administration in 2001.

“Look, Hurricane Katrina showed how bad disasters can be, and there’s an incredible need for individuals and businesses to understand how important preparedness is,” he said. “So if I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses―because that goes straight to the bottom line―then I hope I can help the country in some way.”

FEMA lists Katrina disaster response as one of its top three accomplishments of 2005. This of course reminds me of the following FEMA graphic I saw on the Daily Show. It appears they successfully fulfilled their objective.

ABC News has a story that is hard to comprehend. It would seem around 5,000 to 7,000 individuals are still missing. Nobody knows for sure, because detailed records were not kept. Come again, how can this be true.  I mean doesn’t FEMA have at least a few legal pads to take a name, address, social security number, and a finger print?

Three months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, thousands of people are still unaccounted for, and authorities are at a loss about how to track them down.

When residents were forced to evacuate New Orleans, it was utter chaos. Families were shipped to different parts of the country, and no one took records. Authorities say they are now having a tough time keeping track of who is missing.

There’s even widespread disagreement on the numbers. The states say there are nearly 4,700 people unaccounted for. The National Center for Missing Adults, however, puts the number at 6,644 — with 4,000 cases being actively investigated by the agency, said Kym Pasqualini, chief executive of the NCMA.

60 Minutes in an eposide to air tonight, will report that New Orleans is sinking and residents should just face this fact. 60 Minutes gathered this information in an interview with Tim Kusky, who is the Paul C. Reinert Chair of Natural Sciences in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Saint Louis University. A quick search highlights Dr. Kusky is using Katrina and Rita to get as  many interviews as possible.

State officials have asked the CBS television show "60 Minutes" to postpone Sunday’s scheduled segment highlighting a scientist’s allegations that New Orleans is sinking and that residents should be induced to leave the city.

Tim Kusky, a professor in the earth sciences department at St. Louis University, asserts on the show that New Orleans residents should "face the fact that their city will be below sea level in 90 years."

He also recommends a "gradual pullout from the city, whose slow, steady slide into the sea was sped up enormously by Hurricane Katrina," according to a preview of the program.

From the broadcast: "New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50 to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” says Kusky, a professor in the Earth Sciences Department at St. Louis University. He estimates this will happen in 90 years. “That’s the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That’s two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level,” he tells correspondent Scott Pelley.

Time Magazine has yet more bad news on the recovery efforts in New Orleans.

Delays and squabbles in the recovery efforts mean that Congress’s $62.3 billion largesse has mostly gone unspent. More than half-$37.5 billion-is sitting in FEMA’s account, waiting for a purpose. Under fire for being slow to respond, the Bush Administration had rushed two emergency supplemental bills to Congress with little thought about how the money would be spent and how fast. Now FEMA is “awash in money,” says a Democratic appropriations aide.

Of the nearly $25 billion assigned to projects, checks totaling only about $6.2 billion have been cashed. As a result, a third supplemental-funding bill sent to Congress suggests taking back $2.3 billion in aid. Mayor Ray Nagin attempted to shore up support for the city’s recovery before Congress last week, but he came home with little new. The comment of a G.O.P. aide was typical: “We want to see them helping themselves before they ask us for help,” TIME reports.

According USA Today, a defense contracting firm tangled in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy and an international bribery scheme has been awarded federal government contracts for Hurricane Katrina and other disasters.

Since late September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has awarded Titan a $450,000 contract for a mobile emergency response vehicle and a $107,058 contract for emergency housing work. Titan is currently a defendant in two federal lawsuits that allege the company acted negligently in its hiring and supervision of a translator suspected of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners.

The firm separately paid fines totaling $28,500 in March to settle criminal and civil charges that it was involved in a bribery scheme to benefit the president of the West African nation of Benin.

What is the most interesting is this chart, which highlights as of November 4, local businesses had received 12.33% of the contracts to assist in Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.