Project Katrina

This story and the above chart from the Washington Post is just depressing. More then two-thirds of donations given to private charities have already been allocated. Therefore, the $200 billion or more required to rebuild the region over the next decade plus might be hard to find.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, charities have disbursed more than $2 billion of the record sums they raised for the storm’s victims, leaving less than $1 billion for the monumental task of helping hundreds of thousands of storm victims rebuild their lives, according to a survey by The Washington Post.

Two-thirds of the $3.27 billion raised by private nonprofit organizations and tracked by The Post went to help evacuees and other Katrina victims with immediate needs. What’s left, say charities and federal officials, will need to be stretched over years to rebuild lives and reconstruct the social fabric of the Gulf Coast.

And another chart from the same article, highlighting the top ten Katrina charities and how much money they’ve already allocated. I think you have to give it to American Red Cross (84.5%), International Aid (100%), and the United Way (89.6%) for getting the vast majority of their donations into victims hands quickly.

The Army Corps of Engineers investigation into the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is overlooking one of the most important causes: organizational failures, according to an outside engineering group working officially with the corps.

The corps is spending about $20 million to understand the physical causes of the levee breaches that left more than 75 percent of New Orleans flooded. But the engineering group said the corps should also be looking into “discontinuity and chaos” in the creation and maintenance of the levees, according to a letter from the group to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the chief of the corps.

“No one person or organization is in charge of the New Orleans hurricane protection system,” the group wrote. Local levee boards, parish governments, state agencies and bureaucracies within the corps operate independently and sometimes in conflict with one another, and they are all but destined to miss danger signs and perpetuate mistakes, said the group, known as the External Review Panel, or the E.R.P.

The White House’s report released today, The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, places the blame for the Katrina response on the federal government’s plans and structures, rather than on any individual government executive. According to Homeland Security Advisor Frances Fragos Townsend:

"The system wasn’t dependent on any one person. It was a failure of various aspects of decision-making that needed to happen real time and quickly to get federal response efforts."

The report totally ignores the responsibility of any top Bush administration officials. The recent bipartisan report from House of Representatives fills in the gaps. As reported by the The Washington Post:

[The report] lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council.

As it relates to Bush, the report also found that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance. We had to wait five months for this. Anyone with access to CNN knew all of this was the case.

I first wrote about this back in mid-October. Since then I’ve not seen any additional coverage in the main stream media. And even now, the coverage (more here and here) is only in publications like the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Baptist News. If any one has any links or where I might be able to locate the court records, your input would be very welcome.

Lethal doses of drugs may have been administered to New Orleans hospital patients too sick to be evacuated as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city, it has been claimed.

According to court documents, four hospital administrators heard of plans to give patients lethal doses, although witnesses said they did not know who made the decision to do so.

The documents reveal a doctor and two nurses with syringes of morphine were seen entering rooms of patients left behind at Memorial Medical Centre.

Lawyers for the long-term care facility that leased the floor on which those patients were located, reported the conduct of the doctor and nurses to the Louisiana Attorney-General’s office on September 14, last year. Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29.

The court documents say the centre’s senior staff were told the evacuation plan for the floor was to "not leave any living patients behind" and that "a lethal dose would be administered"

This is just amazing. MSNBC has a story that highlights that Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Chertoff don’t use email.

The business world and government departments depend upon it, grade-school kids are taught how to use it and Osama bin Laden’s followers have become skilled practitioners. But congressional investigations of government responses to Hurricane Katrina have revealed that two of the nation’s key crisis managers, the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, do not use e-mail.

This story in the Times-Picayune should be filed under the tell us something we don’t already know category.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff acknowledged "many lapses" in the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina during a contentious Senate hearing Wednesday in which lawmakers slammed him for failing to properly direct disaster-response teams that "ran around like Keystone Kops."
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Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said Chertoff failed President Bush by not warning him that Michael Brown, who directed the rescue efforts as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "was in way over his head." Chertoff’s failure to tell his commander-in-chief what "all of America" already knew, Coleman said, led Bush to make his now infamous remark five days after the hurricane hit: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."

Now we know why the residents of New Orleans need much more support from a financial POV. The Times-Picayune reports:

More than 90 percent of owner-occupied homes damaged by flooding from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are located in southeast Louisiana, estimates compiled by FEMA show, in figures that could bolster local officials’ efforts to lay claim to most of the federal aid sent to the state for a proposed buyout and renovation program.

The numbers also suggest that the $6.2 billion federal pot committed to the state could be enough to finance a limited buyout proposal unveiled Monday by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

The plan, backed by most parish presidents and being negotiated with state and White House officials, targets mostly severely damaged homes and caps payoffs at $150,000. FEMA’s data show more than 101,000 damaged homes in the area would be eligible for such a program, but Nagin has said the region would seek a second plan for rentals or lesser-damaged homes left out of the initial plan.

Apart from offering a clearer picture of where the needs are, the new data also indicate that as many as a third of badly damaged households in the New Orleans area, or more than 34,000 homes, did not have flood insurance when Katrina hit despite being located in flood-prone zones.

Overall, the latest figures show more than 108,000 owner-occupied homes in Louisiana had "major or severe damage," defined by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as having taken on at least a foot of water. Of those, 93 percent were in one of five metro parishes: Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and St. Tammany.

At first I didn’t think it was a good idea. But the more I think about it, I think it is vital for Mardi Gras to continue this year. There are a lot of reasons I feel this way, but the main reason is I hope Mardi Gras will bring more attention to the problems New Orleans is still experiencing.

City officials here boldly decided last fall to hold the parades of Mardi Gras, even though the city treasury was empty and large swaths of the town still lay in ruins. The price, though, was their demand that the beloved party abandon tradition and seek corporate sponsors.

With the official start of festivities scheduled for next Saturday, no corporation has come up with the $2 million the city was hoping to receive for the naming rights to Mardi Gras, which was first celebrated here 150 years ago.

So far only a single company, the trash-bag maker Glad Products, has said it will contribute to the cause. On Tuesday, Glad, a subsidiary of the Clorox Company, announced an unspecified six-figure donation to the city and a gift of 100,000 trash bags.

If no additional corporate sponsors step forward, the city will have to dig into its nonexistent treasury to pay for the celebration, which many officials say the city needs to raise its spirit and its economy.

This Wednesday a 600-plus-page report, produced by the House select committee, will indicated that the White House didn’t engage the president or “substantiate, analyze and act on the information at its disposal,” failing to confirm the collapse of levee system on Aug. 29. I think we all already know this, but it is still nice to see it in an “official” report chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). The Washington post has the rest of the story.

Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government’s failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.

A draft of the report, to be released publicly Wednesday, includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government, according to a senior investigation staffer who requested anonymity because the document is not final. Titled “A Failure of Initiative,” it is one of three separate reviews by the House, Senate and White House that will in coming weeks dissect the response to the nation’s costliest natural disaster.

The 600-plus-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council, according to a 60-page summary of the document obtained by The Washington Post. Regarding Bush, the report found that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because he alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.

The report, produced by an 11-member House select committee of Republicans chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), proposes few specific changes. But it is an unusual compendium of criticism by the House GOP, which generally has not been aggressive in its oversight of the administration.

A lot of people have slammed Google Video. But you can’t argue with how neat it is to be able to embed video with just a few mouse clicks.