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
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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.
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 Timesreports 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, reportsThe Times.
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.
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?
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.
As I’ve written about before (and here) Republicans and White House officials keep lying about the fact that there were no oil spills caused by Hurricane Katrina and Rita in an effort to convince the American public that more off-shore drilling is both a good idea and environmentally safe. Now we have Samuel Bodman, the head of the Department of Energy (DoE), the one man in the United States that should know the facts, lying to our faces that no oil spills or rigs were damaged by Katrina and Rita. It boggles the mind.
Details are starting to emerge on how New Orleans are going to mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Mayor Ray Nagin plans to mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a low-key bell-ringing at the time of the first levee breach and, later in the day, a candlelight vigil at Jackson Square.
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Mr. Nagin said he doesn’t want to overdo it this year. However, he said the city would invite presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, congressional representatives and celebrities he didn’t identify.
The bell-ringing “is about the sadness of the event,” Mr. Nagin said, “but the afternoon is kind of like, ‘We got through it, celebrate our recovery and let’s point to the future.’ And that’s how I kind of see the day going.”
Ms. Quiett said the Jackson Square vigil is meant to remind people of the promise President Bush made in his September 2005 address: to do what it takes to help hurricane-affected citizens rebuild their communities and lives.
