Project Katrina

In an editorial in the New York Times (behind subscription firewall) Paul Krugman takes Bush to the woodshed.

Two years ago today, Americans watched in horror as a great city drowned, and wondered what had happened to their country. Where was FEMA? Where was the National Guard? Why wasn’t the government of the world’s richest, most powerful nation coming to the aid of its own citizens?

What we mostly saw on TV was the nightmarish scene at the Superdome, but things were even worse at the New Orleans convention center, where thousands were stranded without food or water. The levees were breached Monday morning—but as late as Thursday evening, The Washington Post reported, the convention center “still had no visible government presence,” while “corpses lay out in the open among wailing babies and other refugees.”

Meanwhile, federal officials were oblivious. “We are extremely pleased with the response that every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, have made to this terrible tragedy,” declared Michael Chertoff, the secretary for Homeland Security, on Wednesday. When asked the next day about the situation at the convention center, he dismissed the reports as “a rumor” or “someone’s anecdotal version.”

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On the LiveJournal site Dispatches from Tanganyika “Docbrite” takes a post, My List of 13 Reasons Why We Are Not OK that was written on March 31, 2006, and revisits where we are today.

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

More hospitals and private doctors are open for business, but the state of our medical care is still pretty dire. In a city where almost everybody is going crazy in one way or another, there’s virtually no help for mental patients, who are usually either held in emergency rooms or jailed. State Attorney General Charles Foti failed in his attempted case against Memorial Medical Center doctors and other medical personnel who stayed through the storm and were accused of euthanizing elderly patients, but Foti’s idiocy will probably drive medical personnel out of the city at a time when we desperately need them, and will certainly ensure that fewer will stay through the next storm.

Of course there are 12 more reasons which all of you should read.

Two years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, "none of the 115 ‘critical priority projects’ identified by city officials" for publicly funded rebuilding efforts "has been completed." Of the $34 billion "earmarked for long-term rebuilding," less than half "has made its way through federal checks and balances to reach municipal projects.

This is a powerful editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle. A total bitch slap to Bush, White House, and the Republicans in both the House and Senate.

HURRICANE KATRINA happened two years ago, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at some neighborhoods in the Gulf Coast. Houses, or what’s left of them, still stand derelict in New Orleans, their yards choked with weeds. The city of Houston, which took in more than 150,000 refugees in a grand act of compassion, is still reporting overcrowded public services and way too many hastily assembled trailer-park settlements. Of course, the Bush administration is still placing blame for the continuing disaster on others; on bureaucracy, on the region’s state and local governments, not on the federal levees that failed, nor on its own weak and tardy response.

The mismanagement, missed opportunities and suffering that is the legacy of Katrina still matter because the victims of the storm were—and are—facing the same problems that the people of America are facing. We’re talking about poorly maintained public infrastructure. (The Minneapolis bridge collapse, though responsible for only 13 deaths, created a national sense of deja vu.) We’re talking about communities with poor access to health care, decent schools, jobs that pay a living wage. We’re talking about insurance companies that seem all too happy to take your premium—whether it’s for homeowners’ insurance or health care—and then run away when the bills come due. Most important, we’re talking about the lack of public leaders who have the ability to lead, or at the very least to take responsibility for their failures instead of looking for someone else, or something else, to blame.

The editorial sends with a quote from Donald Powell, President Bush’s Gulf Coast Rebuilding Chief at a recent recovery summit. "It’s not merely going to be a story of tragedy.
"It’s going to be a story of renewal, rebirth and redemption. But this
kind of transformation will not happen without leadership— without
local leadership." Bush, Chertoff, and Powell wouldn’t know leadership if it was standing right in front of them.

Shelley Midura a New Orleans City Council member from District A wrote the following open letter to President Bush. It is thoughtful, respectful (or at least a lot more then I would be), and outlines many things that the Feds could do to help New Orleans if only the White House would listen to the elected leaders and citizens that live in New Orleans.

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for visiting New Orleans for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst federal levee-failure disaster in United States history followed by the worst federal disaster response in United States history. We’re also grateful for the $116 billion federal allocation for the Gulf Coast. That $116 billion has served you well, as your spokesmen often cite it as an indicator of your dedication to our recovery. But, it hasn’t served us as well— it’s not enough, it’s been given grudgingly, and only after our elected officials have had to fight for it. So I feel I must correct the record about you and your administration’s dedication to our recovery and implore you to take action to make things better.

Indeed, you have allocated $116 billion for the Gulf Coast, but that number is misleading. According to the Brookings Institute’s most recent Katrina Index report, at least $75 billion of it was for immediate post-storm relief. Thus only 35% of the total federal dollars allocated is for actual recovery and reconstruction. And of that recovery and reconstruction allocation, only 42% has actually been spent. In fact, while your administration touts "$116 billion" as the amount you have sent to the entire area affected by Katrina and the levee failures, the actual long term recovery dollar amount is only $14.6 billion. This amount is a mere 12% of the entire federal allocation of dollars, billions of which went to corporations such as Halliburton for immediate post-storm cleanup work, instead of to local businesses. Contrast that to the $20.9 billion on infrastructure for Iraq that the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2006 that you have spent, and it’s an astonishing 42% more than you have spent on infrastructure for the post-Katrina Gulf region. The American citizens of the Gulf region do not understand why the federal obligation to rebuilding Iraq is greater than it is for America’s Gulf coast, and more specifically for New Orleans.

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One of the most heart-wrenching stories of Katrina, and there are so many to choose from, is that of Dr. Anna Pou. Right after Katrina hit she was accused of murdering nine patients in a long-term care unit of LifeCare Hospital in a New Orleans. I have to admit in some posts I wrote I was not that kind to her. But in hindsight I was dead wrong. She acted as an angel of mercy it was shown in court documents. Which is why a grand jury declined to indict her.

She still faces a number of civil suits that will most likely drag on for years, but as more and more information surfaces it is clear, at least to me, that she did the only thing she could do. From MSNBC:

Almost a year after the storm, in July 2006, authorities arrested Dr. Anna Pou, a well-known head and neck surgeon. She was eventually accused of murdering nine patients who were in a long-term acute care unit on the seventh floor run by LifeCare Hospital of New Orleans. (Two nurses were also arrested but their charges were later dropped.)

Pou tells NEWSWEEK’s Julie Scelfo that she did indeed administer morphine and a sedative to the nine patients and she knew that these medication might hasten their deaths. But, she says, killing them was not her intention. In the desperate calculation Pou and other medical professionals were forced to make in the chaos and madness that engulfed the hospital, she says some patients could be saved and others were almost certain to die. It was their suffering Pou says she sought to alleviate.

You can read the full interview with Dr. Pou here.

Mississippi residents seem to have it pretty good as it relates to post-Katrina funding. They have brought in a huge amount of federal aid targeted (compared to Louisiana( for Katrina victims, largely in part because of the political connections of their governor and former RNC chairman Haley Barbour. But the ones who have benefited most from Barbour’s legal pilfering? Well it would appear his family members, who have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in Katrina-related business fundings. Some of these Republicans have no soul.

Our country is become more and more of a joke as each day passes. According to the Associated Press:

With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama’s football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and ‘Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

While many of the buyers are Crimson Tide alumni or ardent football fans not entitled to any special Katrina-related tax breaks, many others are real estate investors who are purchasing the condos with plans to rent them out.

And they intend to take full advantage of the generous tax benefits available to investors under the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, or GO Zone, according to Associated Press interviews with buyers and real estate officials.

Ok, I am no lawyer and I understand writing laws without loopholes isn’t the easiest thing in to the world to achieve. What about "intent?" This was not the intent of GO Zone. And the real estate firms are well aware of this. Why can’t the government just say, "look, you are trying to take advantage of a situation. You know it. We know it. Sorry, no tax break for you." I just don’t get why our government can’t use some common sense for once.

Over and over again we keep hearing the same stories in lower-income areas. Families have returned. They have the resources to rebuild, yet the city of New Orleans is doing everything in their power to take their property. If it isn’t bad enough these folks have to rebuild from scratch, that they have to jump through hoop after hoop and cut throw miles of red tape. The Times-Picayune reports:

In appealing the condemnation of his home as an "imminent health threat," he offered a letter showing that a nonprofit group planned to clean out the ungutted property, and a city-issued permit he had secured to rebuild. He walked away with a signed receipt assuring him the city would take the house off its list of tear-downs.

So it came as a shock when Lucien, who lives in a FEMA trailer park in St. Roch, dropped by his one-story Wilton Drive house on July 12 to find the electricity cut off, the door lock broken and colorful Xs painted on the outer walls.

Spotting the telltale signs of impending demolition, Lucien rushed back to City Hall, where a clerk said the house, which by then had been gutted, was scheduled to be knocked down the next day.

Though he secured another written confirmation that his home would be spared, he didn’t trust it—and spent the day and night hunkered down in front of his home, girding for a stand-off with bulldozers, which never came. While his house still stands, Lucien fumes over his bungled case.

"The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing," he said.

Similar frustration appears to be growing as property owners who can’t figure out why their clearly repairable—or, in some cases, occupied—houses have been cited, fight to make sure their homes don’t become piles of rubble.

Look I get that much of the New Orleans government, which wasn’t the most functional in the US before Katrina hit, was crushed as well. I also understand why there are building regulations. But next to basic services: police, power, water, garbage pick-up the next most important thing the city has to do we prove a quick path for people to rebuild. If they can’t rebuild their won’t be enough of a tax base to support basic services. It is that simple.

After nearly two years of listening to countless complaints that the post-Katrina "disaster trailers" contained dangerously high levels of formaldehyde, FEMA is finally springing into action. FEMA has decided to suspend the sale and donation of these trailers while they review the reports that the trailers are causing respiratory problems for residents. It’s a stunning reversal, considering that only a few weeks ago Congress saw documents showing that FEMA lawyers had discouraged the agency from looking into the problem.