Project Katrina

In an effort to garner some positive press coverage while Obama tours the world, the McCain campaign came up with the idea for a photo-op by having him give a speech from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, right off the Louisiana coast.

But just an hour after the photo-op was finalized and the media was alerted, the event was canceled. The reason the campaign cited was bad weather caused by Hurricane Dolly.

But was the weather the real reason for the cancellation? Maybe the McCain “mind trust” didn’t want to visit the rig if the reporters on hand might notice the smell of diesel wafting through the French Quarter.

The Coast Guard closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River at New Orleans after a 600-foot tanker and a barge loaded with fuel oil collided Wednesday, breaking the barge in half.

Nobody was injured, but more than 419,000 gallons of heavy, almost tar-like fuel oil spilled from the barge, forming a slick 12 miles long, said Lt. Cdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau, a Coast Guard spokeswoman. […]

The double-hulled tanker Tintomara was loaded with about 4.2 million gallons of biodiesel and nearly 1.3 million gallons of styrene, but was not leaking, said Michael Wilson, president of ship management company Laurin Maritime (America) Inc. in Houston.

The collision occurred about 1:30 a.m. CDT just upriver from the Crescent City Connection, a pair of bridges between New Orleans’ east and west banks. A smell which many people thought was diesel was noticeable in the French Quarter and parts of New Orleans’ central business district.

This maybe the only smart decision the McCain camp make this week. Nothing says we can “drill safely” like an oil spill that closes 29 miles of the Mississippi River.

I mean it just won’t stop. From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The barrier quickly erected to try to protect Winfield from the flooding Mississippi River was breached this morning, and nearly 130 homes were reported damaged or destroyed, authorities said.

Lincoln County emergency operations officials said a 1,600-foot Hesco barrier, used to protect troops in Iraq, was heavily leaking and topped about 4:30 a.m. National Guard members, who had erected the barrier, were withdrawn. Alarms sounded, warning nearby residents to evacuate.

At least 92 homes have been destroyed, and 36 damaged, officials said. Thirty-six more homes have been impacted by the flooding. Officials estimate that 650 more homes are inaccesible to emergency officials, so the extent of the damage isn’t yet determined.

In my neck of the world, right outside of St. Louis, people have pretty much been working 24/7 to save their commuinites. Although there is still some concern, most believe we’ve seen the worse and the levees will continue to hold. Reuters reports:

Walls and levees held back the cresting Mississippi River on Sunday as requests for government aid poured in from homeowners and businesses swamped by the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years.

Across from St. Louis, where the river remained near the crest reached on Friday, Cahokia Mayor Frank Bergman said his city of 17,000 had escaped disaster by a few feet meters.

“We got lucky,” he said as he walked a 50-year-old network of levees and flood walls that withstood the river’s rise. River water that seeped under the levees at a few spots had been cordoned off by walls of sandbags.

The Boston Globe has by far the most amazing photo essay on the flooding in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Many more photos here.

This little town just a couple hours from me highlights why we have to rework how we hand insurance and government aid. It is just one story of many, but Time Magazine happened to pick of their story.

It was early evening in Grand Tower, Ill., and Josh Franklin, 23, was standing outside his aunt’s double-wide trailer. He’d like to move away from this community of 585 people to Carbondale, a college town about half an hour’s drive to the north. But he can’t afford to. Grand Tower isn’t much of anyplace anymore. Its last restaurant closed shortly after the great flood of 1993. There isn’t a bookstore. Don’t even ask about wi-fi access. “If we get a major flood,” he says, “it’s all over. A lot of small towns, they’ve just disappeared. We’re going to be next.” The floods are certainly coming. And who knows when the next big earthquake will hit, since the town sits within the New Madrid Seismic Zone, one of the continent’s most violent.

This tiny town on Illinois’s southern tip is caught between catastrophes, literally. A dispute with the Federal Government has resulted in its loss of flood insurance— unless the impoverished town takes expensive measures, like hoisting homes and the few remaining businesses on stilts a dozen feet into the air. But if they scratch together the money to do so, it will be impossible to afford earthquake insurance, which is already prohibitively expensive.

Now Grand Tower residents are anxiously watching the surrounding rivers. Stubborn bands of storms have saturated the region’s corn and soybean fields, swelling the Mississippi River and its tributaries above St. Louis, Mo. Today the rising waters were only about two hours’ drive to the north. Some 21 Illinois counties and all of Missouri have been declared disaster zones, and dozens of points along the Mississippi River’s levees in both states have ruptured. “We’re just standing by, hoping for the best but expecting the worst,” says Burke “Bear” Ellett, 49, Grand Tower’s mayor for the past dozen years. If the floods ravage the town, there probably won’t be any money to rebuild it.

Since I have been hitting McCain pretty hard over his response, or lack thereof to the floods in my home state and all around it, I spent some time looking around on his site for any response. This two sentence press release about was all I could locate. Guess he is busy.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those impacted by the flooding throughout the Midwest. Cindy and I would like to extend our sympathies to all those who have lost loved ones, and stand ready to help those in the Midwest to recover and rebuild.

Via the Associated Press (AP):

As Iowa City hoped to elude the worst damage, the state had a multi-front battle on its hands. State officials warned of problems ahead for a string of towns in southeast Iowa along the Mississippi River, led by Burlington, a key railroad hub.

“It’s likely that we will see major and serious flooding on every part of the southeastern border of our state from New Boston and down,” Culver said. “We are taking precautionary steps, we are evacuating where necessary, but that is going to be the next round here.”

Early Monday, more than 36,000 residents in 26 communities had been evacuated from their homes, said Kevin Baskins of the state Emergency Operations Center. Most of those—25,000—were in Cedar Rapids, and another 5,000 in Iowa City, he said.

And where is Geroge Bush? Well he is on vacation in Europe, having dinner with Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch while crowds outside chant “George Bush terrorist” and “Arrest George Bush.”

Gosh, wasn’t he on vacation the last time an American city/region of our country flooded?