Project Katrina

Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) visited an oil rig just off the coast of Louisiana in order “to highlight his support for increased domestic offshore drilling.” On Fox Noise this morning Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) promoted McCain’s oil rig visit.

In the interview Jindal oddly “emphasize that drilling alone is not enough” to address America’s energy needs. Whoops, guess he got all those various lies talking points mixed up.

This is McCain’s second attempt for a photo-op on an oil rig to drill home (sorry for the pun) his plan to open-up more offshore drilling leases. His last scheduled event was canned after a barge spilled more than 419,000 gallons of fuel oil into the Mississippi forming a slick 12 miles long slick.

There are a number of problems with McCain’s energy plan of expanded drilling. The first is he likes to say it is totally safe, as McCain did again on this visit. He and other Republicans like to point to the lie that no damage was done by Hurricane Katrina and Rita, which just isn’t true. The EPA called the spills cause by Katrina and Rita “worse than the worst-case scenario.”

Plus, we are already drilling and there just isn’t enough oil. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Web site in 1998 Louisiana produced 11,269,000 barrels of oil a month. Now it is just 6,293,000 barrels. Almost half as much. It isn’t cause of lack of production, it is cause of lack of oil.

It is also not accurate to say we’re not opening up more areas to drilling. In fact:

McCain’s visit came a day ahead of the Minerals Management Service’s lease sale in New Orleans to auction off 18 million acres of the western Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling. The tracts could potentially yield as much as 400 million barrels of oil, but that amount would only meet the nation’s oil needs for about 19 days, and it would be at least seven to 10 years until oil started flowing.

Yes you read that correctly. It will take 7-10 years to get to the oil and 18 million acres of land will only give us enough oil for 19 days. This is nothing but election year politics and somebody on our “Traditional Media” ought to call them on this shit

National Geographic News reports:

There are now more than 400 known dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, compared to 305 in the 1990s, according to study author Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science

[….]

Earth’s largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, experiences oxygen deprivation year-round, the press release said. The second largest dead zone surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite decades of efforts to clean up U.S. rivers and lakes, high nitrogen levels are currently combining with strong water flow to make that dead zone larger than it has ever been.

Several government-supported scientists are forecasting an expansion of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone to a record 8,800 square miles (23,000 square kilometers), an area larger than New Jersey.

Update: More information from the Washington Post.

Our Traditional Media has done a terrible job covering the real reason behind the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. But Harry Shearer, via the Huffington Post, has done his best to explain that the flood never had to happen. It was the direct fault of the Federal Government and specifically the Army Corp of Engineers. Period.

This is why Harry has for years called the aftermath of Katrina the Federal Flood. How he highlights what nobody else seems to want to write about,

This July was good to New Orleans. No major storms nearby, and a wealth of visitors packing the streets, clubs, restaurants. The Essence Music Festival, the big cocktail convention (seriously), then an international classical piano competition (ditto), and the SCLC’s national convention–compared to last July, when the streets were empty, the resettled part of the city was thriving and vibrant.

August brings a different mood. In Friday’s Times-Picayune, we learn that the Army Corps of Engineers is now scrambling—the paper’s word—to reinforce a crucial floodwall abutting a neighborhood that suffered disastrous flooding three years ago. Apparently, the Corps—which “concluded” on its own that Congress hadn’t authorized it to build a new, stronger, more deeply anchored floodwall before completing so-called 100-year flood protection in 2011—has realized the floodwall is far more vulnerable than it had thought.

More disturbing is the fact that the problem is the elevation figures the Corps used, right after Katrina, in calculating what was needed to strengthen the existing wall. They were “culled” from the original floodwall design plans. It’s been well established by the independent forensic investigations into the Katrina disaster that the Corps had a bad habit of using old, outdated elevation figures in the original design of the failed structures. So why “cull” those after the disaster proved them so disastrously wrong?

Combined with the continued reports of water leaking and puddling in backyards on the supposedly protected side of the 17th St. Canal—reports the Corps is still scrambling (my word) to explain—New Orleans is once again forced to ask: is this the best America can do?

This is a story written around the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that I found while researching a story I am writing on the third anniversary. It is well worth a read, although sad on many different levels.

More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.

[….]

But Hurricane Katrina denied most of the 1,464 victims in Louisiana such final flourishes of dignity; no watch chains for them, no stylish hats. The hurricane scattered bodies over hundreds of square miles, where water, heat and time distorted what many of the dead looked like in life. It was a forensic hell.

The system hastily conceived to fulfill a sacred mission—to collect, identify and release for burial hundreds of bodies—descended at times into the common ineptness of a motor vehicles bureau, ill equipped to deal with wholesale catastrophe. As a result, many families waited far too long for the release of identified bodies, delaying burial, prolonging grief.

Defying the bureaucratic impediments, pathologists, investigators and counselors rose to the sorrowful challenge. Working like wartime MASH units, they reunited families with their missing loved ones and attached names to nearly 900 of the bodies they examined. Even so, some 50 victims remain unknown to the world still, a year later.

“I wish we could have identified everybody,” Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state medical examiner, said. “Ninety-nine percent is a failing rate if it’s your kid missing. That’s the bottom line.”

Things are grim for many Hurricane Katrina evacuees, as funds are either drying up or are tangled in bureaucracy and never ending red tap. Trailer parks provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are closing, and contracts for workers are expiring. “I know we’re behind the eight ball,” Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, told The New York Times. “People talk about recovery, but on one level, we’re still responding.”

So where is the available money going? The Times reports that of the $11.5 billion in federal community-development block grants allocated for housing in Louisiana, $25 million has gone for homelessness prevention and $72 million for the supportive housing-voucher program.

A chunk of $100 million out of a $220 million block grant for social services went to the state Department of Health and Hospitals for medical and mental healthcare. An additional $260,000 of that grant was given to the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit group that works closely with the state recovery authority. The group plans to use those funds for people ineligible for FEMA rental payments, reports The Times.

Folks just can’t seem to catch much of a break:

With the closure of another FEMA trailer park where Hurricane Katrina victims had been living, there are new concerns over a lack of available housing.

While some of the people who were living in FEMA trailers have found rental apartments, or been able to renovate their storm-ravaged homes and move back into them, many people have not found another place to live. Some of them have moved to motels, but many disabled people are in danger of becoming homeless, local charities officials say.

Some of the problem was caused when FEMA had to close some trailer parks earlier than it had planned, after dangerously high levels of formaldehyde were found.

But other problems came because FEMA hasn’t provided adequate support to victims.

That lack of support included an early, and continuing, failure to distribute supplies to Katrina victims. Instead, the agency paid to store cleaning supplies, blankets and home furnishings in warehouses for years before selling them as surplus.

After Katrina hit and the levees failed more than 378,000 people were displaced. Based on U.S. Postal Service data collected by the Brookings Institution and reported in USA Today:

The re-population of New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina slowed drastically last year and may be hitting a plateau, a study released today finds.

The city’s population grew 3% from 2007 to 2008, compared with a 19% increase from 2006 to 2007, according to the report by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Overall, the city is at about 72% of its pre-Katrina population of 450,000.

After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) purchased more than $85M worth of basic supplies for storm victims. For more than two years, until last month FEMA let the supplies sit in warehouses at a cost of $1M/year.

During that two year period local government officials and non-profit relief organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi made repeated public pleas for donations of the exact sort of items FEMA had already purchased and were even stored locally.

That these supplies people have needed for years just sat in warehouses until mid-June of this year is bad enough, but FEMA was able to find a way to make this story even more sad and depressing the way only George Bush’s administration can.

The supplies (GSA now says it is only $18.5M—we can’t count) called Living Kits included towels, shirts, pants, shoes, coffee makers, pillowcases, dinnerware, blankets, pots and pans, buckets, and cleaning supplies. You know the stuff people need to live when they have lost everything and are living in trailers.

So FEMA kept all its stuff under lock and key because as a spokesperson told CNN:

We were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property.

Really, no great need! You have got to be fucking joking. I guess somebody needed to put together a Bush-style post-Katrina DVD for our national emergency agency so they were aware close to 250,000 folks are still living in FEMA provided trailers and housing.

So in June of this year with a single stroke of a pen, FEMA officials declared all the goods purchased for Katrina victims surplus and developed a plan to distribute them to other federal and state government agencies (including prisons).

But before they shipped off all the supplies (121 truckloads) they of course sent a representative out to state and local agencies, non-profit aid organizations, and churches just to double check that there wasn’t a need.

Well not really, I just made that up! That would be logical. Not only didn’t they sent anybody out for a face-to-face meeting, they didn’t even place one phone call or send a single e-mail on this topic.

When the Congressional delegations from Louisiana and Mississippi found out this shocking information from a CNN investigative story they went ballistic (video of the story here). Of course FEMA officials expressed, as you might expect, outrage, cause after nearly three years of rank incompetence and untold billions in waste and fraud how could something like this happen on their watch?

And since the Bush Administration officials have fake outrage down to an art form they of course promised a full investigation, meaning they will wait until the scandal disappears from the headlines before throwing some low-level bureaucrat under the bus.

But that was not enough for Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. They requested FEMA:

Come and tell the committee how such a debacle could occur, and in the process, what are they going to do to assure Congress and the taxpaying public that it will never happen again.

Last Thursday in a pretty rare joint congressional hearing of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees officials from FEMA and the General Services Administration (GSA) got it from both sides of the aisle (some of the audio is here).

During the hearing Eric Smith, FEMA’s assistant administrator for logistics management kept to the same tired talking points when pressed on why the supplies were not distributed to folks that needed them:

They were returned to us after they were not used from different areas—Mississippi, Louisiana.

Landrieu said to Smith:

FEMA never told state officials or relief agencies involved in recovery efforts that the Living Kits meant to resettle hurricane survivors were still available. How can people ask for something they don’t know exists?

Smith’s response was mind-numbing:

They have to have a need. If they have bona fide need, it’s their responsibility to pass that need on.

Where have we heard this before? Maybe on Monday, August 29th 2005 when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called Bush, as more than 1,100 Americans were literally starting to drown and said:

Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got!

But days, weeks, and even months later she’d be blamed by the White House cause she didn’t say exactly what she wanted/needed. I guess in almost three years we still have not got this not so little problem figured out.

You see Mr. Smith when you have pictures like the above, and there are hundreds more like it, even one where a family wrote in duct tape on their roof:

We are Americans, please help, some can’t swim.

When you endure something like what happened as the lead agency that is supposed to ensure it doesn’t in fact happen, more fucking lame excuses almost three years after the fact just don’t cut it.

But thankfully Landrieu also would have none of his BS:

It’s like if a house was on fire. If the fire department operated the same way FEMA does, we would have to call the fire department and specifically request the hose, the pressurized water, the truck, the firefighters and the ladder, all before FEMA would acknowledge that they should send this equipment to help.

After the Congressional hearing a CNN reporter caught up with Smith and asked what mistakes were made? His response:

We did not really make any mistakes. Could things have been done better? Yes of course, but we followed our procedures.

To date only a couple truck loads of the supplies have been returned to Louisiana. None to Mississippi. But rest assured, FEMA told the committee they are still cataloguing what supplies it has left and they’ll report back to the committee. But they do admit at least 90,000 of the Living Kits have already been distributed (they don’t like to say, “given away”).

I’ve already used enough words and I just don’t really know what else to say other than I am ashamed as an America this has all happened as I was a taxpaying adult. What have we become?

I just want to end with a little quote from a BBC show I love called Top Gear. I’ve been watching it since 2005 and I can’t ever recall them ever making a single political statement. They just drive the fastest cars in the world really, really fast.

They’ve only been to the US for one show. A challenge to drive from Miami to New Orleans. They got off the road right before they hit New Orleans in 2006 and had this to say (extended video here):

Finally though we made it. And my word were we in for a shock. We’d seen on the news what Hurricane Katrina had done. But seeing the devastation for real was truly astonishing.

Every house, I’ve been driving now for what 15 miles, and there isn’t a pavement there isn’t a building there isn’t anything that isn’t smashed. It is such a vast scale of destruction.

It had been a year since Katrina had blown through and we sort of assumed that the wealthiest nation on earth would have fixed it.

But we were wrong.

How can the rest of America sleep at night knowing this is here?

Some nights I don’t sleep well. I just wonder what they’d say today almost three years later!

I am all for folks willing to take a stand for something they believe in, even if it is just symbolic. But this is just laugh out loud funny. It makes the Republican look both stupid and petty at the same time. I mean why didn’t they do something like this to protest the lack of body armor for our troops in Iraq. Or the billions in cash lost by the Iraqi government. I mean heck, how about the tens of thousands of their fellow citizens that are still living in trailers all across Louisiana and Mississippi. Where is the outrage about these issues?

I don’t know, maybe all the money the oil industry gives out could be the reason.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats adjourned the House and turned off the lights and killed the microphones, but Republicans are still on the floor talking gas prices.

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders opposed the motion to adjourn the House, arguing that Pelosi’s refusal to schedule a vote allowing offshore drilling is hurting the American economy. They have refused to leave the floor after the adjournment motion passed at 11:23 a.m. and are busy bashing Pelosi and her fellow Democrats for leaving town for the August recess.

At one point, the lights went off in the House and the microphones were turned off in the chamber, meaning Republicans were talking in the dark. But as Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz..) was speaking, the lights went back on, and the microphones were turned on shortly afterward.

But C-SPAN, which has no control over the cameras in the chamber, has stopped broadcasting the House floor, meaning no one is witnessing this except the assembled Republicans, their aides, and one Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has now left.

Well this is fairly good news. In a new bill being promoted by Senate Democrats:

A new $24 billion economic stimulus and disaster assistance package unveiled Thursday by Senate Democrats would provide $3 billion for continued Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, financing that was left out of the emergency spending bill enacted in June.

The legislation would give Louisiana 30 years, instead of three, to repay more than $1.7 billion as its share of levee upgrades in metro New Orleans; $350 million to help hospitals in Louisiana and Mississippi deal with cash-flow issues and other post-hurricane problems; and $75 million to help fight increased violent crime and rebuild police fire and criminal justice facilities.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., praised Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., for including Katrina needs in the new emergency supplemental/stimulus spending bill he unveiled Thursday.