Project Katrina

USA Today reports what I think anybody that even closely follows the situation of levees in our nation already knows:

Communities nationwide have repaired fewer than half of the 122 levees identified by the government almost two years ago as too poorly maintained to be reliable in major floods, according to Army Corps of Engineers data.

State and local governments were given a year to fix levees cited by the corps for “unacceptable” maintenance deficiencies in a February 2007 review that was part of a post-Hurricane Katrina crackdown. Only 45 have had necessary repairs, according to data provided in response to a USA TODAY request. The remaining unrepaired levees are spread across 18 states and Puerto Rico—most in California and Washington.

People living behind the unrepaired levees “have every right to be concerned,” said Tammy Conforti, head of the corps’ levee safety program. “If (people) depend on that for flood risk reduction,” she said of each unrepaired levee, “… those deficiencies need to be corrected.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I heard people from both sides of the political spectrum talk about not rebuilding New Orleans and not upgrading the levees. It made me wonder if they realized that millions upon millions of folks need levee in dozens of states to keep their homes and businesses from flooding.

Sometimes, well OK a lot of the time the sheer ignorance of our population stuns me.

Video of reporter A.C. Thompson of the The Nation interviewing folks from his article a few days ago,  Katrina’s Hidden Race War:

That is a pretty darn important question Katrina vanden Heuvel asks writing in the Huffington post:

The investigation shows lawlessness, but also a stunning inhumanity. Thompson interviews unrepentant vigilantes, and a video accompanying the article includes footage of vigilantes joking that shooting blacks “was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” Thompson details the suspicious death of Henry Glover, who according to eyewitnesses was shot by vigilantes and then bled to death in his car while police beat his would-be rescuer. Most troubling in all of this is the role of law enforcement, as witnesses allege that New Orleans police covered up and destroyed evidence, authorized the shootings and savagely beat witnesses.

To date, not a single incident has ever been investigated. New Orleans police, Homeland Security and the State of Louisiana have refused to answer questions for over 8 months, and Thompson (with the invaluable support of the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute) had to sue to gain access to autopsy records. In total Thompson reviewed over 800 autopsies and state death reports, and amassed a pile of evidence that substantiate his report. “As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime,” he wrote, “I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom have ever been interviewed by police.”

The full extent of the disregard for poor African-Americans and the embarrassing failure of leadership laid bare by Katrina still remains unknown.

Allow me for a second to break with all basic journalistic convention and bring up Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, which of course is far more than what was done during the entire Presidential election.

One entirely predictable outcome of Katrina was the extent to which the conservative noise machine (like right wing radio and Fox Noise) hyped nearly non-stop “reported” incidents of looting, broken down along racial lines of course, to “prove” that folks of color will resort back to their core animal instincts in a time of danger and panic.

Not only it totally offensive, racist, and inaccurate, but now an astonishing article by A.C. Thompson of the The Nation highlights in staggering detail that in at least one case, the exact opposite was true— whites formed gangs (no other word for it), gangs and shot African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm, to “protect their area.”

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. “I just hit the ground. I didn’t even know what happened,” recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions—his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander’s back, arm and buttocks

[....]

Herrington, Collins and Alexander’s experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs—Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that “hundreds of gang members” were marauding through the Superdome. Now it’s clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins—in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

The gangs were from Algiers Point, a middle to upper middle class white enclave in the middle of the city, surrounded by lower income areas on all sides. The residents stockpiled guns and ammunition after the storm, fearing that African-Americans would flock to their area, which was relatively unharmed by the storm. They assembled a small group of white males with instructions to shoot anything that moved.

The hysteria created by the lurid details of chaos and gang activity led to paranoia and the “frontier justice” that ensued. Their are people to be blamed for this, and not nearly all of them lived in Algiers Point.

This is the nation we live in folks. And if A.C. Thompson had not done his job as a journalist, we of course would have never even heard about it.

Let me see if I have this right. The state of Louisiana had asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for $492 million to rebuild Charity Hospital. FEMA said basically, “well how does $23 million sound?” As you might expect the State was not happy. So years after Katrina hit FEMA has said they’ll give the state $150 million. Now I am no expert at negotiations, but who, you would have think the State could have least got something like half, or $247 million of what they asked for.

After years of haggling with state officials, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced late Friday that it has approved $150 million for hurricane-related damage to Charity Hospital. The amount is far less than the $492 million that the state claims the damage is worth but considerably more than the $23 million that FEMA previously had said it was willing to pay.Rather than bring the long-running dispute to an end, FEMA’s announcement merely moves the issue to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

On the a little good news is better than no good news front:

The candy-apple red streetcar is the latest New Orleans icon to make a post-Katrina comeback.The Regional Transit Authority today will put six of the streetcars back in service, more than three years after Hurricane Katrina flooded the entire fleet.

The cars will roll on the Canal Street tracks starting at 11:30 a.m. today, when the RTA’s board of commissioners and other city officials will ride one of the cars during a ceremony.

[....]

After the ceremony, the agency plans to add one streetcar a month until a restored fleet of 24 is rumbling down the Canal Street tracks, according to RTA spokeswoman Rosalind Blanco Cook.

On the bad news front, at one a month, it will take more than five years after Katrina hit to get 24 streetcars running. I don’t know about you, but that sure seems like an awful long time for the “most powerful nation in the world.”

I think US News & World Report’s pretty much says it all in their analysis of Bush’s legacy:

It was a disaster at every level. But in political terms, the government’s failure to respond effectively to Hurricane Katrina in the late summer of 2005 was Bush’s biggest setback at home. “Katrina showed he is incompetent,” says Howard Dean, outgoing chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Before Katrina, everyone, including America’s friends and enemies, believed if something awful happened in the world, you could call in the Americans and they’d fix it.” The government response to the hurricane, which devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, ruined that reputation, Dean argues.

Bush seemed slow off the mark as millions of people suffered, and he created a lasting image of isolation when the White House released photos of him, a solitary figure in his cushy seat, looking out a window on Marine One at the hurricane devastation far below. He also made a huge mistake when he praised Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with a now infamous attaboy—”Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”—even though the agency was botching the disaster response, adding to the impression that Bush was out of touch.

White House advisers say the blame for the poor Katrina response must be shared by the federal, state, and local governments, especially in dealing with the hurricane-related problems in New Orleans. Bush defenders add that he was correct not to visit the disaster sites immediately because to do so would have greatly complicated the relief efforts on the ground.

More substantively, Bush refrained from having the federal government immediately take over the relief effort even when it became clear that the state and local governments in Louisiana were not up to the job. His aides say Bush was guided here by his experience as governor of Texas and his belief that such matters are best left to lower-level officials. “For him, it was a question of usurpation of power,” says a former senior adviser. But his failure to act while thousands of desperate people, unable to find food or water, were appealing for help on national television erased his image as an effective decision maker.

Bushie, you did one heck of a job …..