Project Katrina

This story from the Washington Post reminds me of the first time I visited Atlantic City. Just a few blocks from all the billion dollar casinos are neighborhoods that appear ripped from a third world country. I have to believe that when elected leaders pushed for tax breaks and rezoning the citizens were told the casinos would bring high-paying jobs and taxes to help improve the city. Well I don’t know how anybody can drive around Atlantic City and believe any of those promises were kept.

Nowhere has the rebound from Hurricane Katrina been gaudier than along Mississippi’s casino-studded coast.

Even as the storm’s debris was being cleared, this city’s night skies were lighted up with the high-wattage brilliance of the Imperial Palace, then the Isle of Capri, then the Grand Casino. More followed, and so did vacation-condo developers.
   
Yet in the wrecked and darkened working-class neighborhoods just blocks from the waterfront glitter, those lights cast their colorful glare over an apocalyptic vision of empty lots and scattered trailers that is as forlorn as anywhere in Katrina’s strike zone.

"At night, you can see the casino lights up in the sky," Shirley Salik, 72, a former housekeeper at one of the casinos, said this month while standing outside her FEMA camper with her two dogs. "But that’s another world."

More than two years after the storm, the highly touted recovery of the Mississippi coast remains a starkly divided phenomenon.

[…]

While Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has hailed the casino openings as a harbinger of Mississippi’s resurgence and developers have proposed more than $1 billion in beachfront condos and hotels for tourists, fewer than one in 10 of the thousands of single-family houses destroyed in Biloxi are being rebuilt, according to city permit records. More than 10,000 displaced families still live in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

I wonder how much longer American citizens are going to fall for the false logic that casinos are good for the local economy. They are not. How many more examples are required.

Disclaimer: I should note this is a "hot button" issue for me. There is a huge casino being built across the river from me in St. Louis. For decades we’ve be told that efforts would be made to rebuild the riverfront area to no avail. But heck, we’ll have a casino pretty soon. I just burn with rage when people from the casino are on the local NPR station arguing they can’t met the contractual obligations to hire a certain percentage of minority owned businesses, get this, cause there aren’t any in the St. Louis area that can perform the work.

In almost 400 posts here I have not written a single thing that wasn’t directly related to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, New Orleans, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Well I just had to mention this interview of William Gibson in Rolling Stone.

In his most recent novel, Spook Country, the story is set in the present. Kind of different for Mr. Gibson. Well we now know why. He doesn’t have to write about the future anymore because he believes the present is so much more unlikely.

If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they’d not only show you the door, they’d probably call security.

Ouch. And he even left out our federal government allowed a major city to drown and now more then two years later not a whole lot has been done to improve the situation. I guess we ought to be worried when reality becomes more scary then fiction.

This sucks. From the New Orleans Times Picayune:

New Orleans lost out in the competition to host one of the 2008 presidential debates Monday after the commission that selects the sites decided that the city has not sufficiently recovered from Hurricane Katrina to handle such a major event. Backers of the New Orleans debate, who had won the support of seven presidential candidates and three of the nation’s leading newspapers, reacted with indignation and disputed the debate commission’s assertion that New Orleans has not recovered its touch for staging national events.

New Orleans has not recovered enough to host a presidential debate? I mean they host professional football games with 50,000 plus folks just about every other week. Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras went off without any major problems. These people are shit-all-stupid.

Memo to the Senators running for president. If you agree with this and think New Orleans doesn’t have the ability to "stage national events" then maybe you ought to do something in your role as elected officials.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) will pay to demolish the remaining eligible structures in New Orleans after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ ( USACE ) mission assignment ended more than two months ago.

The FEMA funds will pay a contractor to work with the City of New Orleans Legal Housing Unit to supervise and document the demolition and debris disposal of the remaining eligible structures. The contract should be awarded sometime this month. FEMA had paid USACE under mission assignment to perform this function prior to Aug. 29, 2007.

Approximately 1,800 homes remain to be demolished, creating around 630,000 cubic yards of debris. Demolitions should be completed by Feb. 29, 2008. Under mission assignment, USACE had supervised the demolition of 4,248 homes, totaling 1.5 million cubic yards of debris.

“This recent funding shows FEMA’s commitment to New Orleans and the region since these damaged homes remain a threat to public safety and have to be removed for this city to recover fully,” Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office Director Jim Stark.

You just can’t make this shit up. Frances Fragos Townsend has resigned from her position as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. Here is Fran Townsend’s resignation letter. One section includes the following:

In 1937, the playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote of President George Washington: There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, til all men walk on higher ground in their lifetime. Mr. President, you are such man.

Townsend deserves to be remembered, first of all, for her obscene failure to identify Hurricane Katrina as a major threat to national security in September 2005. That fiasco although qualified her to lead the shameless cover-your-ass operation entitled Lessons Learned. Townsend could be relied upon of course to go on pretending that the devastation wrought by a Gulf-coast hurricane was something other than entirely predictable. Yet to get a true flavor of the sycophancy involved, here are the opening paragraphs from her cover letter addressed to Bush once the lessons had been assembled:

You often remind us that your most solemn obligation as President is to protect the American people. And every day and night, millions of men and women throughout the Federal government—both civilian and military—work to achieve that objective. Given the dangerous world in which we live, they do an outstanding job.

Despite all we do, however, Hurricane Katrina was a deadly reminder that we can and must do better, and we will. This is the first and foremost lesson we learned from the death and devastation caused by our country’s most destructive natural disaster: No matter how prepared we think we are, we must work every day to improve.

These are the fucking folks that Bush has put in charge of keep you, me, and the American public safe.

It’s official: Larry, Curly, and Moe are running FEMA. Fresh off the spectacle of a fake press conference the tools at FEMA are raising incompetence to a new level. Enter the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans.

When Katrina hit New Orleans it knocked out power to the Aquarium, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city. Four days later when the staff made their way back they found almost all of their sharks, tropical fish, jellyfish, and thousands of other creatures dead in their tanks. FEMA quickly promised more than $600,000 to repopulate the Aquarium.

The staff members had another idea. Do the work themselves and not wait for help from the feds. You know, what we hear all the right wing gas bags (Rush, Beck, Hannity, and Savage) say people in New Orleans should do. "Don’t look for government handouts. Pull yourselves up by the boat strips and fend for yourself."

To save precious time (time was actually money for them in a real sense), aquarium staffers improvised and went fishing, snorkeling, and scuba diving for the species needed in multiple expeditions to the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, and Bahamas. After weeks of effort they returned with 1,681 species. The total cost $99,766 (keep in mind FEMA was willing to pay $616,000).

Great news right? Well in the reality based world of course, but not in the bizzaro Bush world we currently live in.

When the Audubon Aquarium filed the invoices with FEMA they were told (via email mind you):

FEMA does not consider it reasonable when an applicant takes excursions to collect specimens. They must be obtained through a reputable sources where, again, the item is commercially available.

You don’t need an advanced math degree to figure out that FEMA is refusing to authorize invoices that would save American taxpayers more than $500,000, simply because the aquarium didn’t comply with shit-all-stupid FEMA regulations. Not to mention that the Aquarium was able to open much faster then if they would have waited to purchase what they needed through "reputable sources."Sixteen months after the above email was sent the Aquarium still has not been paid!

This is all happening because of the Stafford Act. The Act does a lot of bizzzare stuff, but one of them states "facilities can not be improved beyond their pre-storm conditions." So according to FEMA that meant the aquarium would have to find fish, through a commercial vendor, the approximate age and size of those that were lost.  Of course multiple experts told the Association Press (AP) this isn’t close to impossible, it is impossible.

The citizens of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are dammed if they do dammed if they don’t. They try to do something on their own so it gets done faster and for less money they run into mountains of red tape. They don’t do anything and wait for the government to do as they promised, and they wait and wait and get called "lazy."

The situation is a perfect example of FUBAR (Fu*^ed Up Beyond All Reason)!

Gosh I am getting tried of writing about FEMA. According to multiple news sources (here and here) a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis reports poor management and planning led the FEMA to waste $30 million on trailer maintenance contracts.

The report highlights that FEMA approved $16 million in improper or fraudulent invoices for trailer maintenance between June 2006 and January 2007. FEMA also failed to award those contracts to contractors with the lowest prices. Another $15 million was wasted on maintenance inspections FEMA cannot prove ever took place. Adding to the waste (some like myself may say fraud) is FEMA’s decision to place many trailers at group sites, which at one location runs the agency an average of $30,000 per 280 square feet—because FEMA only placed eight trailers there. The contract for this site was fixed in advance, meaning the cost was the same no matter how many trailers were placed there.To pour more salt on the wounds of Katrina victims, at one site FEMA paid $229,000 for repairs” on one trailer—the equivalent of a five bedroom house in that area. How do these people still have jobs?

New satellite imaging from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center reveals that hurricane Katrina caused the largest single forestry disaster in US history. This little reported ecological catastrophe killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks of stagnant water was so massive that researchers say "it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas buildup, ultimately putting as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation’s forest takes out.

To make matter worse, the downing of so many trees has opened vast and sometimes fragile tracts to multiple aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are squeezing out far more environmentally productive native species.

Efforts to limit, or at least slow the damage have been handicapped by the total ineffectiveness of a $504 million federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species. Congress appropriated the money in 2005 and added to it in 2007. But government officials acknowledge that the program got off to a slow start and only about $70 million has been promised or dispensed thus far.

"This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident and the greatest forest destruction in modern times," said James Cummins, executive director of the conservation group Wildlife Mississippi and a board member of the Mississippi Forestry Commission. "It needs a really broad and aggressive response, and so far that just hasn’t happened."