The next week or so I’ll be swamped at work on several projects for …. well work. You know the poeple that pay the bills. So posts will be few and far between until the 13th or 14th of January. Since this blog is my blog, a journal of Katrina, I will back date a few items for historical sake. I don’t like to do this, but there is just not enough hours in the day for me to post them in a more timely fashion.
From a recent post at the Interdictor blog:
I started my 1996 Honda Civic EX’s engine at 0100 EST. I rocketed up I-75 to I-10 and then headed west on 10 all the way in. At 0900 CST, I hit the Twin Single Span across the Lake. Moments later I realized that New Orleans will never be rebuilt in my lifetime.
New Orleans East cannot be described; it can only be seen. You must drive through it. What you see on television is nothing. Nothing. You have not seen devestation until you have driven through NOE. There is no life– mammalian, avian–nothing outside the plant kingdom (and whatever mold falls into). It is uninhabitable and must be bulldozed. This will take decades. Yes, the cleanup will take decades. In fact, it’s likely that the cleanup will never be complete.
I fully expect New Orleans to be a mostly dead city until I am an old, old man, maybe in my late 60s or my 70s. My guess is that no place on Earth compares to the ghost town of New Orleans East. Maybe some cities in the former Yugoslavia were close during the recent clashes. Close. But there, people still lived. No one lives in New Orleans East.
It’s been something like three months and most and perhaps even all of Carrollton Avenue still has no functioning street lights; neither does Earhart Expressway.
Consumer confidence surged in December as declining gasoline prices and improving job opportunities buoyed spirits, boding well for spending in the new year. The Conference Board said Wednesday that its Consumer Confidence Index advanced to 103.6 this month after recovering to 98.3 in November. That was better than the 103.0 reading analysts had expected for December.
CNN has a story that outlines that a number of contractors working for the Red Cross have been indicted for filing false claims and collecting Katrina funds. I think there are two important things here that need to be mentioned. One, these were contractors, not full-time Red Cross employees. My gut is they were hired so the Red Cross could get money to people faster then they could with their normal staff members. Two, the cases that are being investigated are only a small, small fraction of the total funds the Red Cross has filled.
Forty-nine people have been indicted in a scam to pocket Red Cross hurricane relief funds and more indictments are expected, according to Justice Department officials.
Authorities said 22 people working for a Red Cross contractor at a call center in Bakersfield, California, filed false claims, and by involving family members and friends, brought the number of people under indictment to 49.
"I’m really surprised people in this day and time would try to take advantage of the system that’s intended to help those in need," said Jackie Smith, whose brother-in-law was named in the indictment on charges of wire fraud.
Towards the end of the story I think CNN hits on something that should have been in the lead.
Cooper said that about 4,000 cases of assistance out of 1.4 million were being investigated, involving about $400,000 of the $1.4 billion the Red Cross distributed.
I stumbled across a blog by John P. He has some insightful posts related to New Orleans and Katrina. Here is an excerpt from one of the best posts.
The city of New Orleans is being allowed to die through neglect, despite promises of reconstruction. New Orleans, one of the most unique, colorful and culturally rich major cities in the United States, is being allowed to die. Though the “biggest reconstruction effort ever” was promised in President Bush’s address to the nation, hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced from their homes. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds, of homes are beyond repair and must be demolished. Thousands or millions of man hours of labor will need to be done to restore basic services, transportation, and some semblance of normalcy.
I love the United States. Even with it flaws it is the best country in the world. Yet I wonder if we’re going to fail our citizens hit by Katrina the way’ the governments of Indonesian, India, and Sri Lanka failed their citizens.
A year after the waves spread destruction and death across South Asia, hundreds of thousands of tsunami victims still live in moldy tents and ramshackle camps where women are particularly vulnerable to abuse.
On the first anniversary of the tsunami Monday, 80% of the 1.8 million people left homeless by the disaster were still without "satisfactory permanent accommodation," the anti-poverty group Oxfam International estimates.
A survey of 2,300 tsunami victims released this month by the Fritz Institute, a San Francisco non-profit group, found that 100% of respondents in the hardest-hit parts of the Indonesian island Sumatra, 92% in India and 78% in Sri Lanka were still in tents or shelters.
After spending a wonderful weekend with family and friends I must say I am happy to be alone. Time to catch up on my RSS feeds as I watch a true gem, a Girl in a Cafe. In my feeds I saw a link to this article in Rolling Stone. Long, detailed, and insightful. It should be required reading for every American.
“Natural disasters have a way of exposing the cracks in the foundation of our civilization–the scary things that we all suspect to be just under the surface, but that, in ordinary times, we would prefer not to think about. The sudden visibility of poverty in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the city is the most vivid example of this effect. So, too, is the fact–now plain for all to see–that the Department of Homeland Security, the arm of the federal government responsible for ensuring our safety in times of national emergency, has become little more than an arm of big business, a radical experiment in President Bush’s brand of market-based government.
The most glaring example of the for-profit marketization of DHS came on September 26th, barely a month after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, when some 300 corporate lobbyists and lawyers assembled for the Katrina Reconstruction Summit to learn how they could cash in on the federal effort to rebuild New Orleans. Such how-to sessions are nothing new in Washington, of course, and private firms certainly have a major role to play in relocating the 1.5 million people uprooted by the worst natural disaster in American history. What was extraordinary about this particular summit, however, was that it was held not in some conference room at a Beltway hotel, but in an office building of the U.S. Senate. It was a seminar on profiteering, held on the grounds of the very institution to be plundered.”
The Washington Post has the first extensive interview with Michael Brown about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FEMA, and Katrina. It includes a copy of a memo where Brown warned DHS Secretary Tom Ridge in 2003 that "his organizational plan plan would cripple America’s ability to respond to disasters." Its going on page after page, it is worth your time his holiday weekend.
On Sept. 15, 2003, one of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s deputies lobbed a bureaucratic hand grenade across his desk. In a seven-page memo, the new department’s undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response told Ridge that his organizational plan would cripple America’s ability to respond to disasters.
The memo, like so many that flew around Washington during the largest government reshuffling in decades, involved turf: Ridge had decided to move some of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s preparedness functions to an office less than one-fifteenth its size. The writer warned that the shift would make a mockery of FEMA’s new motto, "A Nation Prepared," and would "fundamentally sever FEMA from its core functions," "shatter agency morale," and "break longstanding, effective and tested relationships with states and first responder stakeholders."
The inevitable result, he wrote, would be "an ineffective and uncoordinated response" to a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.
The author was Michael D. Brown, who was FEMA’s director as well as a Department of Homeland Security undersecretary. Two years later, Brown would lose both titles after Hurricane Katrina, when his prophecies of doom came true.
