This is pretty neat. Dr. Douglas Brinkley, the author of The Great Deluge, has an Oral History project related to Katrina. For those of you that are not familiar with oral history, it involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events through one-on-one interviews. This may sound live an obvious way to document history, but it is done a lot less in many instances then you might think.
The Tampa Tribune is reporting that more than two years of Katrina hit the the Gulf Coast the Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) still can’t implement the changes set forth in the Post-Katrina Reform Act. Simply amazing.
Significant improvements in the federal response to a catastrophic hurricane are unlikely to be implemented or "realistically tested" by the upcoming hurricane season, warns a new government report.
The report was released Tuesday as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency came under congressional grilling about why his agency does not have a fully updated disaster-response plan ready—two years after Hurricane Katrina.
"As it enters the 2007 hurricane season, FEMA is an organization in transition that is working to implement the reorganization mandated by the Post-Katrina Reform Act," states the Government Accountability Office report.
You can read an overview of the March 7, 2007 GAO Report (PDF format) here.
The Washington Post is reporting that the huge, federally funded program created to help rebuild Louisiana homes is short close to $3 billion. Currently "only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants have received money." The Post takes it from there:
The report represented the latest crisis for the aid effort initially created to distribute $6.9 billion in federal money to the owners of homes destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina who lacked enough insurance money to rebuild.
More than 20 months after the Katrina catastrophe, tens of thousands of houses remain vacant, in part because of administrative delays in the aid program, the largest single source of direct federal help for homeowners. To date, only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants have received money.
I really wish I could get a copy of this report, but can’t seem to locate anything, even a single mention of it on Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s site. It just blows my mind that a $7 billion program can be $3 billion short. Where did the money go?
The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a study that pretty much confirms the obvious:
The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina has cost countless people here their homes, their jobs or their health. But according to a survey being released Thursday regarding daily life in the flood-ravaged city, the burden has fallen far heavier on blacks than on whites.
The proportion of black respondents who described their lives as "disrupted" more than a year after the storm (59 percent) was about double that of whites who said the same (29 percent).
A narrow majority of those in Katrina-devastated areas think rebuilding New Orleans is not a priority for Congress and the president. And while more than half feel "very prepared" for another storm, few say the same about government officials.
About the only good news is the study found nearly 70 percent reported feeling "optimistic" about the future of New Orleans and 63 percent said the recovery was running in the right direction even if the process was much slower then expected.
$145 billion in federal contracts were awarded without competitive bidding in fiscal 2005, more than double the $67 billion in fiscal 2000. Yet at the same time, "Failures of oversight into contracting procedures have made it possible for fraud, cronyism, and corruption to become prevalent in government," according to a new report by Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Scott Lilly. The report is going to be released to the public on Monday. It will be interesting to see how many of these contracts were related to Katrina.
The state of Kansas is currently missing almost 60 percent of its National Guard equipment because they are in Iraq, therefore greatly hampering its ability to respond to the recent tornadoes.
In a "spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow this morning blamed Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D), saying he was "not aware of any prior complaints" by the governor about the equipment:
If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it. As far as we know, the only thing the governor has requested are FM radios. There have been no requests to the National Guard for heavy equipment. We are eager to provide what Kansas needs. But again there are also —you also have to go through the process of making the request first.
Snow’s statements are incorrect on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Just a few examples include:
At today’s White House briefing Snow was confronted about Sebelius’s past requests. Snow simply replied, "And what happened was, she actually did get—there was not a formal request. But they’d had conversations." He also admitted that Sebelius did request more than FM Radios.
*Much of the data for this post was found via Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo.
Another national disaster and another Governor begging for the help of the Federal government cause her National Guard troops and equipment is in Iraq. And what does the White House do, blame Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius just as they blamed Governor Blanco after Katrina.
The White House fought back Tuesday against criticism from Kansas’
governor that National Guard deployments to Iraq are slowing the
response to last week’s devastating tornado.White House press secretary Tony Snow said the fault was Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’.
In a spat reminiscent of White House finger-pointing at Louisiana
Gov. Kathleen Blanco after the federal government’s botched response to
Hurricane Katrina, Snow rapped Sebelius for not following procedure to
find gaps and then asking the federal government to fill them."If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it," he said.
As Sebelius
said, "I don’t think there is any question if you are missing trucks,
Humvees, and helicopters that the response is going to be slower," she
said Monday. "The real victims here will be the residents of
Greensburg, because the recovery will be at a slower pace." More then half of the Kansas National Guard’s heavy equipment is in Iraq, as well as many well-trained personnel.
Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, says Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He warns that heavy storms may cause massive failures.
The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped channel water into New Orleans during the storm.
Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid reconstruction of the barrier St. Bernard Parish hailed as one of the corps’ most significant rebuilding achievements in the months after the storm.
But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees.”
Dr. Bea examined the hurricane protection system at the request of National Geographic magazine, which is publishing photographs of the levee and an article on his concerns about the levee and other spots on its Web site.
At times you wonder if our government can do anything right.
The Senate homeland security committee plans to hold hearings this summer on the Bush administration’s handling of offers of foreign aid after Hurricane Katrina. Of $854 million offered after the storm—in cash and oil that was to be sold for cash—only $44 million has gone to disaster victims or reconstruction so far.
