Saturday, September 03, 2005
THE TOO LITTLE TOO LATE PREZ
Katrina criticisms echo past complaints against Bush
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Complaints about President George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina echo past criticisms over crises like the Asian tsunami or the Iraq war.
Doubters are asking whether he reacted too slowly to the catastrophe, sent enough troops to keep order, or relied too much on rosy scenarios spun by senior aides while New Orleans descended into anarchy.
Some lawmakers and local emergency officials have called Washington's initial reaction "a national disgrace" and assailed the Bush administration as having a too-little, too-late response.
On its Internet site, CNN on Friday quoted upbeat assessments of relief efforts by US officials, which contrasted sharply with the grim conditions on the ground.
Two senators have announced hearings into Washington's reaction to the disaster, focused on the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of
Homeland Security.
The president himself, asked why the world superpower had not acted more quickly and could not get food and water to the needy in one of its major cities said Friday his administration had reacted quickly.
But Bush, facing poor approval ratings of his handling of the disaster, acknowledged that the critics had a point, saying: "I am satisfied with the response. I'm not satisfied with all the results."
Still, some of the early complaints sounded eerily familiar to what the president faced after the December 26 tsunami that devastated Indian Ocean countries, as well as the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
Bush was at his Texas ranch when the tidal wave hit, and although the United States quickly pledged to aid afflicted areas, he did not make public remarks until December 29, when he defended US aid from accusations that Washington was being "stingy."
The United States later quieted those charges by mounting a massive relief effort, which included deploying US military ships in the region, and ramping up financial help well beyond its much-mocked original 15-million-dollar offer.
Bush was also at his Texas ranch while Katrina churned towards the US coast, where it struck Florida on August 25. He did not make public remarks on the storm until August 28.
Some critics have seized on a news photograph of the president palling around with a country singer and posing with a gift guitar on August 30 -- even as officials predicted Katrina's death toll would run in the hundreds -- to say that the president was not taking the situation seriously enough.
"The bottom line is he needs to appear much more involved, much more hands on, much more in touch with the reality on the ground. He certainly should not be being photographed with a guitar," said a Republican congressional aide.
There have also been parallels with Iraq: The administration has widely been accused of deploying too few troops to contain widespread violence after the fall of
Saddam Hussein because of poor planning.
A similar charge has come from officials in New Orleans, which fell prey to widespread looting while some rescue efforts have been repelled by gunfire.
After Bush used his Friday visit to deliver a help-is-on-the-way message, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin fired back in a radio interview broadcast by CNN that "it's too doggone late!"
"Get off your asses and let's do something and fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country," he said.
Days after Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said her state urgently needed as many as 40,000 troops, Bush on Saturday ordered 7,000 soldiers to join some 4,000 already in the region. Some 21,000 National Guard were already there.Saturday, September 03, 2005
JUST FOLLOWING NO ORDERS, SIR
Guardsmen 'played cards' amid New Orleans chaos: police official
NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - A top New Orleans police officer said that National Guard troops sat around playing cards while people died in the stricken city after Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley launched a bitter attack on the federal response to the disaster though he praised the way the evacuation was eventually handled.
His remarks fuelled controversy over the government's handling of events during five days when New Orleans succumbed to lawlessness after Katrina swamped the city's flood defenses.
The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did not anticipate the collapse of the city's police force.
But Riley said that for the first three days after Monday's storm, which is believed to have killed several thousand people, the police and fire departments and some volunteers had been alone in trying to rescue people.
"We expected a lot more support from the federal government. We expected the government to respond within 24 hours. The first three days we had no assistance," he told AFP in an interview.
Riley went on: "We have been fired on with automatic weapons. We still have some thugs around. My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard.
"The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep.
"For 72 hours this police department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat and played cards. I understand why we are not winning the war in
Iraq if this is what we have."
Riley said there is "a semblance of organisation now."
"The military is here and they have done an excellent job with the evacuation" of the tens of thousands of people stranded in the city.
The National Guard commander said the city police force was left with only a third of its pre-storm strength.
"The real issue, particularly in New Orleans, is that no one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans," Blum told reporters in Washington.
"Once that assessment was made ... then the requirement became obvious," he said. "And that's when we started flowing military police into the theatre."
On Friday, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin denounced the slow federal response as too little, too late, charging that promised troops had not arrived in time.
"Now get off your asses and let's do something and fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country," the mayor said in remarks aired on CNN.
Blum said that since Thursday some 7,000 National Guard and military police had moved into the city.
President George W. Bush on Saturday ordered an additional 7,000 active duty and reserve ground troops.
Blum said any suggestion that the National Guard had not performed well or was late was a "low blow".
The initial priority of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard forces was disaster relief, not law enforcement, because they expected the police to handle that, he said.
The police commander was unable to give a death toll for New Orleans.
"We have bodies all over the city. A federal mortuary team was supposed to come in within 24 hours. We haven't seen them. It is inhumane. This is just not America."
Riley said he did not even know how many police remained from a normal force of 1,700.
"Many officers lost their homes or their families and there are many we have not heard from. Some officers could not handle the pressure and left. I don't know if we have 800 or thousands today."Saturday, September 03, 2005
CALLING BUSHIT ON GW
Louisiana Senator raps Bush over Katrina effort
BATON ROUGE, United States (AFP) - Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu branded President George W. Bush's visit to a busted levee in New Orleans a mere photo-op, and slammed his government's response to the hurricane tragedy.
Landrieu rebuked Bush for failing to heed her call to name a cabinet-level official to lead the federal government response to the one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
"Perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street Levee," said Landrieu, a Democrat.
"Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe.
"Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity.
"The desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment.
"The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old -- deserve far better from their national government."
The White House responded to Landrieu's call on Friday by saying that the Federal Emergency management Agency (FEMA) falls under the oversight of Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff, who is of cabinet rank.
Bush, who was criticized in some quarters over what critics said was a tardy federal response to the tragedy, has taken a much more personal role in the relief effort over the last few days.
After touring areas of New Orleans and Mississippi on Friday, the White House announced that the president would return to the affected area on Monday.
Bush announced Saturday, after a 50-minute meeting with senior aides steering the response to the killer storm, that he was sending 7,000 regular army troops from battle-hardened units to the area.Saturday, September 03, 2005
ANIMALS IN A CAGE
Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - People left homeless by Hurricane Katrina told horrific stories of rape, murder and trigger-happy guards in two New Orleans centers that were set up as shelters but became places of violence and terror.
Police and National Guard troops on Saturday closed down the two centers -- the Superdome arena and the city's convention center -- but then penned the storm victims outside in sweltering heat to keep them from trying to walk out of the city until they were evacuated from the scene.
Military helicopters and buses took away thousands of people who waited in orderly lines in stifling heat outside the flooded convention center. They completed the evacuation by late afternoon.
The refugees, waiting to be taken to sports stadiums and other huge shelters across Texas and northern Louisiana, described how the convention center and the Superdome became lawless hellholes beset by rape and murder.
Several residents of the impromptu shantytown recounted two horrific incidents where those charged with keeping people safe had killed them instead.
In one, a young man was run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer, in another a man seeking help was gunned down by a National Guard soldier, witnesses said.
Police here refused to discuss or confirm either incident. National Guard spokesman Lt. Col Pete Schneider said "I have not heard any information of a weapon being discharged."
"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck's windshield and they shot him dead."
Wade Batiste, 48, recounted another tale of horror.
"Last night at 8 p.m. they shot a kid of just 16. He was just crossing the street. They ran him over, the New Orleans police did, and then they got out of the car and shot him in the head," Batiste said.
BODY IN THE STREET
The young man's body lay in the street by the Convention Center's entrance on Saturday morning, covered in a black blanket, a stream of congealed blood staining the street around him. Nearby his family sat in shock.
A member of that family, Africa Brumfield, 32, confirmed the incident but declined to be quoted about it, saying her family did not wish to discuss it. But she spoke of general conditions here.
"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave," she said through tears.
People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to the makeshift morgue.
People trying to walk out are forced back at gunpoint -- something troops said was for their own safety. "It's sad, but how far do you think they would get," one soldier said.
"They have us living here like animals," said Wyvonnette Grace-Jordan, here with five children, the youngest only six weeks old. "We have only had two meals, we have no medicine and now there are thousands of people defecating in the streets. This is wrong. This is the United States of America."
One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the center, "They (the Bush administration) care more about
Iraq and
Afghanistan than here."
'OUR GUYS ARE IN IRAQ'
The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, "We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq."
Across town at the Superdome, where as many as 38,000 refugees camped out until Wednesday night when evacuation buses first came, the 4,000 still there were corralled outside, hoping to get on four waiting buses with seats for only 200.
The scene at the sports stadium was one of abject filth. Crammed into a small area after the building was shut to them on Friday night, those remaining sat amid heaps of garbage, piled in places waist high. The stench of human waste pervaded the interior of the now vacant stadium.
One police officer told Reuters there were 100 people in a makeshift morgue at the Superdome, mostly people who died of heat exhaustion, and that six babies had been born there since last weekend, when people arrived to take shelter.
At the arena, too, there was much talk of bedlam after dark.
"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one National Guard soldier told Reuters. "Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."
But the brutal experience came to an abrupt and welcome end on Saturday. After days of waiting, buses and helicopters finally arrived and evacuated all the people at both the convention center and the Superdome in an operation that lasted just eight hours.
By 6 p.m. at the convention center, all that was left was a street full of trash, cherished personal belongings left behind in the rush to leave, and an acrid stench.Saturday, September 03, 2005
JUST LET THE MISSISSIPPI TAKE IT TO THE SEA JUST LET THE MISSISSIPPI TAKE IT
New Orleans Left to the Dead and Dying
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - Thousands more bedraggled refugees were bused and airlifted to salvation Saturday, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.
No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina's floods and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.
And the dying goes on — at the convention center and an airport triage center, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Saturday that she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.
Touring the airport triage center, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, said "a lot more than eight to 10 people are dying a day."
Most were those too sick or weak to survive. But not all.
Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death and another commit suicide at the Superdome. Womack was beaten with a pipe and being treated at the airport triage center.
"One guy jumped off a balcony. I saw him do it. He was talking to a lady about it. He said it reminded him of the war and he couldn't leave," he said.
Three babies died at the convention center from heat exhaustion, said Mark Kyle, a medical relief provider.
Some 20,000 refugees had been waiting for rescue for nearly a week at the Superdome, with as many as 25,000 more at the New Orleans convention center. National Guard Lt. Col. Bernard McLaughlin said the number may have been closer to 5,000 to 7,000.
The last 300 refugees at the Superdome climbed aboard buses Saturday, eliciting cheers from members of the Texas National Guard who were guarding the facility.
At the convention center, thousands of refugees dragged their meager belongings to buses, the mood more numb than jubilant. Yolando Sanders, who had been stuck at the convention center for five days, was among those who filed past corpses to reach the buses.
"Anyplace is better than here," she said.
"People are dying over there."
Nearby, a woman lay dead in a wheelchair on the front steps. A man was covered in a black drape with a dry line of blood running to the gutter, where it had pooled. Another had lain on a chaise lounge for four days, his stocking feet peeking out from under a quilt.
By mid-afternoon, only pockets of stragglers remained in the streets around the convention center, and New Orleans paramedics began carting away the dead.
A once-vibrant city of 480,000 people, overtaken just days ago by floods, looting, rape and arson, was now an empty, sodden tomb.
The exact number of dead won't be known for some time. Survivors were still being plucked from roofs and shattered highways across the city.
President Bush ordered more than 7,000 active duty forces to the Gulf Coast on Saturday.
"There are people in apartments and hotels that you didn't know were there," Army Brig. Gen. Mark Graham said.
The overwhelming majority of those stranded in the post-Katrina chaos were those without the resources to escape — and, overwhelmingly, they were black.
"The first few days were a natural disaster. The last four days were a man-made disaster," said Phillip Holt, 51, who was rescued from his home Saturday with his partner and three of their aging Chihuahuas. They left a fourth behind they couldn't grab in time.
Tens of thousands of people had been evacuated from the city, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry said as many as 120,000 hurricane refugees were in 97 shelters across the state, with another 100,000 in Texas hotels and motels. Others were in Tennessee, Indiana and Arkansas.
Emergency workers at the Astrodome were told to expect 10,000 new arrivals daily for the next three days.
Thousands of people remained at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where officials turned a Delta Blue terminal into a triage unit. Officials said 3,000 to 5,000 people had been treated at the triage unit, but fewer than 200 remain. Others throughout the airport awaited transport out of the city.
"In the beginning it was like trying to lasso an octopus. When we got here it was overwhelming," said Jake Jacoby, a physician helping run the center.
Airport director Roy Williams said about 30 people had died, some of them elderly and ill. The bodies were being kept in refrigerated trucks as a temporary morgue.
At the convention center, people stumbled toward the helicopters, dehydrated and nearly passing out from exhaustion. Many had to be carried by National Guard troops and police on stretchers. And some were being pushed up the street on office chairs and on dollies.
Nita LaGarde, 105, was pushed down the street in her wheelchair as her nurse's 5-year-old granddaughter, Tanisha Blevin, held her hand. The pair spent two days in an attic, two days on an interstate island and the last four days on the pavement in front of the convention center.
"They're good to see," LaGarde said, with remarkable gusto as she waited to be loaded onto a gray Marine helicopter. She said they were sent by God. "Whatever He has for you, He'll take care of you. He'll sure take care of you."
LaGarde's nurse, Ernestine Dangerfield, 60, said LaGarde had not had a clean adult diaper in more than two days. "I just want to get somewhere where I can get her nice and clean," she said.
Around the corner, a motley fleet of luxury tour buses and yellow school buses lined up two deep to pick up some of the healthier refugees. National Guardsmen confiscated a gun, knives and letter openers from people before they got on the buses.
"It's been a long time coming," Derek Dabon, 29, said as he waited to pass through a guard checkpoint. "There's no way I'm coming back. To what? That don't make sense. I'm going to start a new life."
Hillary Snowton, 40, sat on the sidewalk outside with a piece of white sheet tied around his face like a bandanna as he stared at a body that had been lying on a chaise lounge for four days, its stocking feet peeking out from under a quilt.
"It's for the smell of the dead body," he said of the sheet. His brother-in-law, Octave Carter, 42, said it has been "every day, every morning, breakfast lunch and dinner looking at it."
When asked why he didn't move further away from the corpse, Carter replied, "it stinks everywhere, Blood."
Dan Craig, director of recovery at the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, said it could take up to six months to get the water out of New Orleans, and the city would then need to dry out, which could take up to three more months.
A Saks Fifth Avenue store billowed smoke Saturday, as did rows of warehouses on the east bank of the Mississippi River, where corrugated roofs buckled and tiny explosions erupted. Gunfire — almost two dozen shots — broke out in the French Quarter overnight.
In the French Quarter, some residents refused or did not know how to get out. Some holed up with guns.
As the warehouse district burned, Ron Seitzer, 61, washed his dirty laundry in the even dirtier waters of the Mississippi River and said he didn't know how much longer he could stay without water or power, surrounded by looters.
"I've never even had a nightmare or a beautiful dream about this," he said as he watched the warehouses burn. "People are just not themselves."
___Saturday, September 03, 2005
LYING LIARS AND THE LIES THEY TELL
The Army Corps of Engineers, civilian engineers and disaster readiness experts have been warning for DECADES that this would eventually happen - not "if" but WHEN. Local authorities have been begging for funding to prepare and not received it.
THESE BOLDFACED LYING BUSHCO FUCKERS MAKE ME SOOOOOOO MAD!
Check out the article in USA Today (below the AFP article) that was published just yesterday and compare it to the bullshit pouring out of Chertoff's mouth.
Katrina, floods like "atomic bomb" on New Orleans : Chertoff
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of New Orleans' levees had the combined force of an "atomic bomb" being dropped on the city that could not have been foreseen, the US security czar insisted.
In a staunch defence of the government against accusations it failed to prepare for the catastrophe, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff insisted Washington had done everything it could to protect the stricken region but that the failure of New Orleans' dykes could not have been predicted.
"This is probably the worst catastrophe, or set of catastrophes certainly that I'm aware of in the history of the country. It was a devastating hurricane followed by a devastating flood," Chertoff said.
"It was as if an atomic bomb was dropped on New Orleans," he said of the double whammy.
"That perfect storm combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody's foresight," he said as
President George W. Bush's administration came under intense fire for its handling of the disaster.
But, Chertoff said, the plight of victims of the storm that battered the US Gulf coast Monday was steadily improving as the rescue operation picks up steam, but conceded that much more work needed to be done.
"The situation is improving hour by hour, nevertheless we are not satisfied," he told a press conference in Washington.
He said the delayed rescue operation and arrival of thousands of troops and emergency supplies in anarchic New Orleans and stricken areas of Mississippi and Alabama was rapidly changing the grim outlook.
"This is a picture that is improving but we have a lot more work to do," Chertoff said, adding that "all the capabilities, all the assets of the United States" were coming to bare in the delayed drive to rescue tens of thousands of survivors still trapped in the city and to care for the army of refugees.
The US Coast Guard has rescued some 9,500 survivors of the apocalyptic destruction in New Orleans and the US Gulf Coast, while some 4,000 people had been airlifted out of the city of jazz on Friday.
In addition the first trains began running from deluged New Orleans on Saturday to Texas, the destination for up to 75,000 of survivors of the tragedy that is thought to have killed thousands.
He pointed to the more than 4,000 active duty troops already on the ground in New Orleans to help restore law and order after a four-day orgy of looting, rape and killing, and the 7,000 additional soldiers that Bush ordered in Saturday as signs that the government and military had a grip on the situation.
While no toll of the number of dead and missing was yet available, officials have estimated that thousands were killed in the storm and ensuing flooding on the Gulf Coast and that at least 100,000 had been forced to flee their homes.
Around 20,000 people were in process of being evacuated from New Orleans' convention center, while the city's Superdome stadium, that became a hellish refuge for 25,000 survivors in the immediate aftermath of the flooding, was 95 percent empty, according to CNN television.
Refugees are being housed in hundreds of shelters springing up across the southern United States.
Chertoff also reminded the world that while the death and destruction wrought on New Orleans, which is 80 percent under water, was "breathtakingly horrifying," it was not the only affected area.
He said that in addition to the hard-hit areas of Mississippi and Alabama, where around 150 people are confirmed killed, people living in Louisiana around New Orleans were also "in dire straits" and needed help urgently.
US Surgeon General Richard Carmona told the same press conference that US health authorities were setting up 10 medical shelters with a total capacity of 2,500 beds to help treat the injured and sick.
City's defenses weakened, ignored
Fri Sep 2, 6:58 AM ET
USA Today - Hurricane Katrina took only a few hours to rip through New Orleans on Monday, but the city's vulnerability was in the making for years. Soaring ambitions to tame nature, misplaced priorities and denial contributed to the damage. The simple fact is: It didn't have to be this bad, and the nation has much to learn from the city's mistakes.
The city's fabled levees were vulnerable, but government was unwilling to spend the enormous sums to strengthen them. Instead, money was poured for decades into attempts to control the flow of the Mississippi River, in the process destroying Louisiana's delta wetlands that weaken storms when they come ashore.
As the city prospered and narrowly dodged one hurricane after another, development grew bolder, increasing risk.
There are limits to what might have been done. Higher earthen levees sink more quickly into the ground. And engineers can't stop a whole city from sinking. Founded in 1717, New Orleans was built on land that was at least 10 feet above sea level. Now most of the city sits several feet below, like a bowl waiting to be filled.
While New Orleans is in many ways unique, the mistakes made and threats ignored hold lessons for other vulnerable areas. The federal government has manipulated most of the 2,300 miles of the Mississippi River for decades, erecting levees, draining side channels and destroying marshes to promote navigation and reduce floods. Yet many scientists argue that such projects can intensify the damage when floods occur. Certainly, they open more land to development, attracting more people to high-risk areas.
Protection against disaster requires strong leadership, economic trade-offs, vast amounts of money and the ability to confront harsh realities. In the Big Easy, all were in short supply. Consider how officials disregarded two of the biggest threats:
Vanishing buffers. Engineering feats that tamed the flow of the Mississippi and turned it into one of the world's richest shipping channels came with a heavy price: Relentless erosion of marshes, swamps and barrier islands along the coast that once acted as buffers to the surging waters from storms. Without them, New Orleans sat defenseless.
In the past 75 years, 1 million acres of marshes and swamps - enough to cover the state of Delaware - have vanished. For more than 20 years, scientists, environmentalists and concerned local citizens have warned of the danger, but top state officials did not get serious about reversing the damage until a few years ago. Since 2001, they have pushed a $14 billion, 20-year plan to restore the coast. It has been a tough sell. Yet the price now looks cheap, when viewed against the human and economic loss this week.
Inadequate walls. Scientists and engineers knew that the flood walls and levees that hold back the Mississippi to the city's south and Lake Pontchartrain to the north would be no match for a Category 4 storm like Katrina. Three years ago, The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune newspaper laid out the problems in an incisive series of articles. Last year, an emergency response exercise showed that the city's defenses would be overwhelmed even by a lesser storm. Yet those with the money or clout to respond didn't. It was as if the disaster plan was to hope nothing would happen.
Each year since 2001, the Bush administration has slashed Louisiana's requests for flood control funds. Congress did only slightly better in its final budgets. Whatever the reasons, less than 2% of the Army Corps of Engineers' $4.7 billion budget this year was set aside for three crucial New Orleans levee projects. Now it's hard to fathom why such urgent needs were such low priorities.
It will be many months before New Orleans can look toward rebuilding. When it does, the solutions most difficult to achieve, such as diverting the river to replenish coastal marshes, might turn out to be the best investments. They will require not only enormous expenditures but also political will - sacrificing short-term economic gain for long-term survival of a great city and a region critical to the whole nation.Saturday, September 03, 2005
THE SHIT HIT THE FAN HERE TOO, BUT THEY ARE *NOT* EATING EACH OTHER
Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed
JACKSON, MS, Associated Press - Mississippi hurricane survivors looked around Saturday and wondered just how long it would take to get food, clean water and shelter. And they were more than angry at the federal government and the national news media.
Richard Gibbs was disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans and upset at the lack of attention hurricane victims in his state were getting.
"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."
Gibbs and his wife, Holly, have been stuck at their flooded home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Water comes up to the second floor, they are out of gasoline, and food supplies are running perilously low.
Until recently, they also had Holly's 75-year-old father, who has a pacemaker and severe diabetes, with them. Finally they got an ambulance to take him to the airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.
In poverty-stricken north Gulfport, Grover Chapman was angry at the lack of aid.
"Something should've been on this corner three days ago," Chapman, 60, said Saturday as he whipped up dinner for his neighbors.
He used wood from his demolished produce stand to cook fish, rabbit, okra and butter beans he'd been keeping in his freezer. Although many houses here, about five miles inland, are still standing, they are severely damaged. Corrugated tin roofs lie scattered on the ground.
"I'm just doing what I can do," Chapman said. "These people support me with my produce stand every day. Now it's time to pay them back."
One neighbor, 78-year-old Georgia Smylie, knew little about what's happening elsewhere. She was too worried about her own situation.
"My medicine is running out. I need high blood pressure medicine, medicine for my heart," she said.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he's been watching hours of Katrina coverage every day and most of the national media attention has focused on the devastation and looting in New Orleans.
"Mississippi needs more coverage," Sabato said. "Until people see it on TV, they don't think it's real."
Along the battered Mississippi Gulf Coast, crews started searching boats for corpses on Saturday. Several shrimpers are believed to have died as they tried to ride out the storm aboard their boats on the Intracoastal Waterway.
President Bush toured ravaged areas of the Mississippi coast on Friday with Gov. Haley Barbour and other state officials. They also flew over flooded New Orleans.
"I'm going to tell you, Mississippi got hit much harder than they did, but what happened in the aftermath — it makes your stomach hurt to go miles and miles and miles and the houses are all under water up to the roof," Barbour said.
Keisha Moran has been living in a tent in a department store parking lot in Bay St. Louis with her boyfriend and three young children since the hurricane struck. She said National Guardsmen have brought her water but no other aid so far, and she was furious that it took Bush several days before he came to see the damage in Mississippi.
"It's how many days later? How many people are dead?" Moran said.
Mississippi's death toll from Hurricane Katrina stood at 144 on Saturday, according to confirmed reports from coroners and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Barbour had said Friday the total was 147, but he didn't provide a county-by-county breakdown.
In a strongly worded editorial, The Sun Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport pleaded for help and questioned why a massive National Guard presence wasn't already visible.
"We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan (area) and ours," the newspaper editorialized, saying survival basics like ice, gasoline and medicine have been too slow to arrive.
"We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible," the paper wrote.Saturday, September 03, 2005
HOW COME THE 'NATIONAL' GUARD IS IN IRAQ, AND THE REGULAR MILITARY IS BEING DEPLOYED TO NEW ORLEANS?
This is totally bass-ackwards - we have the National Guard and Reserves fighting and dying in GWB's overseas vanity war, and we have to deploy regular military to do the job of the National Guard at home!
Katrina Deployments Add to Military Strain
In this handout photo provided by the U.S. Navy, Sailors and Marines of the multipurpose amphibious assault ship USS Bataan and Helicopter Sea Control Squadron 28 in the Gulf of Mexico, load a MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter with water to deliver to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast, Friday, Sept. 2. 2005. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy, Journalist Seaman Joanne DeVera)
WASHINGTON, AP - President Bush's decision to put thousands of active-duty soldiers and Marines on Hurricane Katrina relief duty adds a new dimension to the enormous strain on the military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Senior military officers said Saturday they have plenty of troops to handle their wide range of missions at home and abroad, and they discounted suggestions that the urgent deployment of soldiers and Marines to the Gulf Coast would interfere with the rotation of combat troops in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We can handle the overseas war-fight commitment and still defend our homeland and support the Department of Homeland Security simultaneously," Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told a Pentagon news conference.
"People say, 'Aren't you stretched too far, aren't you about ready to run out?' There are 200,000 citizen soldier National Guardsmen left with the right kind of skills around this nation" to help with hurricane relief, Blum said.
The active-duty military has about 1.2 million people in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, of which about 140,000 are in Iraq and nearly 20,000 in Afghanistan. That leaves hundreds of thousands not committed directly to fighting wars, but many of them perform a range of staff functions in the Pentagon and other government agencies and at military headquarters across the nation and around the world.
Lt. Gen. Joseph Inge, deputy commander of Northern Command, told reporters at the Pentagon on Saturday that the Katrina mission would have no negative effect on executing the missions in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"Absolutely not," Inge said.
The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record) of Missouri, said that while he has been personally assured by Pentagon officials that the Gulf Coast rescue and recovery effort can be accomplished without disrupting plans for Iraq rotations, he remains worried about the future.
"This effort will clearly increase the overall burden on our military," Skelton said Friday. "The Defense Department's civilian leaders must look at the impact of this and future crises and the ongoing war on the military's future readiness and overall state."
Inge said the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, which already has several infantry battalions in Afghanistan and Iraq or preparing to go there, began dispatching about 2,500 soldiers, including infantry, and support troops, to Louisiana on Saturday. They included most of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.
A spokeswoman for the 82nd Airborne, Maj. Amy Hannah, said later that at least 5,000 would be sent from her division. Another spokesman there, Spc. John French, said 5,000 would be sent over the next few days.
The 1st Cavalry Division, from Fort Hood, Texas, is sending about 2,700 soldiers to the Gulf Coast, and the Marines are sending about 2,000 from bases in California and North Carolina. The 4th Infantry Division, which is getting ready to begin a new deployment to Iraq, already has sent some helicopters to Louisiana.
The Air Force is flying missions to the Gulf daily, and the Navy has numerous ships off the Gulf Coast.
Blum said the National Guard was going to send 10,000 more troops than previously planned, bringing the total number of Guardsman involved in the relief effort to 40,000 within the next several days. He said there would be 33,000 in Louisiana and Mississippi by the end of Saturday.
In addition to deployments in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the National Guard is heavily committed to the conflict in Iraq. The Army National Guard has 39,800 soldiers in Iraq and the Air National Guard has about 900. That represents about 30 percent of all U.S. forces in Iraq. Thousands also are operating in Kuwait.
Blum said the only Guard unit he knows of that has been pulled off the list to rotate into Iraq is a small unit whose members live in Gulfport, Miss., which was heavily battered by Hurricane Katrina.
"Many of them, we can't find them," Blum said.
A Guard infantry unit that was training at Camp Shelby, Miss., when Katrina struck has been kept off disaster relief duty so that it can deploy to Iraq as scheduled, Blum said.Saturday, September 03, 2005
MUGABE IS A PARANOID MEGALOMANIAC AND NEEDS TO BE SHOT
Here, I'll say it: Robert Mugabe has gutted what was only a decade ago the most prosperous and peaceful country in all Africa, and turned it into a complete stinking shithole that may never recover. He needs a bullet between his eyes.
Zimbabwe: CIA Is Behind Kidman Movie
HARARE, Zimbabwe - President Robert Mugabe's government has attacked the suspense thriller "The Interpreter," starring Nicole Kidman, claiming it is part of a propaganda campaign by the CIA that shows "Zimbabwe's enemies did not rest."
The Herald, the government-controlled daily newspaper, also linked the film to efforts by Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer last week to have Mugabe indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
In the film, Kidman plays a United Nations interpreter who overhears two people discussing an apparent assassination plot against the president of a fictional Republic of Matobo. The president, Edmond Zuwanie, is accused of ethnic cleansing and plans to address the U.N. General Assembly in an attempt to forestall indictment by the International Criminal Court.
Two months after Zimbabwe's official censorship board approved the film's screening here, acting Minister of Information and Publicity Chen Chimutengwende told The Herald in Saturday's editions: "The CIA-backed film showed that Zimbabwe's enemies did not rest."
Zuwanie and the fictional country he leads have been interpreted as caricatures of Mugabe and Zimbabwe.
"The film just shows how careful we have to be and that we should know our enemy is very powerful," Chimutengwende said. "We should plan to counter Euro-American imperialism. Our enemies have resources and are determined to wage their war on the economic, social and cultural fronts."
The film ran for two weeks in early July at Harare cinemas and is available here on video.
Zimbabwe has become an international outcast in recent years because of repression and economic mismanagement by Mugabe's regime. The government claims Western sanctions and boycotts are to blame for the country's looming financial collapse.Saturday, September 03, 2005
IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT - FEELING SECURE IN THE HOMELAND YET?
Focus on terrorism delays FEMA response to Katrina
WASHINGTON, Knight Ridder - The chaotic government response to Hurricane Katrina, which even
President Bush said was "not acceptable," was the inevitable result of federal policies emphasizing protection from terrorist attacks at the expense of preparing for far more common natural disasters, state emergency officials and other experts said Friday.
As hurricane survivors died along roadsides and at shelters where they were told to take refuge, or pleaded for food and water or a ride to an overcrowded shelter, members of Congress called for hearings to find out how the response to this disaster could have failed so badly when the nation has spent unprecedented billions of dollars in the name of homeland security.
But the answer may not be much of a mystery. The
Federal Emergency Management Agency, once a powerful independent agency focused solely on responding to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters that occur on average about four times a month, was placed within the huge Department of
Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Department of Homeland Security sends $1.1 billion each year to states to combat terrorism, but just $180 million to help prepare for disasters such as Katrina. Much of the terrorism grant money is given under conditions that specifically exclude spending it on items or personnel that would be used in responding to hazards other than terrorism.
Since 1995, the federal government has declared 562 major disasters. All were natural disasters except two terrorist attacks: Oklahoma City in 1995 and the 9-11 attacks.
The hearings and investigations will likely show that the disaster response expertise of FEMA was badly eroded once it became part of the terrorism-fighting bureaucracy of Homeland Security, state officials and some former FEMA officials said.
"There are no emergency managers at any level in the Department of Homeland Security. It's all law enforcement," said George Haddow, former FEMA deputy chief of staff. "It doesn't look like anyone's in charge to me because the system has been deconstructed."
Clark Kent Ervin, the former Bush-appointed Homeland Security inspector general, said FEMA disaster officials frequently expressed concerns that not enough attention was being focused on natural disasters. Apparently, he said, nothing happened.
Ervin said the red flags raised by FEMA employees had the force of logic.
"It does make sense to say that it's more likely, thank God, to have a natural disaster than a terrorist one," Ervin said. "There's a question mark: Is that agency (FEMA) in a primarily terrorism-related department nimble enough" to handle a natural disaster?
State emergency management directors share this concern.
"We've really seen some degradation of capabilities in this country," said Trina Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association, which represents those state directors.
Homeland Security officials defended their agency's response to Katrina and its ability to combat terrorists and Mother Nature. Spokesman Marc Short said that while more state funding is restricted to fighting terrorism, the equipment and expertise gained by terrorism response exercises are often applicable in natural disasters.
But Sen. Jon Kyl (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that oversees homeland security, said he would hold hearings into the response to Katrina and expressed concerns about the nation's ability to respond to a terrorist attack.
"I am not at all confident, based on what we've seen, that we'd have the ability to handle that," he said.
The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee also announced it would investigate the inadequate response to Katrina. In a joint statement, Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the committee chairwoman and ranking member, said, "It is increasingly clear that serious shortcomings in preparedness and response have hampered relief efforts at a critical time."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called on the
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to conduct oversight hearings once the relief effort is completed. He specifically charged the committee with examining the response of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA.
"Every state and community has warehouses of hazmat (hazardous materials) suits, personal protection equipment, bomb detectors, bomb diffusers, radiological detectors. And some of that really wonderful equipment is needed," Sheets said. "But we've also got local officials where their emergency operations center is an office somewhere with a phone and a fax machine."
Several members of Congress are questioning the wisdom of rolling FEMA into Homeland Security.
"FEMA should not be hindered by a top-heavy bureaucracy when they are needed to act swiftly to save lives," said Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record), R-Fla. He said he plans to introduce legislation when Congress reconvenes to pull FEMA out of Homeland Security.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said he voted to put FEMA under Homeland Security - and now questions that decision after watching all the chaos.
"What's happening is inexcusable," Pascrell said Friday. "God knows how many people we're going to find who have died because of starvation or died because they have not received proper medical help."
FEMA Director Michael Brown defended his agency's efforts against a barrage of criticisms and video reports showing slow response.
"I understand that there are pockets where people have not gotten the basics, and we're working with the Coast Guard to get those," Brown told CBS's "The Early Show." "But I'm telling you, we have those supplies."
As federal officials tried to get some control over the deteriorating situation in New Orleans, chaos was being replaced with bureaucratic rules that inhibited private relief organizations' efforts.
"We've tried desperately to rescue 250 people trapped in a Salvation Army facility. They've been trapped in there since the flood came in. Many are on dialysis machines," said Maj. George Hood, national communications secretary for the relief organization.
"Yesterday we rented big fan boats to pull them out and the National Guard would not let us enter the city," he said. The reason: a new plan to evacuate the embattled city grid by grid - and the Salvation Army's facility didn't fall in the right grid that day, Hood said in a telephone interview from Jackson, Miss.
"No, it doesn't make sense," he said.
The Salvation Army, along with the
American Red Cross and other relief organizations, is supplying meals to refugees in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. But Hood said good supply lines to keep relief stations stocked with bottled water, food and gas still haven't been established.
"The problem is we're running out of food and supplies, and getting replacement food and supplies in here is a big problem," he said. "The infrastructure is clogged."
With much federal help only now beginning to arrive or still promised as being on the way, Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), D-La., called on President Bush to appoint within the next 24 hours a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response to Hurricane Katrina.
"The American people have continued to look to FEMA to operate as it did in years past. There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible. Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach," Landrieu said. "In order to resolve this dire situation, we must return to the successful tactics of the past. The suffering has gone on long enough. Now is the time for action."Saturday, September 03, 2005
WHEN ANIMALS ARE STARVING, THEY EAT EACH OTHER
Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' miserable shelter
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - With the rotors of President George W. Bush's helicopter sounding overhead, New Orleans' poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.
Ending days of abandonment since the hurricane struck on Monday, the U.S. National Guard handed out military rations and a bottle of water to thousands of evacuees -- the first proper meal most had eaten in days.
But as the masses lined up outside, herded by Army troops toting machine guns, inside the convention center where these people slept since Monday was the stench of death and decay.
Leroy Fouchea, 42, waited in the sweltering heat for an hour to get his ration -- his first proper food since Monday -- and immediately handed it over to a sickly friend.
He then offered to show reporters the dead bodies of a man in a wheelchair, a young man who he said he dragged inside just hours earlier, and the limp forms of two infants, one just four months old, the other six months old.
"They died right here, in America, waiting for food," Fouchea said as he walked toward Hall D, where the bodies were put to get them out of the searing heat.
He said people were let die and left without food simply because they were poor and that the evacuation effort earlier concentrated on the French Quarter of the city. "Because that's where the money is," he spat.
A National Guardsman refused entry.
"It doesn't need to be seen, it's a make-shift morgue in there," he told a Reuters photographer. "We're not letting anyone in there anymore. If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to
Iraq."
As rations were finally doled out here on the day
President Bush visited the devastated city, an elderly white woman and her husband collapsed from the heat.
"I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday.
Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.
"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."
Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.
Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children.
She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center.
"She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."
Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the abuse and murder of children, but they could not be independently verified.
Many complained bitterly about why they received so little for so many days, and they had harsh words for Bush.
"I really don't know what to say about President Bush," said Richard Dunbar, 60, a Vietnam veteran. "He showed no lack of haste when he wanted to go to Iraq, but for his own people right here in Louisiana, we get only lip service."
One young man said he was not looking forward to another night in the convention center and wondered when conditions would improve. "It's been like a jail in there," he said. "We've got murderers, rapists, killers, thieves. We've got it all."Friday, September 02, 2005
FEEL SECURE IN THE HOMELAND YET?
An AP Essay: Is This Happening in America?
By JIM LITKE, Associated Press
Image after image of unrelenting sorrow, layered one atop the other like a deck of haunting cards. A baby held aloft, inches above a sea of desperate faces, gasping for air. The dead left where they've fallen, in plain view, robbed of even the simple dignity of a shroud. Survivors waiting, then begging, then fighting, finally, over food and water.
Here.
While the images of natural disasters and man-made ones alike, from Sri Lanka or Baghdad, cause despair, the pictures from New Orleans inspire not just helplessness, but disbelief. The richest, most powerful nation in the world can build schools, hospitals and shelters halfway around the globe, but it can't provide the basic necessities for its own days after a disaster that everybody saw coming?
Here?
Usually, we shudder, change the channel or turn the page, awaiting better news. But there is something too compelling about these pictures. The distance between us and the people in them has been narrowed, rendered uncomfortably close, and not just for those who are family, friends or neighbors. We recognize them. We all see people like them.
Here.
Authorities can't make the waters that did that retreat. They can't begin to rebuild the levee or the homes and businesses made uninhabitable, at least not now. They will never be able to restore much of what was washed away in the flood.
But if a reporter can interview a man standing outside a looted drugstore, and record his reluctance at having to go inside and steal pads for incontinence, why couldn't someone get medical supplies to the people huddled at the Superdome or the convention center in time, or the buses promised to evacuate them?
There are more questions than answers, and will be for years to come. That's the nature of disaster, and its aftermath. They expose our fragility, overwhelm our best intentions, mock our attempts to impose the sense of calm and order that prevails when life proceeds according to some rough plan.
Yet, ultimately, that's what is most unsettling about the constant stream of images: The suffering goes on not just for hours, but for days after we should have and could have ended it. And for all the commissions, reports and bravado that passes for preparedness, we didn't. It was a hand we never expected to be dealt.
Here.
There will be time enough, too, to assess blame, for politicians to point fingers, find and fire those deemed accountable. And maybe even to figure out how a handful of Southeast Asian governments, whose economies, armies and emergency resources could all be folded comfortably several times inside those of the United States, responded to a tsunami much larger and fiercer than Hurricane Katrina with swiftness and efficiency, and we could not. And so the frustration builds, not so much over what happened, but what did not.
Here.
In the meantime, the disturbing images keep rolling in, interrupted now and then by more hopeful ones. The trucks, jeeps, buses and helicopters so scarce the past few days are out moving in force. Police and National Guardsmen are on the streets, rescue workers are getting in place. The babies in the latest pictures are contentedly emptying bottles, pallets filled with water and food are being unloaded by human chains. One administration official after another turns up on the screen to offer reassurances and soothing words.
But the damage has been done, and it's no longer limited to the lives lost and ruined, or the property destroyed. Those are things, sadly enough, that can be totaled up over time.
Much harder to measure is the cost of all those searing images burned into the national conscience, and what they've done to the sense of security that was our last refuge when disasters wreaked havoc, and then, unnecessary suffering, in distant lands — the certainty that it couldn't happen here.
Now we know better.Friday, September 02, 2005
THE PROBLEM IS THAT YOU PESKY REPORTERS KEEP TAKING PICTURES
The big disconnect on New Orleans - The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views from the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.
But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. -- 2:11)
# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin's angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)
# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you.
# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.
Uncollected corpses
# Brown: That's not been reported to me, so I'm not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I'm just not going to speculate.
# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, 'People are dying in front of us' -- 4:36 )
# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy -- that's how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I'm like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just -- I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He's dead.
Hospital evacuations
# Brown: I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.
# CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It's gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's over 200 patients still here remaining. ...We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly ... where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells -- 4:45 )
# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty rough.(Mayor's video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix -- 1:03)
Violence and civil unrest
# Brown: I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that.
# CNN's Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they're losing control of the city. We're now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn't safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire -- 2:12)
The federal response:
# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.
# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.
# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.
# Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there.
# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.
Security
# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty's rant on the government's 'bungled' response -- 0:57)
# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.
# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.
# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.Friday, September 02, 2005
RAY NAGIN TELLS LIKE IT IS
New Orleans mayor lashes out at feds - Nagin: 'They are spinning and people are dying'
Left: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, shown here before the hurricane hit, says the feds are "feeding people a line of bull."
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- As his city skidded deeper into chaos, New Orleans' embattled mayor accused federal officials of dragging their feet while people are dying in deplorable conditions.
Mayor Ray Nagin's voice cracked with anger and anguish Thursday night in an interview with New Orleans radio station WWL-AM. (Hear the mayor tell feds to 'get off their asses' -- 12:09.)
"We're getting reports and calls that [are] breaking my heart from people saying, 'I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out.' And that's happening as we speak." (Transcript of radio interview with Nagin)
Nagin said the time has long passed for federal authorities to act on their promises.
"You mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on man," he said.
"I need reinforcements," he pleaded. "I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. This is a national disaster. (Hear Nagin's angry demand for more troops -- 1:00)
"I've talked directly with the president," he said. "I've talked to the head of the homeland security. I've talked to everybody under the sun."
After scheduled visits to devastated areas in Alabama and Mississippi, President Bush was expected to fly over the hurricane-ravaged city on Friday.
As he left the White House, Bush said, "The results are not acceptable. I'm headed down there right now."
He said he was "looking forward" to thanking people involved in disaster-relief efforts and assuring victims that short-term and long-term help is on the way.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday that he thinks the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies have done a "magnificent job" under difficult circumstances, citing their "courage" and "ingenuity."
Insisting that aid is coming as fast as possible, Chertoff said, "You can't fly helicopters in a hurricane. You can't drive trucks in a hurricane."
FEMA Director Michael Brown told CNN on Friday, "My heart breaks. What we're doing, we're ramping up." (See video of CNN asking why FEMA is clueless about conditions -- 2:11 )
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she hoped the amount of needed aid would begin arriving Friday.
"I'm not going to stand here and play the blame game," Blanco said. "We have a problem. Let's get to the problem."
The tempers of those waiting for food, water and relief from relentless heat continued to boil Friday as they waited for help to arrive, some in shocking conditions that were only getting worse. At least one large explosion rocked the city early Friday.
In the radio interview, Nagin's frustration was palpable.
"I've been out there man. I flew in these helicopters, been in the crowds talking to people crying, don't know where their relatives are. I've done it all man, and I'll tell you man, I keep hearing that it's coming. This is coming, that is coming. And my answer to that today is BS, where is the beef? Because there is no beef in this city. "
Nagin said, "Get every Greyhound bus in the country and get them moving."
Nagin called for a moratorium on press conferences "until the resources are in this city."
"They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying," he said.
"I don't know whether it's the governor's problem, or it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get ... on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now," Nagin said.
"They thinking small, man, and this is a major, major deal," he said.
"Get off your asses and let's do something."
The mayor said except for a few "knuckleheads," the looting is the result of desperate people just trying to find food and water to survive.
Nagin blamed the outbreak of crime and violence on drug addicts who are cut off from their drug supplies and wandering the city "looking to take the edge off their jones."
Nagin is in his first term as mayor. He was sworn in May 2002. A Democrat, he was a popular reform candidate who promised to clean up the city's political corruption. He's a former cable company executive.
TRANSCRIPT OF RAY NAGIN INTERVIEW
(CNN) -- New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the slow pace of federal and state relief efforts in an expletive-laced interview with local radio station WWL-AM.
The following is a transcript of WWL correspondent Garland Robinette's interview with Nagin on Thursday night. Robinette asked the mayor about his conversation with President Bush:
NAGIN: I told him we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice. And that I have been all around this city, and I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we're outmanned in just about every respect. (Listen to the mayor express his frustration in this video -- 12:09)
You know the reason why the looters got out of control? Because we had most of our resources saving people, thousands of people that were stuck in attics, man, old ladies. ... You pull off the doggone ventilator vent and you look down there and they're standing in there in water up to their freaking necks.
And they don't have a clue what's going on down here. They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn -- excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed.
WWL: Did you say to the president of the United States, "I need the military in here"?
NAGIN: I said, "I need everything."
Now, I will tell you this -- and I give the president some credit on this -- he sent one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done, and his name is [Lt.] Gen. [Russel] Honore.
And he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving. And he's getting some stuff done.
They ought to give that guy -- if they don't want to give it to me, give him full authority to get the job done, and we can save some people.
WWL: What do you need right now to get control of this situation?
NAGIN: I need reinforcements, I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man. We ain't talking about -- you know, one of the briefings we had, they were talking about getting public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out here.
I'm like, "You got to be kidding me. This is a national disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans."
That's -- they're thinking small, man. And this is a major, major, major deal. And I can't emphasize it enough, man. This is crazy.
I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people over at the convention center. It's bursting at the seams. The poor people in Plaquemines Parish. ... We don't have anything, and we're sharing with our brothers in Plaquemines Parish.
It's awful down here, man.
WWL: Do you believe that the president is seeing this, holding a news conference on it but can't do anything until [Louisiana Gov.] Kathleen Blanco requested him to do it? And do you know whether or not she has made that request?
NAGIN: I have no idea what they're doing. But I will tell you this: You know, God is looking down on all this, and if they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying and they're dying by the hundreds, I'm willing to bet you.
We're getting reports and calls that are breaking my heart, from people saying, "I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. The water is up to my neck. I don't think I can hold out." And that's happening as we speak.
You know what really upsets me, Garland? We told everybody the importance of the 17th Street Canal issue. We said, "Please, please take care of this. We don't care what you do. Figure it out."
WWL: Who'd you say that to?
NAGIN: Everybody: the governor, Homeland Security, FEMA. You name it, we said it.
And they allowed that pumping station next to Pumping Station 6 to go under water. Our sewage and water board people ... stayed there and endangered their lives.
And what happened when that pumping station went down, the water started flowing again in the city, and it starting getting to levels that probably killed more people.
In addition to that, we had water flowing through the pipes in the city. That's a power station over there.
So there's no water flowing anywhere on the east bank of Orleans Parish. So our critical water supply was destroyed because of lack of action.
WWL: Why couldn't they drop the 3,000-pound sandbags or the containers that they were talking about earlier? Was it an engineering feat that just couldn't be done?
NAGIN: They said it was some pulleys that they had to manufacture. But, you know, in a state of emergency, man, you are creative, you figure out ways to get stuff done.
Then they told me that they went overnight, and they built 17 concrete structures and they had the pulleys on them and they were going to drop them.
I flew over that thing yesterday, and it's in the same shape that it was after the storm hit. There is nothing happening. And they're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here.
WWL: If some of the public called and they're right, that there's a law that the president, that the federal government can't do anything without local or state requests, would you request martial law?
NAGIN: I've already called for martial law in the city of New Orleans. We did that a few days ago.
WWL: Did the governor do that, too?
NAGIN: I don't know. I don't think so.
But we called for martial law when we realized that the looting was getting out of control. And we redirected all of our police officers back to patrolling the streets. They were dead-tired from saving people, but they worked all night because we thought this thing was going to blow wide open last night. And so we redirected all of our resources, and we hold it under check.
I'm not sure if we can do that another night with the current resources.
And I am telling you right now: They're showing all these reports of people looting and doing all that weird stuff, and they are doing that, but people are desperate and they're trying to find food and water, the majority of them.
Now you got some knuckleheads out there, and they are taking advantage of this lawless -- this situation where, you know, we can't really control it, and they're doing some awful, awful things. But that's a small majority of the people. Most people are looking to try and survive.
And one of the things people -- nobody's talked about this. Drugs flowed in and out of New Orleans and the surrounding metropolitan area so freely it was scary to me, and that's why we were having the escalation in murders. People don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it.
You have drug addicts that are now walking around this city looking for a fix, and that's the reason why they were breaking in hospitals and drugstores. They're looking for something to take the edge off of their jones, if you will.
And right now, they don't have anything to take the edge off. And they've probably found guns. So what you're seeing is drug-starving crazy addicts, drug addicts, that are wrecking havoc. And we don't have the manpower to adequately deal with it. We can only target certain sections of the city and form a perimeter around them and hope to God that we're not overrun.
WWL: Well, you and I must be in the minority. Because apparently there's a section of our citizenry out there that thinks because of a law that says the federal government can't come in unless requested by the proper people, that everything that's going on to this point has been done as good as it can possibly be.
NAGIN: Really?
WWL: I know you don't feel that way.
NAGIN: Well, did the tsunami victims request? Did it go through a formal process to request?
You know, did the Iraqi people request that we go in there? Did they ask us to go in there? What is more important?
And I'll tell you, man, I'm probably going get in a whole bunch of trouble. I'm probably going to get in so much trouble it ain't even funny. You probably won't even want to deal with me after this interview is over.
WWL: You and I will be in the funny place together.
NAGIN: But we authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq lickety-quick. After 9/11, we gave the president unprecedented powers lickety-quick to take care of New York and other places.
Now, you mean to tell me that a place where most of your oil is coming through, a place that is so unique when you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world, everybody's eyes light up -- you mean to tell me that a place where you probably have thousands of people that have died and thousands more that are dying every day, that we can't figure out a way to authorize the resources that we need? Come on, man.
You know, I'm not one of those drug addicts. I am thinking very clearly.
And I don't know whose problem it is. I don't know whether it's the governor's problem. I don't know whether it's the president's problem, but somebody needs to get their ass on a plane and sit down, the two of them, and figure this out right now.
WWL: What can we do here?
NAGIN: Keep talking about it.
WWL: We'll do that. What else can we do?
NAGIN: Organize people to write letters and make calls to their congressmen, to the president, to the governor. Flood their doggone offices with requests to do something. This is ridiculous.
I don't want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don't do another press conference until the resources are in this city. And then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can't even count.
Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.
WWL: I'll say it right now, you're the only politician that's called and called for arms like this. And if -- whatever it takes, the governor, president -- whatever law precedent it takes, whatever it takes, I bet that the people listening to you are on your side.
NAGIN: Well, I hope so, Garland. I am just -- I'm at the point now where it don't matter. People are dying. They don't have homes. They don't have jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same in this time.
(long silence)
WWL: We're both pretty speechless here.
NAGIN: Yeah, I don't know what to say. I got to go.
WWL: OK. Keep in touch. Keep in touch.
Friday, September 02, 2005
WHAT YOU WANNA BET DUBYA JUST 'FORGETS' TO ASK UNTIL ITS FAR TOO LATE?
Annan offers emergency supplies to help US cope with Katrina disaster
Fri Sep 2, 2:07 PM ET
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The United Nations said it was ready to send water storage tanks, water purification tablets, generators, tents, planes and other emergency supplies to help the United States in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe told reporters that the UN had set up an inter-agency task force chaired by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (COHA) to determine resources available at the moment to assist US relief efforts in anticipation of a possible request from the US government.
The task force would comprise representatives from the United Nations Children's Fund, the
World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' office and the World Food Program, she added.
Those agencies are ready to supply water storage tanks, water purification tablets, high-energy biscuits, generators, planes, tents and other emergency supplies along with experienced staff members, Okabe said.
Earlier, the UN chief, who is currently vacationing in Sweden, said through his press office: "I know that I speak for the whole world in offering them my heartfelt sympathy and any assistance that the United Nations can give."
"It's now clear that Hurricane Katrina has caused a huge disaster. The damage is far worse than any of us imagined at first," the UN chief said.
US Senator David Vitter said that the death toll from Hurricane Katrina could top 10,000 in the state of Louisiana alone.
"The sheer size of this emergency makes it possible that we can supplement the American response with supplies from other countries, or with experience we have gained in other relief operations," Annan said.
In Geneva, a UN spokeswoman said that UN disaster assessment and coordination teams specialized in natural disasters had been placed on alert in a number of countries and were ready to intervene in the hurricane-hit areas if Washington asked.
"A worldwide alert has been sent to all national teams for natural disaster coordination and evaluation," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters.
The six-to-eight-person specialist teams comprise disaster experts -- including doctors and geologists -- with the closest ones to the United States able to deploy within six hours.
UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland earlier wrote to US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton to offer help in Hurricane Katrina's wake and has been encouraging donors to contribute to non-governmental organizations active in helping the victims, Byrs added.
Several thousand people were feared killed in the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama after they were lashed by Hurricane Katrina on Monday.Friday, September 02, 2005
YEAH, WE'RE PRETTY FREAKED OUT BY IT OVER HERE AS WELL
World stunned as US struggles with Katrina
LONDON (Reuters) - The world has watched amazed as the planet's only superpower struggles with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with some saying the chaos has exposed flaws and deep divisions in American society.
World leaders and ordinary citizens have expressed sympathy with the people of the southern United States whose lives were devastated by the hurricane and the flooding that followed.
But many have also been shocked by the images of disorder beamed around the world -- looters roaming the debris-strewn streets and thousands of people gathered in New Orleans waiting for the authorities to provide food, water and other aid.
"Anarchy in the USA" declared Britain's best-selling newspaper The Sun.
"Apocalypse Now" headlined Germany's Handelsblatt daily.
The pictures of the catastrophe -- which has killed hundreds and possibly thousands -- have evoked memories of crises in the world's poorest nations such as last year's tsunami in Asia, which left more than 230,000 people dead or missing.
But some view the response to those disasters more favorably than the lawless aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering," said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
"Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."
SINKING INTO ANARCHY
Many newspapers highlighted criticism of local and state authorities and of
President Bush. Some compared the sputtering relief effort with the massive amounts of money and resources poured into the war in
Iraq.
"A modern metropolis sinking in water and into anarchy -- it is a really cruel spectacle for a champion of security like Bush," France's left-leaning Liberation newspaper said.
"(Al Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden, nice and dry in his hideaway, must be killing himself laughing."
A female employee at a multinational firm in
South Korea said it may have been no accident the U.S. was hit.
"Maybe it was punishment for what it did to Iraq, which has a man-made disaster, not a natural disaster," said the woman, who did not want to be named as she has an American manager.
"A lot of the people I work with think this way. We spoke about it just the other day," she said.
Commentators noted the victims of the hurricane were overwhelmingly African Americans, too poor to flee the region as the hurricane loomed unlike some of their white neighbors.
New Orleans ranks fifth in the United States in terms of African American population and 67 percent of the city's residents are black.
"In one of the poorest states in the country, where black people earn half as much as white people, this has taken on a racial dimension," said a report in Britain's Guardian daily.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, in a veiled criticism of U.S. political thought, said the disaster showed the need for a strong state that could help poor people.
"You see in this example that even in the 21st century you need the state, a good functioning state, and I hope that for all these people, these poor people, that the Americans will do their best," he told reporters at a
European Union meeting in Newport, Wales.
David Fordham, 33, a hospital anesthetist speaking at a London underground rail station, said he had spent time in America and was not surprised the country had struggled to cope.
"Maybe they just thought they could sit it out and everything would be okay," he said.
"It's unbelievable though -- the TV images -- and your heart goes out to them."
(With reporting by Reuters bureaux around the world)Friday, September 02, 2005
KING GEORGE - A CONSISTENT PATTERN OF MISMANAGEMENT AND CALLOUSED DISREGARD
Way past time to throw this smirking chimp and his fatcat buddies out of office.
Bush 'buried' critical report - Bush wants more tax cuts
(BBC UK, 5/29/03 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2946552.stm)
The Bush administration reportedly buried a report commissioned by the US Treasury which predicted a budget deficit of over $44,000bn and called for tax rises.
In a front-page story Britain's Financial Times said the report, which advocated tax rises, was left out of February's budget report as the White House lobbied for $350bn in tax cuts.
Those cuts, the opposite of what was reportedly recommended in the Treasury study, were signed into law by President George W Bush on Wednesday.
The newspaper said the study was "the most comprehensive assessment of how the US government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the 'baby boom' generation's future healthcare and retirement costs".
"It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66% across-the-board income tax increase," the FT said.
The Bush administration has been heavily criticised for the tax cuts - which came on top of a 10-year $1,650bn in tax cuts in 2001 - as the US economy stagnates and unemployment rises.
Reports ignored
The FT reported that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was sacked from the administration in December, commissioned the paper.
Two leading US Treasury economists headed the study - Kent Smetters, former Treasury deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, and Jagdessh Gokhale, a Treasury consultant at the time.
In transcripts of interviews with them published by the FT, they disagree over whether the report was meant to be included in the budget report.
Mr Smetters said the report was "never meant to be a Treasury study. It was meant to be some internal thinking... on how to reform the budget".
He was contradicted by Mr Gokhale.
"When we were conducting the study my impression was that it was slated to appear (in the budget)," he said.
But Mr Gokhale added that it had been common practise for US administrations to ignore similar critical reports over the past decade.
Friday, September 02, 2005
THOUSANDS OF WELL FED AND WATERED TROOPS SIT ON THEIR ASSES AT KEESLER AFB
When I was stationed at Keesler back in '79, I was sent out to help the locals clean up the day after a hurricane hit, the very next morning. How come the thousands of able-bodied, trained airmen, who have food, water, shelter and sanitation plus a working runway aren't being mobilized to aid in rescue and relief work??
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Military Bases Assess Damage; Keesler AFB Hardest Hit
By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31, 2005 – Military bases in the path of Hurricane Katrina and its resulting floodwaters were continuing to assess damage today while reaching out to affected servicemembers and their families to provide support.
Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., appears to have received the heaviest damage after taking a direct hit from the Category 4 hurricane.
Base officials started assessment and recovery operations Aug. 30 and by evening, provided the first hot meals to the 6,000 military members, civilians and family members who weathered the storm at the base, all escaping without injury.
"Initial reports show drastic damage to the industrial and housing areas," said Maj. Ray Mottley, commander of the 81st Civil Engineering Squadron. A complete damage assessment, to be conducted with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is expected to provide a more complete picture.
About 50 percent of the base was under water, and the commissary, base exchange and some base housing units were flooded with more than six feet of water, Mottley reported. Generators were in place to keep critical facilities operating, but Mottley said the base hospital and much of the base remains without power.
However, Keesler's airfield remains operational during daylight hours, and it has a fully operational sewage system and access to drinking water, Mottley said.
In the meantime, base officials are advising evacuees not to return to the base area until directed to do so, probably not before Sept. 2, and to monitor the base Web site at www.keesler.af.mil or call the Air Force Personnel Center at (800) 435-9941 for updates and instructions. Officials also advise Keesler residents who are able to do so to contact their families to let them know they're OK.
Airmen scheduled to report to Keesler for technical training are advised not to proceed with their plans until further notice. A stop-movement order remains in effect for Keesler, the 361st Training Squadron's Detachment 2 at Pensacola, Fla., and the 366th Training Squadron's Detachment 6 at Gulfport, Miss., Air Force officials said.
Six other Air Force bases are now back to normal operations, officials reported. These are Eglin Air Force Base, Hurlburt Field and Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla.; Barksdale Air Force Base, La.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.
Navy officials were still assessing damage to bases in the hurricane-ravaged area: Naval Air Station New Orleans, La.; Naval Support Activity New Orleans; Naval Station Pascagoula, Miss.; Naval Construction Battalion Center Gulfport, Miss.; and Naval Air Station Pensacola, Fla.
Navy Lt. Trey Brown, a Navy spokesman, said evacuation orders in place for installations in both New Orleans and Gulfport were expected to be extended today for New Orleans.
A toll-free number the Navy set up Aug. 30 for affected sailors and their families "is already getting a lot of calls," Brown said. The line, staffed around the clock by active-duty Navy volunteers, will provide callers help regarding the status of Navy family members.
Nearly 700 Marines and almost 1,400 of their family members were evacuated from Marine Forces Reserve Headquarters New Orleans, leaving only essential personnel behind. The headquarters staff was organizing today to support the Marine Corps' response to the hurricane relief effort, according to Maj. Jason Johnston, a Headquarters Marine Corps spokesman.
The status of historic Jackson Barracks in New Orleans, home of the Louisiana National Guard, could not immediately be confirmed, due to intermittent phone service to the city. However, almost 3,800 Louisiana Army and Air Guard members were on duty to remove debris, provide security and shelter, distribute water, food and ice, and offer medical and law-enforcement support, National Guard Bureau officials said.
Contact information for servicemembers and their families are:
Navy: (877) 414-5358; www.navy.mil Air Force: (800) 435-9941; www.keesler.af.milFriday, September 02, 2005
FLUSHING OUT THE BIG EASY WON'T BE EASY
Pumping water out could take six months, engineers say
By Ralph Vartabedian, Sydney Morning Herald
Draining the billions of litres of water from flooded New Orleans could take three to six months - much longer than first thought.
"There is a lot of water here," said Colonel Richard Wagenaar, the Army Corps of Engineers' senior officer in New Orleans, who is directing recovery efforts.
"The news cameras do not do it justice. And I'm worried the worst is yet to come."
An army engineer, Walter Baumy, said the corps was struggling with river beds clogged with loose barges and debris and could not find contractors able to manoeuvre heavy equipment into the flood zone. Communication had also proved difficult.
The water is nine metres deep in some parts of the city, covering the roofs of homes.
In the city's ninth ward, homes have shifted and floated away, leaving nothing that resembled the city grid before the storm, Colonel Wagenaar said. Hurricane Katrina has shut down an extremely complex plumbing and flood control system, with levees breached in three places.
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The 17th Street Canal pumping station is the largest single drainage pump in the world, able to move 283 cubic metres of water per second.
One of the first tasks facing the army team is trying to start up the city's 22 massive pumps - which can match the flow rates of the Colorado River - and repairing the levees.
But the engineers are not sure when they will fix breaches and are even more concerned about the condition of the pumping system, which is without electricity and could be clogged with debris.
The levee breach responsible for most of the flooding was at the 17th Street Canal, used to divert water to Lake Pontchartrain during river floods, the senior project engineer, Al Naomi, said. The wall failed when waters rose over the top and cascaded down to the base, scouring a hole that undermined the foundation.
Engineers will use helicopters to put nine-tonne sandbags and concrete highway barriers along the 60-metre breach in the 17th Street Canal.
"They'll drop sandbags from the edges and build the levee back toward the middle," said Rick Van Bruggen, a California hydrologist and levee expert.
The levees, made of dirt and reinforced concrete, are designed to hold back a 3.5-metre storm surge. But the Katrina surge was believed to have been significantly higher .
Mr Naomi complained that as the Gulf Coast braced for an intense hurricane season earlier this year a $US71 million ($94 million) cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. The cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades, he said.
Once that levee is restored, engineers will use the city's vast pumping system to move water back into the lake and the Mississippi.
But even as the city begins to dry out, Mr Van Bruggen said, the situation inside the deluged area could get worse because of pollution, disease and lawlessness.
"The storm is over, but people still don't understand the scope of the problem," Mr Van Bruggen said. "New Orleans as we've known it is gone."
Los Angeles Times, The NewYork Times, Cox NewspapersFriday, September 02, 2005
THEY TOLD YOU SO AND TOLD YOU SO, YOU FATCAT POLITICAL MORONS
Engineers' warnings and pleas for money went unheeded
By Andrew C. Revkin and Christopher Drew The New York Times
NEW YORK - The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.
Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms.
Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business.
In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system.
This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended.
"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come."
No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.
Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."
Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront.
They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said.
The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said.
Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."
They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level of ruggedness sufficient to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm.
Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, Louisiana's congressional delegation had been pushing for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration had been willing to accept.
Naomi said all the quibbling over the region's storm budget, or even over taking New Orleans to full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd.
"It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over," Naomi said. "People will be scarred for life by this event."
He said there were still no clear hints as to why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of waves roiling the lake.
Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York for this article and Christopher Drew from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cornelia Dean contributed reporting from New York.
NEW YORK The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.
Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms.
Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business.
In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system.
This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended.
"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come."
No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.
Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."
Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront.
They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said.
The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said.
Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."
They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level of ruggedness sufficient to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm.
Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, Louisiana's congressional delegation had been pushing for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration had been willing to accept.
Naomi said all the quibbling over the region's storm budget, or even over taking New Orleans to full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd.
"It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over," Naomi said. "People will be scarred for life by this event."
He said there were still no clear hints as to why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of waves roiling the lake.
Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York for this article and Christopher Drew from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cornelia Dean contributed reporting from New York.
NEW YORK The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.
Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms.
Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business.
In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system.
This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended.
"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come."
No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.
Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."
Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront.
They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said.
The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said.
Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."
They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level of ruggedness sufficient to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm.
Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, Louisiana's congressional delegation had been pushing for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration had been willing to accept.
Naomi said all the quibbling over the region's storm budget, or even over taking New Orleans to full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd.
"It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over," Naomi said. "People will be scarred for life by this event."
He said there were still no clear hints as to why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of waves roiling the lake.
Andrew C. Revkin reported from New York for this article and Christopher Drew from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cornelia Dean contributed reporting from New York.
NEW YORK The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.
Often leading the chorus was Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms.
Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in the magazine New Orleans City Business.
In an interview Wednesday night, Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system.
This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street canal, he realized that the decades-long string of near misses had ended.
"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much and then a failure has to come."
No one expected that weak spot to be along a canal that, if anything, had gotten more attention and shoring up than many other spots around the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.
Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was particularly surprising because the break occurred "along a section that was just upgraded. It did not have an earthen levee. It had a vertical concrete wall several feet thick."
Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot, or 100-meter, break in the canal through which most of the floodwaters were entering New Orleans, federal engineers decided to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront.
They are preparing to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Naomi said.
The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure out how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sand bags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city has leveled off, officials said.
Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a May report on the New Orleans-area hurricane protection plan and budget gap. The district headquarters concluded that "The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."
They also meant that there was far too little money to conduct a thorough study of how to upgrade the city's protections from the existing standard, sufficient to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity
Friday, September 02, 2005
MY PET GOAT, PART DUH
A friend just emailed me this, and I nearly fell out of my chair laughing:
Subject: Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Dear Mr. Bush:
Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.
Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?
Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!
I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?
And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!
On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.
There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.
No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!
You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com
P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.Friday, September 02, 2005
GW PLUGS NOSE AND RIDES IN WITH THE CAVALRY FOR HIS PHOTO OP - VACATION ACCOMPLISHED!
Bush Tours Katrina Damage Amid Criticism
MOBILE, Ala., Associated Press - Facing sharp criticism, President Bush opened a tour of the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast on Friday by vowing the government will restore order in lawless New Orleans and saying the $10.5 billion being approved by Congress is just a small downpayment for disaster relief.
"I'm not looking forward to this trip," Bush said as he set out for a firsthand look at the destruction in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
"It's as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by the worst kind of weapon you can imagine," the president said.
Bush began the day at the White House where he expressed unhappiness with the efforts so far to provide food and water to hurricane victims and to stop looting and lawlessness in New Orleans. "The results are not acceptable," said Bush, who rarely admits failure.
The president's comments came after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin lashed out at federal officials, telling a local radio station "they don't have a clue what's going on down here."
Even Republicans were criticizing Bush and his administration for the sluggish relief effort. "I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
He urged Bush to name former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as the White House point person for relief efforts. Rep. John Sweeney (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., also suggested Giuliani or former Secretary of State Colin Powell or retired Gen. Tommy Franks to take charge of the relief efforts.
Bush got a warm reception in Mobile from Govs. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Bob Riley of Alabama. Both praised the federal government's response. Still, Barbour said, "We've suffered a grievous blow that we won't recover from for a long while."
Standing with the governors in an airplane hangar, Bush said, "We have a responsibility to clean up this mess."
"What is not working right, we're going to make it right," Bush said. Referring to rampant looting and crime in New Orleans, Bush said, "We are going to restore order in the city of New Orleans."
"The people of this country expect there to be law and order, and we're going to work hard to get it," the president said. "In order to make sure there's less violence, we've got to get food to people."
"We'll get on top of this situation," Bush said, "and we're going to help the people that need help."
Bush was accompanied by Homeland Security Department secretary Michael Chertoff. The department, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been accused of responding sluggishly to the deadly hurricane. On the plane ride to Alabama, Bush was briefed on plans for housing the tens of thousands of people displaced by the hurricane.
"There's a lot of aid surging toward those who've been affected. Millions of gallons of water. Millions of tons of food. We're making progress about pulling people out of the Superdome," the president said.
For the first time, however, he stopped defending his administration's response and criticized it. "A lot of people are working hard to help those who've been affected. The results are not acceptable," he said. "I'm heading down there right now."
Bush hoped that his tour of the hurricane-ravaged states would boost the spirits of increasingly desperate storm victims and their tired rescuers, and his visit was aimed at tamping down the ever-angrier criticism that he has engineered a too-little, too-late response.
Four days after Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana, Bush was to get a second, closer look at the devastation wrought by the storm's 145 mph winds and 25-foot storm surge in an area stretching from just west of New Orleans to Pensacola, Fla. In all, there are 90,000 square miles under federal disaster declaration.
Friday's trip follows a 35-minute flyover of the region he took Wednesday aboard Air Force One as he headed back to Washington from his Texas ranch.
While the president was working his way along the coast, his wife, Laura, was scheduled to be nearby in Lafayette, La. Mrs. Bush was to visit the Cajundome arena to console people who took shelter there.
Amid the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, Bush has other problems besides the hurricane: Gasoline prices have soared past $3 a gallon in some places, and support is ebbing for the war in
Iraq.
So Bush has tried to respond to Katrina in a way that evokes the national goodwill he cultivated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — and that does not recall the criticism his father, former President Bush, endured after Hurricane Andrew slammed Florida in 1992.
But he began facing questions about his leadership in the crisis almost immediately. New Orleans officials, in particular, were enraged about what they said was a slow federal response.Friday, September 02, 2005
TELL IT LIKE IT IS, RAY - MEANWHILE, GW ARRANGES HIS PHOTO OP A WEEK LATE
New Orleans Mayor Fumes Over Slow Reponse
NEW ORLEANS - A day before President Bush headed to the hurricane-ravaged South, Mayor Ray Nagin lashed out at federal officials, telling a local radio station "they don't have a clue what's going on down here."
Federal officials expressed sympathy but quickly defended themselves, saying they, too, were overwhelmed by the catastrophe that hit the Gulf Coast region on Monday.
Nagin's interview Thursday night on WWL radio came as President Bush planned to visit Gulf Coast communities battered by Hurricane Katrina, a visit aimed at alleviating criticism that he engineered a too-little, too-late response.
Bush viewed the damage while flying over the region Wednesday en route to Washington after cutting short his Texas vacation by two days.
"They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn — excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed," Nagin said.
Nagin said he told Bush in a recent conversation that "we had an incredible crisis here and that his flying over in Air Force One does not do it justice ... I have been all around this city and that I am very frustrated because we are not able to marshal resources and we are outmanned in just about every respect."
In an interview Friday on NBC's "Today,"
Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown stood behind the massive federal relief effort that's under way.
"I understand the mayor's frustration. ... We have been having a continuous flow of commodities into the Superdome, there were five trucks arriving last night to feed well over 50,000 people.
"We're also diverting supplies to the convention center which I learned about yesterday and that area. ... This is an absolutely catastrophic disaster," he said.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who like Nagin is a Democrat, was less confrontational than the mayor.
"When the system goes down, this is pretty much what you get," she said on CBS' "The Early Show." "We don't get into the blame game. We just work with what we got."Friday, September 02, 2005
GW MIGHT JUST FINALLY POP IN FOR A PHOTO OP. AIN'T HE A SPESHUL WIDDLE PRECIOUS?
National Guardsmen Pour Into Louisiana
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - Thousands of National Guardsmen with food, water and weapons streamed into Louisiana on Friday to bring relief to New Orleans' suffering multitudes and put down the looting and violence. "The cavalry is and will continue to arrive," said one general.
The assurances came amid blistering criticism from the mayor and others who said the federal government had bungled the relief effort and let people die in the streets for lack of food, water or medicine.
In Washington, President Bush admitted "the results are not acceptable" and pledged to bolster the relief efforts with a personal trip to the Gulf Coast on Friday.
"We'll get on top of this situation," he said before setting out, "and we're going to help the people that need help."
Earlier Friday, an explosion at a chemical depot rocked a wide area of New Orleans and jolted residents awake, lighting up the dark sky and sending a pillar of acrid gray smoke over a ruined city awash in perhaps thousands of corpses, under siege from looters, and seething with anger and resentment.
A second large fire erupted downtown in an old retail building in a dry section of Canal Street.
There were no immediate reports of injuries. But the fires deepened the sense of total collapse in the city since Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore Monday morning.
The blast took place in a section of the city directly across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. It was about two miles from the Louisiana Superdome and less than a mile from the New Orleans Convention Center, the two spots where tens of thousands of hungry, desperate and hostile refugees awaited buses to deliver them from their misery.
Lt. Gen. Steven Blum of the National Guard said 7,000 National Guardsmen arriving in Louisiana on Friday would be dedicated to restoring order in New Orleans. He said half of them had just returned from assignments overseas and are "highly proficient in the use of lethal force." He pledged to "put down" the violence "in a quick and efficient manner."
"But they are coming here to save Louisiana citizens. The only thing we are attacking is the effects of this hurricane," he said. Blum said that a huge airlift of supplies was landing Friday and that it signaled "the cavalry is and will continue to arrive."
As he left the White House for his visit to the devastated area, Bush said 600 newly arrived military police officers would be sent to the convention center to secure the site so that food and medicine could get there.
City officials have accused the government — namely the Federal Emergency Management Agency — of being slow to recognize the magnitude of the tragedy and slow to send help.
"Get off your asses and let's do something," Mayor Ray Nagin told WWL-AM Thursday night in a rambling interview in which he cursed, yelled and ultimately burst into tears. At one point he said: "Excuse my French — everybody in America — but I am pissed."
Across the city, law and order broke down. Police officers turned in their badges. Rescuers, law officers and helicopter were shot at by storm victims. Fistfights and fires broke out Thursday at the hot and stinking Superdome as thousands of people waited in misery to board buses for the Houston Astrodome. Corpses lay out in the open in wheelchairs and in bedsheets. The looting continued.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco called the looters "hoodlums" and issued a warning to lawbreakers: Hundreds of National Guardsmen hardened on the battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.
"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."
At the Superdome, group of refugees broke through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen in a scramble to get on to the buses. And about 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at the convention center grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead, including at least seven bodies scattered outside the building.
Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.
"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."
A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.
"There's a lot of very sick people — elderly ones, infirm ones — who can't stand this heat, and there's a lot of children who don't have water and basic necessities to survive on," said Daniel Edwards, 47, outside the center. "We need to eat, or drink water at the very least."
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"I don't treat my dog like that," Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people."
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.
By midmorning Friday, despite a constant buzzing of military helicopters overhead, there was still no sign of the relief to the tens of thousands lined up outside the convention center.
"I'm trying to keep hope alive, but slowly my hope is fading," said refugee Carl Clark. "Believe it or not, these people are human. Right now they're crowded like animals. They're trying to keep their dignity. ... I don't even know what the Red Cross looks like."
Raymond Whitfield, 51, watched a National Guard truck drive by the convention center, but like most other official vehicles, it did not stop.
"The National Guard just drives around and around. I know the police, the National Guard, they got generators, so they can sleep and eat," he said.
"Look at them," he said of the men inside the truck, "they're not even sweating."
"Everybody's on the edge right now," said 28-year-old Kenya Green. "Every day, it's `The bus is coming, The bus is coming,' but still nothing. ... They don't give us no information."
Conditions were dire at the Superdome as well. By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.
The flow of refugees to the Houston Astrodome was temporarily halted overnight after about 11,000 people had arrived — less than half the estimated 23,000 people expected.
"We've actually reached capacity for the safety and comfort of the people inside there,"
American Red Cross spokeswoman Dana Allen said. She said people were "packed pretty tight" on the floor.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced that Dallas would host 25,000 more refugees at Reunion Arena and 25,000 others would relocate to a San Antonio warehouse at KellyUSA, a city-owned complex that once was home to an Air Force base. Houston estimated as many as 55,000 people who fled the hurricane were staying in area hotels.
While floodwaters in New Orleans appeared to stabilize, efforts continued to plug three breaches in the levees that protect this bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, which is wedged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to the lake.
The chief of the Louisiana State Police said he heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers — many of whom from flooded areas — turning in their badges.
"They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives," Col. Henry Whitehorn said.
Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "'Go to hell — it's every man for himself.'"
FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where gunfire had broken out.
Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.
"I'm a Christian," he said. "I feel bad going in there."
Hospitals struggled to evacuate critically ill patients who were dying for lack of oxygen, insulin or intravenous fluids. But when some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, "there are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'"Friday, September 02, 2005
NO SHIT, PART DUH
Maybe those cases of really cool "Homeland Security" designer parkas and other public relations chotchke were a bad idea... ya think?
Storm disaster fuels doubts over US terror plans
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans -- and the delay helping stranded people get out or even get water and food -- is raising doubts that U.S. cities may be ill-prepared to cope with a potentially worse disaster: a major attack.
Four years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the storm disaster marked the first time the federal government has invoked its post-September 11 response plan aimed at enhancing Washington's ability to deal with national incidents.
But as Americans reeled at images of death and desperation among the city's refugees, experts on domestic security said a nuclear or biological attack on a big U.S. city could cause greater mayhem, and unlike the storm, come without warning.
The New Orleans disaster is already viewed as an illustration of what can go wrong in an American city under siege.
"In many ways, this is a test of our national capacity," said James Carafano, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "If we can't do this 24-7-365, we aren't doing our job for preparedness."
In New Orleans, largely submerged in flood waters, the plan was unable to cope with tens of thousands of desperate refugees who could not escape the city.
"There are a whole host of factors that you can practice against. But to be honest, it's not the same as living through it," said Frank Cilluffo, director of George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute.
The relief effort has been led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security created after the 2001 attacks. President George W. Bush acknowledged on Friday that relief efforts so far had been unacceptable.
Officials said deaths in New Orleans were in the hundreds and probably in the thousands. But the human toll could be far worse if caused by terrorism, experts said.
Intelligence officials have long warned of the danger of Islamic extremists setting off a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon in a city. Attackers could also wreak havoc by destroying a nuclear power plant or a hydro-electric dam.
"If you had a nuclear explosion and fire or something biological in New Orleans, you'd have seen tens of thousands of casualties," Carafano said. "We don't really have the capacity to mobilize the medical support for catastrophic terrorism."
Only a handful of cities already hit by terrorism or catastrophic natural disaster, such as New York, Washington and Miami, have adequate emergency systems, experts said.
New Orleans' emergency responders were plagued by communications trouble that raised comparisons with problems faced by the police and firefighters who responded to the 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center.
When Katrina roared ashore, it downed transmission towers needed to maintain radio and cellular telephone contact between emergency crews. Many have had to get by with walkie-talkies.
"What were they thinking? You know a hurricane's going to knock down cell phone towers," said Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University.
He and others said cities should have spent federal homeland-security money for satellite telephones and criticized the federal government for not assigning higher funding priorities to communities facing the greatest risks.Thursday, September 01, 2005
JUST STICK YOUR HEADS IN THE SAND UNTIL NEXT ELECTION
Flushing out the ugly truth
The horror in New Orleans has exposed the nation's dirty secrets of race and poverty. Americans are ready to help. Will our leaders show the way?
Left: Milvertha Hendricks, 84, waits in the rain with other flood victims outside the convention center in New Orleans Thursday.
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Joan Walsh, Salon
Sept. 1, 2005 | The nightmare in New Orleans has a lot to tell us about poverty: the desperate poverty of the city's African-American population, of course, but also the poverty of political debate in the U.S. today. The crisis unfolding before us -- dispossession, looting, people shooting at rescue workers, the president's dim response, and now, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome -– rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country, it's excruciating to watch. But I'm especially struck by the inability of our existing political discourse to describe, let alone to solve, the intractable social problems that have come together in this flood whose proportions and portents seem almost biblical.
Ever since the first looting photos made cable news I've felt sick, like here we go again, we're going to have a new round in the culture war about the poor. Are they victims, or barbarians? If Sean Hannity's attacking them, well, I sure as hell have to defend them. When right-wing blogger Boortz is saying shoot them on sight, somebody has to say that's sick and crazy, right? Personally, with all the destruction in view on Tuesday and Wednesday, I couldn't be horrified by people stealing food; I didn't even care much about people running off with sneakers and beer and TVs. Looting Wal-Mart? I don't defend it, but what do we expect? These are desperately poor people who've been deliberately left behind, in so many senses of the word -- left behind by society, shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and now truly left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own. If looting Wal-Mart was the worst of it, I thought, we should consider ourselves lucky.
But it wasn't. Thursday we saw people shooting at rescue helicopters (with guns they stole from Wal-Mart, perhaps?), at hospital supply trucks, at workers trying to evacuate the sick from hospitals, the horrifying next chapter in an already awful story. I started to feel like my indifference to yesterday's looting was morally lazy, a reflexive shrug at having to really think about the poor, who they are, why they are. What a crazy, depraved way to treat people who are trying to help. But having said that, we're not absolved from trying to understand and reckon with the chaos. Like it or not, this crisis is going to be with us for a long time, because it's been coming for a long time -– we're going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we've long chosen to ignore.
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As I watched buses make their way from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston, in a surreal and perverse echo of the Freedom Rides of the '60s, a few thoughts were inescapable. Why didn't we send a caravan of buses into the city's poorest neighborhoods on Saturday or Sunday, when the dimensions of the disaster were already predictable? And what is really going to happen in Houston? These are dispossessed people who've been further dispossessed -- do we have a word for that? After a few days, the Superdome is already a slice of hell, with overflowing bathrooms, fights, rape allegations and now, people dying outside. Do we expect the Astrodome -- abandoned by the Houston Astros in 2000 for Enron Field, excuse me, Minute Maid Park -- to fare much better? Sure, Houston's got electricity and running water, but tens of thousands of scared, angry people packed into an abandoned sports stadium -- we couldn't come up with a better symbol of how little we care about the poor, how little we've thought about what to do with them, for them, if we tried.
As if to make sure we didn't miss the ironies, the same week as Katrina came news that the poverty rate has climbed again, the fourth straight year under President Bush. But let's be fair: John Kerry barely mentioned the poor last year. And while President Clinton's booming 1990s lifted some boats, and his welfare reform at least muted the ideological sniping about whether poor folks were victims or freeloaders, nobody's bothered lately to pay much attention to whether welfare reform made people's lives better, whether it paved a path out of poverty or just moved its subjects into the vast ranks of the working poor.
Then came Katrina, and we're forced to pay attention. We're forced to look at New Orleans, to really see it -- one of the nation's great party cities and also one of its poorest. If you go for Mardi Gras or the annual Jazz Heritage Festival, really if you go any old time, you know its majority black population is mostly hidden from white tourists. Beyond the gorgeous French Quarter and Garden District it's long been a crime-plagued, gang-ridden, corruption-befouled city. But as long as you stuck to Fodor's, you didn't have to care.
Now you do. Before Katrina, we were warned of coffins floating out of cemeteries, but instead we got poor black people flushed out of slums, and to some people they're apparently just as scary. But they're not going back any time soon. They're our responsibility now. They always were; we just ignored it.
Maybe we can't anymore. On cable news, our normally buttoned-down blow-dried correspondents, almost all of them white, are cracking under the strain of bearing witness to the suffering and even death of the people who weren't looting, who did the right thing and headed to the Superdome, only to find a worse hell awaited them. They've dropped their script and they're asking tough questions. CNN's Chris Lawrence was clearly shaken describing what he saw: "We talked to mothers holding babies, some of these babies 3, 4, 5 months old, living in these horrible conditions ...These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at some of these mothers your heart just breaks ... People need to see this ... what it's really like here. We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the convention center, and there's no one to come get them."
Later, Anderson Cooper was even harsher, challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu for thanking President Bush for his efforts to aid her state. "Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting," he said. "For the last four days I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi ... You know, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them them wrong way right now. Because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours and there's not enough facilities to take her up. Do you get the anger that is out here?"
Of course, it's unfair to blame the president for an act of nature like Katrina. And yet it's irrefutable that this administration's backward policies and politics made this disaster worse than it had to be, and its belated response will do nothing to address the problems that have suddenly been flushed out into the open. The death toll from Katrina is likely to be higher than 9/11, but most of its victims will be black and poor, and I doubt we'll wage a war on poverty and neglect to match the war on terror launched after al-Qaida struck -- and if we did, I doubt it would be any more effective. The president, who continued his vacation while Katrina raged, just the way he kept reading "My Pet Goat" on 9/11, is headed for the Gulf on Friday. I'd like him to bring some answers, but I don't expect him to.
What I'd really like is to see him head today for the Superdome, bring his dad, and Bill Clinton, and John Kerry and Howard Dean -- any Democrat or Republican who cares, really –- and go to work, feeding and comforting the refugees and finding out what they need. Then I'd like to see them put people to work, rebuilding the amazing historic city we've apparently lost.
Americans are ready to do the right thing. Americans want to help their neighbors -- even when those neighbors are people they don't know, who are poor and have different colored skin. If you close your eyes, you can imagine a silver lining. Inspired by a president who got down in the water himself and started bailing, America could find the will and the resources to put people to work building a country, not destroying one the way we're doing in Iraq. But that is just a dream. In the real world, the water is likely to keep rising. Still, I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong.Thursday, September 01, 2005
WELL, DUH.
Newsview: Politicians Failed Storm Victims
By RON FOURNIER, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina's victims. They didn't strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who's at fault?
There's plenty of blame to go around — the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.
It wasn't a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn't exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.
Just last year, the Army Corps of Engineers sought $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans. The White House slashed the request to about $40 million. Congress finally approved $42.2 million, less than half of the agency's request.
Yet the lawmakers and Bush agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-laden highway bill that included more than 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers. Congress spent money on dust control for Arkansas roads, a warehouse on the Erie Canal and a $231 million bridge to a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.
How could Washington spend $231 million on a bridge to nowhere — and not find $42 million for hurricane and flood projects in New Orleans? It's a matter of power and politics.
Alaska is represented by Republican Rep. Don Young (news, bio, voting record), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and Republican Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), a senior member of the all-important Senate Appropriations Committee. Louisiana's delegation holds far less sway.
Once the hurricane hit, relief trickled into the Gulf Coast. Even
Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, whose agency is in charge of disaster response, pronounced the initial results unacceptable.
The hurricane was the first major test of FEMA since it became part of the
Homeland Security Department, a massive new bureaucracy that many feared would make the well-respected FEMA another sluggish federal agency.
Looting soon broke out as local police stood by. Some police didn't want to stop people from getting badly needed food and water. Others seemed to be overwhelmed. Thousands of National Guard troops were ordered to the Gulf Coast, but their ranks have been drastically thinned by the war in
Iraq.
On top of all this, Katrina is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The best leaders running the most efficient agencies would have been sharply challenged.
"Look at all they've had to deal with," former
President Clinton told CNN. "I'm telling you, nobody every thought it would happen like this."
That's not true. Experts had predicted for years that a major hurricane would eventually hit New Orleans, swamping the levees and filling the bowl-shaped city with polluted water. Yet even Bush insisted that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees in a serious storm.
The politicians are doing what they do in time of crisis — shifting the blame.
"The truth will speak for itself," Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), D-La., said of potential lapses by government. Later, her office blamed the White House for budget cuts.
If it's not the Republicans' fault, perhaps some in Washington would like to blame New Orleans itself. House Speaker
Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., questioned whether a city that lies below sea level should be rebuilt. "That doesn't make sense to me," he said.
But for anybody living — or dying — in the devastated region, there are far too many villains to name.
"We're out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center.
Robin Lovin, ethics professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it's too convenient to blame one branch of government when they are all, at some level, failing people. From Watergate to Clinton's impeachment, governmental institutions have disappointed the public.
"Bush, Congress, the mayor — each of them are symptoms of a bigger problem, that we don't have accountability for disasters or challenges of this scale," Lovin said. "That's all the public wants in trying times — accountability."
Thus, Americans are doing what people do when government lets them down — they're turning to each other. Donations are pouring into charities. Internet sites are being used to find relatives. Residents of far-off states are opening their homes to victims.
The community spirit is reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. So is the second-guessing. It will happen again after the next crisis. You've heard the warnings: a cataclysmic California earthquake, another terrorist strike, a flu pandemic, a nuclear plant meltdown, a tsunami, the failure to address mounting U.S. debt — and on and on.
Will the public and its leaders be better prepared next time?Thursday, September 01, 2005
SMIRKING CHIMP ALL HAT NO CATTLE
Waiting for a Leader
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL Published: September 1, 2005
George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.
We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.
Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.
While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast's most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans's levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?
It would be some comfort to think that, as Mr. Bush cheerily announced, America "will be a stronger place" for enduring this crisis. Complacency will no longer suffice, especially if experts are right in warning that global warming may increase the intensity of future hurricanes. But since this administration won't acknowledge that global warming exists, the chances of leadership seem minimal.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
THE FAST DESCENT INTO MADNESS
New Orleans in Anarchy With Fights, Rapes
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear.
"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said of 300 National Guard troops who landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."
Four days after Hurricane Katrina roared in with a devastating blow that inflicted potentially thousands of deaths, the fear, anger and violence mounted Thursday.
"I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive," said Canadian tourist Larry Mitzel, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. "I'm scared of riots. I'm scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire."
The chaos deepened despite the promise of 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting, plans for a $10 billion recovery bill in Congress and a government relief effort President Bush called the biggest in U.S. history.
New Orleans' top emergency management official called that effort a "national disgrace" and questioned when reinforcements would actually reach the increasingly lawless city.
About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans convention center grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead. Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.
"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."
Col. Henry Whitehorn, chief of the Louisiana State Police, said he heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers — many of whom from flooded areas — turning in their badges.
"They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives," Whitehorn said.
A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.
In hopes of defusing the situation at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across a bridge to the city's unflooded west bank for whatever relief they could find. But the bedlam made that difficult.
"This is a desperate SOS," Nagin said in a statement. "Right now we are out of resources at the convention center and don't anticipate enough buses."
At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair.
"You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people," he added. "You can go overseas with the military, but you can't get them down here."
The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
"They've been teasing us with buses for four days," Edwards said. "They're telling us they're going to come get us one day, and then they don't show up."
Every so often, an armored state police vehicle cruised in front of the convention center with four or five officers in riot gear with automatic weapons. But there was no sign of help from the National Guard.
At one point the crowd began to chant "We want help! We want help!" Later, a woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd ..."
"We are out here like pure animals," the Issac Clark said.
"We've got people dying out here — two babies have died, a woman died, a man died," said Helen Cheek. "We haven't had no food, we haven't had no water, we haven't had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us."
Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "'Go to hell — it's every man for himself.'"
"This is just insanity," she said. "We have no food, no water ... all these trucks and buses go by and they do nothing but wave."
FEMA director Michael Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.
Speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live,"
Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff said the evacuation of New Orleans should be completed by the end of the weekend.
At the hot and stinking Superdome, where 30,000 were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in a lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses.
After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up, with a group of refugees breaking through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen.
One military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP's rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.
Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. An ambulance service airlifting the sick and injured out of the Superdome suspended flights as too dangerous after it was reported that a bullet was fired at a military helicopter.
"If they're just taking us anywhere, just anywhere, I say praise God," said refugee John Phillip. "Nothing could be worse than what we've been through."
By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. National Guard Capt. John Pollard said evacuees from around the city poured into the Superdome and swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.
As he watched a line snaking for blocks through ankle-deep waters, New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert blamed the inadequate response on the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"This is not a FEMA operation. I haven't seen a single FEMA guy," he said. He added: "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."
FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, but are working overtime to feed people and restore order.
A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings — and not all the crimes were driven by greed.
When some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, "there are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'"
Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.
"I'm a Christian. I feel bad going in there," he said.
Earl Baker carried toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant. "Look, I'm only getting necessities," he said. "All of this is personal hygiene. I ain't getting nothing to get drunk or high with."
Several thousand storm victims had arrived in Houston by Thursday night, and they quickly got hot meals, showers and some much-needed rest.
Audree Lee, 37, was thrilled after getting a shower and hearing her teenage daughter's voice on the telephone for the first time since the storm. Lee had relatives take her daughter to Alabama so she would be safe.
"I just cried. She cried. We cried together," Lee said. "She asked me about her dog. They wouldn't let me take her dog with me. ... I know the dog is gone now."
While floodwaters in the city appeared to stabilize, efforts continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system that protects this below-sea-level city.
Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to Lake Pontchartrain, state Transportation Secretary Johnny Bradberry said. The next step called for using about 250 concrete road barriers to seal the gap.
In Washington, the White House said Bush will tour the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former
President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.
"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."
Donald Dudley, a 55-year-old New Orleans seafood merchant, complained that when he and other hungry refugees broke into the kitchen of the convention center and tried to prepare food, the National Guard chased them away.
"They pulled guns and told us we had to leave that kitchen or they would blow our damn brains out," he said. "We don't want their help. Give us some vehicles and we'll get ourselves out of here!"
____
____Thursday, September 01, 2005
OUR HEARTS AND PRAYERS BUT NOT OUR WALLETS
Hastert Questions Rebuilding New Orleans
WASHINGTON - It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that's seven feet under sea level, House Speaker Dennis Hastert said of federal assistance for hurricane-devastated New Orleans.
"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," the Illinois Republican said in an interview Wednesday with the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Ill.
Hastert, in a transcript supplied by the newspaper, said there was no question that the people of New Orleans would rebuild their city, but noted that federal insurance and other federal aid was involved. "We ought to take a second look at it. But you know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild too. Stubbornness."
Hastert's press secretary, Ron Bonjean, said Hastert was not suggesting New Orleans should be abandoned or relocated. "The speaker believes that we should have a discussion about how best to rebuild New Orleans so as to protect its citizens," he said. "What he is saying is that rebuilding the city in the same way is not sensible."
There are "some real tough questions to ask," Hastert said in the interview. "How do you go about rebuilding this city? What precautions do you take?"
Hastert announced Thursday that the House, currently at the end of its summer break, would return for an emergency session Friday to approve some $10 billion in federal aid for hurricane victims.
"In the wake of this disaster, the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida should know that the United States Congress stands ready to help them in their time of need," he said in a joint statement with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.Thursday, September 01, 2005
THESE ANIMALS JUST KEEP EATING EACH OTHER
New Orleans Doctors Plead for Help
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP
Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called The Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters.
"We have been trying to call the mayor's office, we have been trying to call the governor's office ... we have tried to use any inside pressure we can. We are turning to you. Please help us," said Dr. Norman McSwain, chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital, the largest of two public hospitals.
Charity is across the street from Tulane University Medical Center, a private facility that has almost completed evacuating more than 1,000 patients and family members, he said.
No such public resources are available for Charity, which has about 250 patients, or University Hospital several blocks away, which has about 110 patients.
"We need coordinated help from the government," McSwain said.
He described horrific conditions.
"There is no food in Charity Hospital. They're eating fruit bowl punch and that's all they've got to eat. There's minimal water," McSwain said.
"Most of their power is out. Much of the hospital is dark. The ICU (intensive care unit) is on the 12th floor, so the physicians and nurses are having to walk up floors to see the patients."
Dr. Lee Hamm, chairman of medicine at Tulane University, said he took a canoe from there to the two public hospitals, where he also works, to check conditions.
"The physicians and nurses are doing an incredible job, but there are patients laying on stretchers on the floor, the halls were dark, the stairwells are dark. Of course, there's no elevators. There's no communication with the outside world," he said.
"We're afraid that somehow these two hospitals have been left off ... that somehow somebody has either forgotten it or ignored it or something, because there is no evidence anything is being done."
Hamm said there was relief Wednesday as word traveled throughout University Hospital that the National Guard was coming to evacuate them, but the rescue never materialized.
"You can imagine how demoralizing that was," he said.
Throughout the entire city, the death, destruction and depravity deepened even as the hurricane waters leveled off.
"Hospitals are trying to evacuate," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. "At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking pot shots at police and at helicopters, telling them, 'You better come get my family.'"
Richard Zuschlag, president of Acadian Ambulance Service Inc., described the chaos at a suburban hospital.
"We tried to airlift supplies into Kenner Memorial Hospital late last evening and were confronted by an unruly crowd with guns, and the pilots refused to land," he said.
"My medics were crying, screaming for help. When we tried to land at Kenner, my pilots got scared because 100 people were on the helipad and some of them had guns. He was frightened and would not land."
Zuschlag said 65 patients brought to the roof of another city hospital, Touro Infirmary, for evacuation Wednesday night spent the night there. The hospital's generator and backup generator had failed, and doctors decided it was safer to keep everyone on the roof than carry fragile patients back downstairs.
"The hospital was so hot that with no rain or anything, they were better off in the fresh air on the roof," he said.
When patients have been evacuated, where to take them becomes the next big decision.
"They're having to make strategic decisions about where to send people literally in midair," said John Matessino, president of the Louisiana Hospital Association. "It's a very difficult thing to prioritize when they're all a priority."
Knox Andress, an emergency nurse who is regional coordinator for a federal emergency preparedness grant covering the state, said it's impossible to underestimate the critical role hospitals are playing for anyone left in the city.
"They're running out of their medications, they're running out of money. They're having social issues and where do they go? They go to the hospital. The hospital is the backbone of the community because the lights are always on," he said.
When hospitals can't take care of people and the rescuers need rescued, there's no social fabric left, Andress said.
Hospitals weren't the only facilities with troubles.
Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who has been working with search and rescue, confirmed that 30 people died at a nursing home in St. Bernard Parish and 30 others were being evacuated. He did not give any further details.Thursday, September 01, 2005
MAN OF THE PEOPLE, REGULAR GUY
The Flyover Presidency of George W. Bush
by Arianna Huffington
The president's 35-minute Air Force One flyover of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was the perfect metaphor for his entire presidency: detached, disconnected, and disengaged. Preferring to take in America's suffering -- whether caused by the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina -- from a distance. In this case, 2,500 feet.
Apparently, the president "sat somberly on a couch on the left hand side of the presidential jumbo jet peering out the window" at the catastrophe below, joined at different times by White House staffers including Karl Rove and Scott McClellan. McClellan later quoted the president as saying, "It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." Ya think?? Hey, here's an idea, Mr. President: maybe you should, y'know, get off the plane and see for yourself?
Instead, he jetted on to Washington for a brisk 9-minute Rose Garden speech designed to let us know that his administration was doing everything in its power to mitigate the looming PR disaster the flooding of New Orleans could create for the White House... Uh, I mean, everything in its power to aid the recovery.
The speech contained the usual Bush bonhomie (he's "confident" New Orleans "will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it"). But the most telling moment came when the president discussed the ways his administration was moving to help ease the suffering of profit-soaked oil companies impacted by the storm, pointing out that he had instructed Energy Secretary Sam Bodman to work with refineries to "alleviate any shortage through loans" and that the EPA had waived clean air standards for gasoline and diesel fuels in all 50 states. You could almost see him getting misty.
He also unleashed a torrent of facts and figures: "The Department of Transportation has provided more than 400 trucks to move 1,000 truckloads containing 5.4 million Meals Ready to Eat -- or MREs, 13.4 million liters of water, 10,400 tarps, 3.4 million pounds of ice, 144 generators, 20 containers of pre-positioned disaster supplies, 135,000 blankets and 11,000 cots." It was as if by piling so many disparate numbers so high he might be able to block out the two most significant numbers of all: the number of National Guardsmen unable to help out in Louisiana and Mississippi because they are deployed in Iraq, and the tens of millions of hurricane and flood-control dollars that never made it to Lake Pontchartrain because they had been diverted to Iraq.
The president's Rose Garden speech followed an all-hands-on-deck press briefing earlier in the day featuring
Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff and as many cabinet members and agency heads could be crammed around a podium, including Bodman of Energy, Mineta of Transportation, Johnson of the EPA, Leavitt of HHS, and McHale of DoD. It had the feel of the old circus bit where clown after clown after clown piles out of the impossibly small car.
And, like the president, Chertoff and company came armed with plenty of designed-to-obfuscate numbers. In one head-spinning riff, Chertoff rattled off info on "39 disaster medical assistance teams," "1,700 trailer trucks," "truckloads of water, ice, meals, medical supplies, generators, tents and tarpaulins," as well as the Coast Guard's "three national strike teams" and other "ships, boats and aircraft" that had "worked heroically for the last 48 hours, rescuing and assisting well more than 1,000 people who were in distress." But still no mention of those unavailable Guardsmen or the funds that were taken away from shoring up Lake Pontchartrain and shipped over to Iraq.
Those are the blood red elephants floating belly-up in the middle of this deadly disaster -- and the reason for the full-court PR press.
During his press briefing, Chertoff declared the aftermath of Katrina "an incident of national significance." It's clear from Bush and his team's actions how worried they are that, as the facts come out, it will become "an incident of political significance" as well.Thursday, September 01, 2005
REMIND ME HOW MANY BILLIONS WE WASTED TO KICK SADDAM OUT OF OFFICE
Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen?
by Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News.
PHILADELPHIA - Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans late on Tuesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in
Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming....Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans City Business.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House....In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
Will Bunch (letters@editorandpublisher.com) is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. Much of this article also appears on his blog at that newspaper, Attytood.Thursday, September 01, 2005
WHAT'S MINE IS MINE AND WHAT'S YOURS IS MINE AND WHY THE FUCK ISN'T UNCLE SAMMY WIPING MY ASS FOR ME?
Unrest Intensifies at Superdome Shelter
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - Fights and trash fires broke out, rescue helicopters were shot at and anger mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured in to help restore order across this increasingly desperate and lawless city.
"We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and evacuees complained that they were dropped off and given nothing.
An additional 10,000 National Guardsman from across the country were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake as looting, shootings, gunfire, carjackings spread and food and water ran out.
But some Federal Emergency Management rescue operations were suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington. "In areas where our employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled back," he said.
"Hospitals are trying to evacuate," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. "At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, "You better come get my family".
Police Capt. Ernie Demmo said a National Guard military policeman was shot in the leg as the two scuffled for the MP's rifle. The man was arrested.
"These are good people. These are just scared people," Demmo said.
The Superdome, where some 25,000 people were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, descended into chaos.
Huge crowds, hoping to finally escape the stifling confines of the stadium, jammed the main concourse outside the dome, spilling out over the ramp to the Hyatt hotel next door — a seething sea of tense, unhappy, people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up to the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.
Fights broke out. A fire erupted in a trash chute inside the dome, but a National Guard commander said it did not affect the evacuation. After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving at the Sueprdome for nearly four hours, a near riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up.
Outside the Convention Center, the sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement. Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling outside for days, waiting for buses that did not come.
At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog." He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here."
Just above the convention center on Interstate 10, commercial buses were lined up, going nowhere. The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
"They've been teasing us with buses for four days," Edwards said.
People chanted, "Help, help!" as reporters and photographers walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to photograph one of the bodies, and covered it over with a blanket. A woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm.
John Murray, 52, said: "It's like they're punishing us."
The first of hundreds of busloads of people evacuated from the Superdome arrived early Thursday at their new temporary home — another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 350 miles away.
But the ambulance service in charge of taking the sick and injured from the Superdome suspended flights after a shot was reported fired at a military helicopter. Richard Zuschlag, chief of Acadian Ambulance, said it had become too dangerous for his pilots.
The military, which was overseeing the removal of the able-bodied by buses, continued the ground evacuation without interruption, said National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider. The government had no immediate confirmation of whether a military helicopter was fired on.
In Texas, the governor's office said Texas has agreed to take in an additional 25,000 refugees from Katrina and plans to house them in San Antonio, though exactly where has not been determined.
In Washington, the White House said President Bush will tour the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.
"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."
On Wednesday, Mayor Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate yet of the magnitude of the disaster: Asked how many people died in New Orleans, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." The death toll has already reached at least 121 in Mississippi.
If the estimate proves correct, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which was blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.
Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans, saying the city had become uninhabitable for the 50,000 to 100,000 who remained behind after the city of nearly a half-million people was ordered cleared out over the weekend, before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.
The mayor said that it will be two or three months before the city is functioning again and that people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.
"We need an effort of 9-11 proportions," former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now president of the Urban League, said on NBC's "Today" show. "So many of the people who did not evacuate, could not evacuate for whatever reason. They are people who are African-American mostly but not completely, and people who were of little or limited economic means. They are the folks, we've got to get them out of there."
"A great American city is fighting for its life," he added. "We must rebuild New Orleans, the city that gave us jazz, and music, and multiculturalism."
With New Orleans sinking deeper into desperation, Nagin ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts Wednesday and stop the increasingly brazen thieves.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas — hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said.
In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.
The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall.
But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu toured the stricken areas said said rescued people begged him to pass information to their families. His pocket was full of scraps of paper on which he had scribbled down their phone numbers.
When he got a working phone in the early morning hours Thursday, he contacted a woman whose father had been rescued and told her: "Your daddy's alive, and he said to tell you he loves you."
"She just started crying. She said, `I thought he was dead,'" he said.
___Thursday, September 01, 2005
...AND THE RICH GET RICHER...
Report Scores Runaway CEO Pay, Alleges War Profiteering
WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug 30 (OneWorld) - Chief executives at U.S. defense contractors have seen a 200-percent pay raise since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, widening the chasm between compensation in the corner office and wages on the factory floor, a new report said Tuesday.
Average CEO pay--$11.8 million in salary, stock options, bonuses, and incentives--rose last year to 431 times what the average worker earned, $27,460, according to the report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. In 2003, CEOs had made 301 times their average employees' pay.
The ratio had peaked at 525-to-1 in 2001.
''If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the U.S. would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour,'' the research and advocacy groups said.
The report charged that individual CEOs have profited from the
Iraq War, with huge average raises at the biggest defense contractors. To arrive at this conclusion, it looked at 34 of the top 100 defense contractors of 2004. While most firms in the larger group were privately held, the 34 included in the report were publicly traded, meaning that their financial results were easier to research.
The 34 companies covered by the report--firms including United Technologies, Textron, and General Dynamics--made at least 10 percent of their revenues from defense contracts.
At these firms, average CEO pay rose 200 percent from 2001 to 2004--as compared to seven percent for all CEOs.
Examples cited in the report include that of David Brooks, CEO of bulletproof vest maker DHB Industries, who earned $70 million in 2004, up 3,349 percent from his 2001 compensation of $525,000.
Brooks also sold company stock worth about $186 million at the end of last year, spooking investors who drove down DHB's share price, according to the report. Analysts quoted in news stories said investors were worried about large insider stock sales.
In May 2005, the U.S. Marines recalled more than 5,000 DHB armored vests after questions were raised about their effectiveness, the report added.
The board of directors determines how much a company's CEO will be paid. Tuesday's report, the twelfth in an annual series, questioned the soundness of those decisions, charging the largest pay hikes went to:
--''Stock tankers,'' or corporate chiefs who received the most pay in any given year between 1991 and 2004 only to see their company's stock lag far behind the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 index in the following year.
--''Pension underfunders,'' or CEOs whose firms maintained the most anemic pension plans for non-executive employees yet who received 72 percent more pay than the average large-company CEO.
--''Tax dodgers,'' or CEOs at 46 large firms that paid no federal income tax in 2003 despite earning a collective $30 billion in profits. ''Some of the savings wound up in the pockets of their CEOs, who made $12.6 million in average pay in 2004,'' the report said.
--''Book cookers.'' In the last ten years, CEOs of firms with shady accounting appeared 18 times on the top 10 lists of highest paid executives, according to the report. ''This includes leaders whose companies were either later found to have committed fraud or were forced to make material restatements of earnings to correct previous overstatements of profits.''
To curb the ''Executive Excess'' that inspired the report and provided its title, the study's authors urged the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission to foster competitive elections for seats on corporate boards.
''Corporate boards are self-nominating and overwhelmingly made up of current and retired CEOs who have a vested interest in not challenging compensation systems that they themselves benefit from,'' the report said.
The report also said shareholders should have ultimate say over CEO compensation.
''British shareholders must annually approve executive pay, a tradition that has contributed to greater restraint in executive pay than the United States has experienced,'' it said.
CEOs themselves could take action, and the report singled out for praise two bosses worthy of membership in an ''Executive Pay Hall of Fame.''
Brad Anderson, CEO of consumer electronics retailer Best Buy in 2003 decided to forgo $7.5 million in stock options and instead gave them to ''outstanding non-executive employees,'' the report said.
At supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, it added, CEO John Mackey's pay is limited to no more than 14 times the average workers' pay.Thursday, September 01, 2005
SUPPORT THE TROOPS - BRING 'EM HOME ALIVE
We can't win in Iraq, so let's bring our troops home
By Joseph L. Galloway, Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is out on spin patrol this week, declaring that we're going to win in
Iraq no matter how long it takes. President Bush is still staying the course and predicting victory.
But what do the officers who are fighting this war in the worst parts of Iraq think? Do they still believe victory is possible?
My Knight Ridder colleague Tom Lasseter recently spent three weeks embedded with Army and Marine units in Anbar province, the heart of Sunni Arab resistance to the American forces occupying Iraq. It's the stomping grounds of a homegrown insurgency targeting Americans, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis and any Sunnis who cooperate with any of the above.
If you read Lasseter's articles (http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12476559.htm) you'll hear the voices of the brave combat commanders like Marine Col. Stephen Davis, who's leading 5,000 Marines in an endless war of attrition.
"I don't think of this in terms of winning," Davis said.
He sees a war that will last for years. Roadside bombs have hit vehicles Davis was riding in three different times so far this year. The insurgents essentially have fought the Americans in Anbar to a stalemate. They've proved to be very fast at adapting to new ways of killing Americans when the old ways no longer work.
Two key cities in the province are Fallujah and Ramadi, twice attacked by large American forces last year, and captured only in a huge offensive after last November's elections. These battles cost hundreds of American casualties, and many more Iraqis. Fallujah was all but destroyed by American artillery and air power.
But guess what? Even as we're spending $225 million to rebuild Fallujah, the insurgents are sliding back in amid the civilians returning to their homes.
As for the little towns and small cities of Anbar, the best the Americans can do is mount quick-strike operations to target the bad guys and run them out. Then we leave. Then the insurgents and foreign terrorists return. American officers told Lasseter that they don't have enough troops to take these places and hold them, and that Iraqi forces aren't up to the job.
"It doesn't do much good to push them out of these areas only to let them go back to areas we've already cleared," said Lt. Col. Tim Mundy, who commands the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines.
What this tells us is that we're winning the war in the Kurdish areas to the north and the Shiite areas to the south, but we're losing the war where there is a war, in the Sunni heartland in Anbar province.
Here, American soldiers and Marines are killed and wounded daily by the ubiquitous IEDs, by rocket-propelled grenades, by homemade bombs dropped from upstairs windows and by enemy snipers. Patrolling these places is deadly work. Remember the two days this summer when the Marines lost 20 men killed from one Ohio reserve company? That was in Anbar.
Here's what it boils down to: We are not winning in Iraq, and we cannot win in Iraq by staying the course.
This is counter-insurgency warfare. This has been a counter-insurgency operation since the early summer of 2003 - something that took our civilian leaders by surprise. They didn't plan for it, and they haven't supplied Col. Davis, Lt. Col. Mundy and all the other brave soldiers they've sent there with enough troops, the proper equipment or a strategy for victory.
The only victory in Iraq isn't ours to win. It's up to the Iraqi people, all of them, to find a political solution and build a government or have a civil war and water an ancient land with the blood of another generation.
The president and Rumsfeld say the United States cannot, must not, leave Iraq in haste; that this would send the wrong message to our enemies. Bull! We arrived in haste and we can and should leave the same way. We should begin an orderly withdrawal of our forces from Iraq not later than the end of this year.
That might permit us to refocus attention and resources on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the terrorist leadership. Remember them? They were the people who attacked our people on our soil on Sept. 11, 2001, and they came at us out of Afghanistan, not out of Iraq. They were Job One for the Bush administration for about three months.
So please tell us again, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, why we must stay in Iraq when we can't win there? Why your obsession with the overthrow of a tin-pot tyrant led us down a path to the deaths of 1,900 Americans in a country that isn't worth the life of even one American soldier?Thursday, September 01, 2005
"CIVILIZATION" IS ABOUT 1 MICRON THICK
I watched the same descent into madness and animalistic wolfpack behaviors in the days after hurricane Hugo wiped out the island of St. Croix in the USVI. More people than we would like to believe are kept on a leash only by the threat of punishment - when the rule of law disappears, there are no laws and no rules. "Morality" is a social construct, nothing else. I believe 1/3 of people are brutes by nature, 1/3 have their inner compasses pointing more or less towards 'good', and 1/3 are simply sheep that follow the strongest lead.
In other words, I'm not surprised these dumbass monkeyfuckers are eating each other.
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Evacuation Disrupted Amid Fires, Gunshots
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - Gunfire and arson blazes disrupted the evacuation of 25,000 people from the Superdome on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured into New Orleans to help restore order across the increasingly lawless and desperate city.
An additional 10,000 National Guard troops from across the country were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake. That brought the number of troops dedicated to the effort to more than 28,000, in what may be the biggest military response to a natural disaster in U.S. history.
"The truth is, a terrible tragedy like this brings out the best in most people, brings out the worst in some people," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on NBC's "Today" show. "We're trying to deal with looters as ruthlessly as we can get our hands on them."
The first of 500 busloads of people who were evacuated from the hot and stinking Louisiana Superdome arrived early Thursday at their new temporary home — another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 350 miles away.
But the ambulance service in charge of airlifting the sick and injured from the Superdome suspended flights after a shot was reported fired at a military helicopter. Richard Zuschlag, chief of Acadian Ambulance, said it had become too dangerous for his pilots.
The military, which was overseeing the removal of the able-bodied by buses, continued the ground evacuation without interruption, said National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider. But Schneider said fires set outside the arena were making it difficult for buses to get close enough to pick people up.
President Bush urged a crackdown on the looting and other lawlessness that have spread through New Orleans.
"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."
On Wednesday, Mayor Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate yet of the magnitude of the disaster: Asked how many people died in New Orleans, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." The death toll has already reached at least 110 in Mississippi.
If the estimate proves correct, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which was blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.
Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans, saying the city had become uninhabitable for the 50,000 to 100,000 who remained behind after the city of nearly a half-million people was ordered evacuated over the weekend, before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.
The mayor said that it will be two or three months before the city is functioning again and that people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.
With New Orleans sinking deeper into desperation, Nagin also ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts Wednesday and stop the increasingly brazen thieves.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas — hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said.
In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.
"There are physical threats to safety from roving bands of armed individuals with weapons who are threatening the safety of the hospital," said spokesman Steven Campanini. He estimated there were 350 employees in the hospital and between 125 to 150 patients.
Tempers flared elsewhere across the devastated region. Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Miss., fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus. One officer was shot in the head and a looter was wounded in a shootout. Both were expected to survive.
Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, clothes, TV sets — even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.
Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 — the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east — pushing shopping carts, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.
On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.
The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall.
But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
The full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days — in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities' first priority has been reaching the living.
In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places such as Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland and Bay St. Louis, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.Wednesday, August 31, 2005
THINK RAPE IS FUN? THINK AGAIN - NO LOVE IN THIS GLOVE
South Africa anti-rape condom aims to stop attacks
KLEINMOND, South Africa (Reuters) - A South African inventor unveiled a new anti-rape female condom on Wednesday that hooks onto an attacker's penis and aims to cut one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world.
"Nothing has ever been done to help a woman so that she does not get raped and I thought it was high time," Sonette Ehlers, 57, said of the "rapex", a device worn like a tampon that has sparked controversy in a country used to daily reports of violent crime.
Police statistics show more than 50,000 rapes are reported every year, while experts say the real figure could be four times that as they say most rapes of acquaintances or children are never reported.
Ehlers said the "rapex" hooks onto the rapist's skin, allowing the victim time to escape and helping to identify perpetrators.
"He will obviously be too pre-occupied at this stage," she told reporters in Kleinmond, a small holiday village about 100km (60 miles) east of Cape Town. "I promise you he is going to be too sore. He will go straight to hospital."
The device, made of latex and held firm by shafts of sharp barbs, can only be removed from the man through surgery which will alert hospital staff, and ultimately, the police, she said.
It also reduces the chances of a woman falling pregnant or contracting
AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases from the attacker by acting in the same way as a female condom.
South Africa has more people with
HIV/AIDS than any other country, with one in nine of its 45 million population infected.
Ehlers, who showed off a prototype on Wednesday, said women had tried it for comfort and it had been tested on a plastic male model but not yet on a live man. Production was planned to start next year.
But the "rapex" has raised fears amongst anti-rape activists that it could escalate violence against women.
"If a victim is wearing such a device it may enrage the attacker further and possibly result in more harm being caused," said Sam Waterhouse, advocacy co-ordinator for Rape Crisis.
Other critics say the condom is mediaeval and barbaric -- an accusation Ehlers says should be directed rather at the act of rape.
"This is not about vengeance ... but the deed, that is what I hate," she said.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
WHOSE BRIGHT IDEA WAS THIS AGAIN?
New Orleans' Tragic Paradox
By Kevin Sack, Los Angeles Times
In 1718, French colonist Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored his engineers' warnings about the hazards of flooding and mapped a settlement in a pinch of swampland between the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and a massive lake to the north.
Ever since, the water has sustained New Orleans and perpetually threatened it. Somehow, until this week, the mystique of the water had always washed away the foreboding of disaster, as if carrying the city's worries downstream. That was true even early Tuesday morning, when Hurricane Katrina's last-minute veer to the east convinced many residents they had once again eluded the Fates.
But when the rainfall brought by Katrina breached levees and overwhelmed the city's pumping stations, the catastrophic consequences of Bienville's miscalculation could no longer be ignored.
New Orleans, a city that has struggled to keep its head above water, physically and economically, is now a city submerged.
City officials estimated that 80% of the town was under standing water Tuesday, with some areas beneath as much as 20 feet. Water at times coursed through the French Quarter, one of the highest points in a city that is largely below sea level.
In broad swaths, the flooding submerged low-lying neighborhoods up to the rooftops and left one of America's most enchanting cities a sodden ruin.
For locals, it is a cruel paradox. The water that has given New Orleans its very life — its commerce, its cuisine, even the meandering flow of its daily pace — has now rendered their beloved city almost unrecognizable.
The charming quirks of its geography — like the practice of entombing the dead aboveground because high water tables make burial a short-term proposition — may no longer seem so charming. The water, cherished by Bienville for its potential to open the region to commerce, has now all but strangled access. Bridges and causeways are shredded, and city streets are buried in debris.
"The river gives and the river basically takes away," said novelist Richard Ford, who lived in New Orleans until last year. "There really isn't a vocabulary that I have access to that describes this. And as always, it's the least able to recover from this disaster who will suffer most intensely."
Ford, like other New Orleans devotees, said it was a facet of the city's famed insularity that residents managed to avert their attention from impending disaster.
"If you live in New Orleans," he said, "you've decided that whatever it is about that city that you like is more important than whatever anxiety you feel."
Curtis Wilkie, an author and journalism professor who has lived in the French Quarter for 12 years, said he had previously found a sense of comfort in the water around him.
"It's always been part of the attraction of New Orleans — the river and the lake and the Gulf," he said. "Whatever peril there was, it was outweighed by the charm of the city. But there's no city in America that has quite the relationship with water that we do. And everybody knew that this was a potential disaster."
Indeed, centuries after Bienville, geographers and engineers have been warning with increasing alarm that a storm like Katrina could devastate a region of 1.3 million people, leaving tens of thousands dead or homeless.
The water, after all, is everywhere. Lake Pontchartrain, just north of the city center, is 300 square miles and is crossed by a 24-mile causeway, the longest over-water bridge in the world. The Mississippi River pushes 300,000 cubic feet of water past the city every second, at depths that average 90 feet.
There is virtually no major route into the city that does not traverse vast expanses of brackish blue. The Port of New Orleans is one of the country's busiest, with more than 6,000 vessels passing the city annually.
Offshore oil is another economic stimulant, as are fishing and aquaculture. Much of the city's $5-billion convention and tourism industry is tied to the riverfront, with its Riverwalk Marketplace, aquarium and dockside paddle wheelers.
A Category 4 or Category 5 storm, geologists long theorized, would exploit the eroding Louisiana coastline and the gradual settling of the city's earthen foundation, and compromise the more than 500 miles of levees and floodwalls holding back the river and lake. Armed with computer models, they predicted that hundreds of years of engineering would make little difference.
Experts have recommended replenishing the more than 1 million acres of coastal marshland that have vanished into the sea since 1930, largely the result of human intrusion. A study panel concluded the cost could top $14 billion.
Other proposals have included rebuilding barrier islands, erecting more levees and restricting the flow of water into channels and canals. A Louisiana State University professor even proposed building a two-story wall with floodgates to secure the southern part of the city, saying the walled zone could serve as a municipal refuge in a killer storm.
The New Orleans diaspora — the expatriates who claim the city as their own years after leaving — worried Tuesday that the receding floodwaters would reveal a ghastly horror. They expect numerous unreported deaths and the utter destruction of an already aged housing stock that has been weakened by infestations of Formosan termites.
"What breaks your heart is the city has so many poor people who live in old, deteriorated, substandard housing and they have so little — and what little they have they've lost," said Michael L. Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund, who spent seven years in New Orleans as president of Dillard University. "These are people who stayed because they couldn't get out, because they didn't have a car."
John M. Barry, a part-time New Orleans resident and the author of "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America," spent the day in his Washington office, fielding e-mails from neighbors who were watching the water rise near their French Quarter houses. "It's like watching not only your life, but the lives of everything you've ever been involved in, just floating away," he said.
Barry said that like the devastating 1927 flood, which killed more than 200, Katrina would be remembered as a natural disaster made worse by man. "The most obvious lesson," he said, "is that you've got to be alert to unintended consequences."
The refusal to build spillways and reservoirs exacerbated the effects of the 1927 flood just as coastal erosion and the blazing of shipping canals presumably contributed to Katrina's destruction, he said. "If a worse case develops, this will come as close to wiping out a major American city as has ever happened."
Novelist Ford joined others in questioning whether New Orleans could ever regain its lightness of being, its sense that come what may, the good times would roll. When impending disaster was only theoretical, the city seemed to accept that though the end might be near, little could be done to forestall it.
"That's the structure of living in New Orleans," he said. "People feel that the place is doomed at some point, but they're going to stay. It's just a way of dealing with the end that's different from other ways of dealing with the end."Wednesday, August 31, 2005
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND THIS BABY IN YOUR ENTERTAINMENT CENTER
Briton Finds Venomous Centipede in House
LONDON - Aaron Balick expected to find a tiny mouse rustling behind the TV in his apartment. Instead, he found a venomous giant centipede that somehow hitched a ride from South America to Britain.
"Thinking it was a mouse, I went to investigate the sound. The sound was coming from under some papers which I lifted, expecting to see the mouse scamper away," the 32-year-old psychotherapist said Wednesday. "Instead, when I lifted the papers, I saw this prehistoric looking animal skitter away behind a stack of books."
He trapped the 9-inch-long creature between a stack of books and put it in a plastic container.
The next day he took it to Britain's Natural History Museum, which identified the insect as a Scolopendra gigantea — the world's biggest species of centipede.
Stuart Hine, an entomologist at the museum, said it was likely the centipede hitched a ride aboard a freighter, likely with a shipment of fruit.
"Dealing with over 4,000 public and commercial inquiries every year, we have come to expect the unexpected. However, when Aaron produced this beast from his bag I was staggered," Hine said. "Not even I expected to be presented with this."
The Scolopendra gigantea has front claws that are adapted to deliver venom when it stings, which can lead to a blistering rash, nausea and fever. The sting is rarely life-threatening, but painful.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
REALITY SETTING IN
Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - The mayor said Wednesday that Hurricane Katrina probably killed thousands of people in New Orleans.
"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and others dead in attics, Mayor Ray Nagin said. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."
The frightening prediction came as Army engineers struggled to plug New Orleans' breached levees with giant sandbags and concrete barriers, while authorities drew up plans to move some 25,000 storm refugees out of the city to Houston in a huge bus convoy and all but abandon flooded-out New Orleans.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the situation was desperate and there was no choice but to clear out.
"The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters," the governor said. "It's becoming untenable. There's no power. It's getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials."
The Pentagon, meanwhile, began mounting one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in U.S. history, sending four Navy ships to the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, along with the hospital ship USNS Comfort, search helicopters and elite SEAL water-rescue teams. American Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region in the agency's biggest-ever relief operation.
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina has reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone. But Louisiana has put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.
A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.
"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is we have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."
With the streets awash and looters brazenly cleaning out stores, authorities planned to move at least 25,000 of New Orlean's storm refugees — most of them taking shelter in the dank and sweltering Superdome — to the Astrodome in Houston in a vast exodus by bus.
Around midday, officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers said the water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain had equalized, and water had stopped rising in New Orleans, and even appeared to be falling, at least in some places. But the danger was far from over.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags Wednesday into the 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall. But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
Officials said they were also looking at a more audacious plan: finding a barge to plug the 500-foot hole.
"The challenge is an engineering nightmare," the governor said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
As New Orleans descended deeper into chaos, hundreds of people wandered aimlessly up and down Interstate 10, pushing shopping carts, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings. Dozens of fishermen from up to 200 miles away floated in on caravans of boats to pull residents out of flooded neighborhoods.
On some of the few roads that were still passable, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.
In one east New orleans neighborhood, refugees were being loaded onto the backs of moving vans like cattle, and in one case emergency workers with a sledgehammer and an ax broke open the back of a mail truck and used it to ferry sick and elderly residents.
Police officers were asking residents to give up any guns they had before they boarded buses and trucks because police desperately needed the firepower: Some officers who had been stranded on the roof of a motel said they were being shot at overnight.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
ABANDON SHIP
Governor: Everyone Must Leave New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS, Associated Press - The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We've sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers struggled without success to plug New Orleans' breached levees with giant sandbags, and the governor said Wednesday the situation was worsening and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city.
"The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "The National Guard has been dropping sandbags into it, but it's like dropping it into a black hole."
As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, four Navy ships raced toward the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, and Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region. The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen.
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.
A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets on Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.
"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."
Blanco said she wanted the Superdome — which had become a shelter of last resort for about 20,000 people — evacuated within two days, along with other gathering points for storm refugees. The situation inside the dank and sweltering Superdome was becoming desperate: The water was rising, the air conditioning was out, toilets were broken, and tempers were rising.
At the same time, sections of Interstate 10, the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east, lay shattered, dozens of huge slabs of concrete floating in the floodwaters. I-10 is the only route for commercial trucking across southern Louisiana.
The sweltering city of 480,000 people — an estimated 80 percent of whom obeyed orders to evacuate as Katrina closed in over the weekend — also had no drinkable water, the electricity could be out for weeks, and looters were ransacking stores around town.
"The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters," the governor said. "It's becoming untenable. There's no power. It's getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials."
She gave no details on exactly where the refugees would be taken. But in Houston, Rusty Cornelius, a county emergency official, said at least 25,000 of them would travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and would be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which is no longer used for professional sporting events.
The
Federal Emergency Management Agency was considering putting people on cruise ships, in tent cities, mobile home parks, and so-called floating dormitories — boats the agency uses to house its own employees.
To repair one of the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain, officials late Tuesday dropped 3,000-pound sandbags from helicopters and hauled dozens of 15-foot concrete barriers into the breach. Maj. Gen. Don Riley of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said officials also had a more audacious plan: finding a barge to plug the 500-foot hole.
Riley said it could take close to a month to get the water out of the city. If the water rises a few feet higher, it could also wipe out the water system for the whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert.
A helicopter view of the devastation over Louisiana and Mississippi revealed people standing on black rooftops, baking in the sunshine while waiting for rescue boats.
"I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour after touring the destruction by air Tuesday.
All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters plucked bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said 3,000 people have been rescued by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn't make it.
"Oh my God, it was hell," said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans' low-lying Ninth Ward. "We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos."
Looting broke out in some New Orleans neighborhoods, prompting authorities to send more than 70 additional officers and an armed personnel carrier into the city. One police officer was shot in the head by a looter but was expected to recover, authorities said.
A giant new Wal-Mart in New Orleans was looted, and the entire gun collection was taken, The Times-Picayune newspaper reported. "There are gangs of armed men in the city moving around the city," said Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief. Also, looters tried to break into Children's Hospital, the governor's office said.
On New Orleans' Canal Street, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores and grabbed merchandise. In Biloxi, Miss., people picked through casino slot machines for coins and ransacked other businesses. In some cases, the looting took place in full view of police and National Guardsmen.
Blanco acknowledged that looting was a severe problem but said that officials had to focus on survivors. "We don't like looters one bit, but first and foremost is search and rescue," she said.
Officials said it was simply too early to estimate a death toll. One Mississippi county alone said it had suffered at least 100 deaths, and officials are "very, very worried that this is going to go a lot higher," said Joe Spraggins, civil defense director for Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport. In neighboring Jackson County, officials said at least 10 deaths were blamed on the storm.
Several of the dead in Harrison County were from a beachfront apartment building that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water as Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds Monday. Louisiana officials said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades.
Blanco asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer.
"That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors," she said. "Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild."
Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. Officials said it could be weeks, if not months, before most evacuees will be able to return.
Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and
President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage.
Also, the Bush administration decided to release crude oil from federal petroleum reserves to help refiners whose supply was disrupted by Katrina. The announcement helped push oil prices lower.
Katrina, which was downgraded to a tropical depression, packed winds around 30 mph as it moved through the Ohio Valley early Wednesday, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes.
The remnants of Katrina spawned bands of storms and tornadoes across Georgia that caused at least two deaths, multiple injuries and leveled dozens of buildings. A tornado damaged 13 homes near Marshall, Va.
On the Net:
National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.govWednesday, August 31, 2005
WHEN IT COMES TO FIREARMS, I'M A PRAGMATIST
GUNS: Facts & Fallacies
Doctors for Integrity in Research & Public Policy
Edgar A. Suter, MD, Chair
5201 Norris Canyon Road
Suite 140
San Ramon, CA 94583
"Guns are used defensively by good people 1. to 2.4 million times every year - lives saved, injuries prevented, medical costs saved, and property protected"
POLITICS OR RESEARCH? . . . THE TAXPAYERS PAY
On the issue of guns and violence, our group has uncovered shocking incompetence, distortions and outright lies in many major medical journals. We have discovered it is quite common for TAXPAYER-FUNDED gun control researchers to fabricate and sculpt their data to bolster their biased and foregone conclusions.
The "peer review" process is supposed to prevent the publication of research that is flawed in method or conclusions. Editorial bias has caused a breakdown of that review process, allowing publication of much shoddy work simply because it supported the "politically correct" view. Unusual showmanship accompanies the announcements of gun prohibition advocates. Why?
Our group is also concerned that the 1990 Harvard Medical Practice Study - a sample from New York state - suggests that Americans are five times as likely to die from a doctor as from a gun. An estimated 150,000 Americans die every year from medical negligence - over five times as many deaths from doctors as from guns! A "public health emergency" about which the American Medical Association is suspiciously silent. Politics, lies or incompetence?
THE NUMBERS
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. George Lundberg, in a June 10, 1992 JAMA editorial, claimed "one million US inhabitants die prematurely each year as the result of intentional homicide or suicide." Since an average of 30,000 Americans die from gunshots each year, JAMA's claim is a 35-FOLD EXAGGERATION. Yet congressmen listen with respect to their testimony on guns.
THE "INNOCENT CHILDREN" EXAGGERATION
Powerful images of children are used to mislead us. Prohibitionists foster the image of gun deaths of "thousands of innocent children." In order to make this claim, they have had to include young adults (to age 24) involved in gang and drug crime - hardly "innocent children." 10 TO 20 TIMES MORE CHILDREN DIE FROM CAR AND OTHER LEADING CAUSES OF ACCIDENTAL DEATHS AS DIE FROM GUNS - for example, in 1988, compared with 2,608 car, 1,014 drowning, and 10,094 burn deaths, 123 children (ages 0-10) died from gun accidents.
THE "43 TIMES" FALLACY
We have all head that "a gunowner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than intruder." How did this fallacy start? In a 1985 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Drs. Kellerman and Reay described the proper way to calculate how many people are saved by guns compared to how many are hurt by guns. The benefits should include, in the authors' own words, "cased in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm [and] cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house known to be armed..."
However, when Kellerman and Reay calculated their comparison, they did NOT include those cases, they only counted the times a homeowner KILLED the criminal. Because only 0.1% (1 in a 1,000) of defensive gun usage involves the death of the criminal, KELLERMAN AND REAY UNDERSTATED THE PROTECTIVE BENEFITS OF FIREARMS BY A FACTOR OF 1,000! They turned the truth on its head! Why? Kellerman emotionally confessed his anti-gun prejudice at the 1993 HELP Conference.
Honest analysis, even by Kellerman and Reay's own standards, shows the "43 times" comparison to be superficially appealing, but actually a deceitful contrivance - unfortunately, a lie that is parroted by the well-funded gun-prohibition lobby and by gullible and biased journalists.
THE "POLICE CHIEF'S" FALLACY
The victim disarmament lobby wants us to believe that it is dangerous to resist crimes like rape and assault using a gun - but USING A GUN IS ACTUALLY SAFER THAN NOT RESISTING OR RESISTING WITH LESS POWERFUL MEANS. Defense with a gun results in fewer injuries (17%) than resisting with less powerful means (knives, 40%; other weapon, 22%; physical force, 51%; evasion, 35%; etc.) and in fewer injuries than not resisting at all (25%).
When a victim is successful in repelling a crime, the victim is unlikely to report the crime, leaving police to deal only with the unsuccessful attempts to defend oneself. Since police are exposed to a skewed sample of failure, they can honestly, though incorrectly, conclude that it is dangerous to attempt to defend oneself with a gun, the so-called "Police Chief's Fallacy" named after the former San Jose, CA Police Chief Joseph McNamara, a vocal gun prohibitionist.
LICENSING, REGISTRATION, & BANS
In a 1991 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Colin Loftin attempted to show that Washington, DC's 1976 ban on new gun sales decreased murder. Loftin and his co-authors, funded by YOUR tax money from the anti-gun Centers for Disease Control (CDC), produced a piece of "research" with several major flaws. Despite these flaws, the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine, known for its anti-gun bias, published the article anyway.
Most shocking amongst the dozen flaws:
* The apparent homicide drop began during 1974, 2 years BEFORE the gun law - so how could the law be responsible for the temporary drop?
* If the gun freeze were responsible for the homicide drop, we would expect the drop to continue - the law hasn't changed, but the overall Washington, DC homicide rate has skyrocketed to 8 TIMES THE NATIONAL AVERAGE since 1988.
* Justifiable and excusable homicides, including those by police officers, were treated the same as murders and were not excluded from the study.
* The study used raw numbers rather than population-corrected rates, so did not correct for the 20% population decrease in Washington, DC during the study period or for the 25% increase in the control population - the imagined drop in total homicides was not due to the gun law, as Loftin claimed, but was due to other factors, such as the population drop!
If "guns cause murder," why doesn't Virginia, the alleged "easy purchase" source of DC's guns, have DC's murder rate? The black teenage male homicide rate in DC is 227 per 100,000, yet less than 7 for rural, middle-aged white men, the US group for whom gun ownership is highest - there is an inverse relationship between homicide and gun density. Homicide rates have been falling for decades for every group EXCEPT inner-city teenage males, the group for whom gun ownership is ALREADY illegal throughout the entire US.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO RESEARCH THAT SHOWS LICENSING, REGISTRATION, WAITING PERIODS, OR GUN BANS DECREASE CRIME IN THE LEAST - obviously criminals that murder, rape and deal drugs won't comply with any gun law. It is only good citizens that will be disarmed, defenseless, dialing 911, and dependent upon the dubious resources and questionable will of a capricious, rapacious, incompetent, and uncaring government.
THE 'ASSAULT WEAPONS" DECEPTION
It is not just the American Medical Association, Handgun Control Inc. (HCI) and the media that have hysterically and grossly exaggerated the criminal use of semiautomatic guns. The California Attorney General's Office conducted two statewide studies of the use of "assault weapons" in crime. Both the 1988 Helsley and the 1990 Johnson studies showed that such guns almost never used in crime, EVEN IN THE MAJOR CENTERS OF DRUG VIOLENCE. Criminals prefer concealable weapons, not big rifles and shotguns. The Attorney General office ignored and denied the existence of the studies until the studies were leaked to the press.
Of over two dozen published studies on "assault weapons," only one FLAWED "study" done by two newspaper reporters, the Cox newspaper study, suggested that, EVEN IN THE HIGHEST CRIME AREAS, semiautomatic guns were used in more than 0 to 3% of crimes. The Cox "study" is invalid because it was based on gun traces. The FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), and the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress have all explained why gun traces cannot be used for statistical purpose - simply, because guns are CHOSEN for tracing, such traces do not represent a true SAMPLING of the kinds of guns used in crime. THE COX "STUDY" EXAGGERATED THE USE OF "ASSAULT WEAPONS" IN CRIME FROM 3 TO OVER 100 TIMES, depending on the definition of "assault weapon" and the locale studied.
Almost all of these newly fearsome, expensive target rifles banned are functionally like guns designed 100 years ago! The Los Angeles riots and other disasters show us that these so-called "assault weapons" are often the most appropriate weapons for self-protection by good citizens against mob and gang violence.
THE "RELATIVES & FRIENDS" FALLACY
Gun prohibitionists would have us believe that most murders involve ordinary people driven to kill in a sudden fit of rage only because a gun was present. This is based on HCI's distortion of the FBI Uniform Crime Report statistics. To the FBI, a murderer or rapist that lives in the victim's apartment building or dueling drug dealers are "acquaintances." These are the "friends and family" that HCI says kill each other - DEFINITELY NOT LIKE THE FRIENDS AND FAMILY YOU AND I HAVE.
Almost all the "relatives" killed each year are the very same men, well-known to the police, that have been brutalizing their wives, girlfriends, and children for years - those men are killed in self-defense. Would it be more "politically correct" if those women or children were killed by their abusers?
Law professor Don Kates has written, "Far from being ordinary, otherwise law-abiding citizens, those who commit murders, as every study of homicide shows, are real criminals with long histories of violence against the people around them...Indicative of this are FBI statistics showing that 74.7% of persons arrested for murder had been arrested previously for a violent felony or burglary..."
CONCLUSIONS
As a dozen national studies show, including a study by the National Institute of Justice and two studies commissioned by gun-prohibition organization, GUNS DO PROTECT US! GUNS ARE USED DEFENSIVELY BY GOOD PEOPLE 1 GO 2.4 MILLION TIMES PER YEAR, far exceeding all reliable estimates of criminal misuse. Using a gun to resist a crime or assault is safer than not resisting at all or resisting with means other than firearms. Guns not only repel crime, guns deter crime as is shown by numerous surveys of criminals.
The studies proving the ineffectiveness and the dangers of gun prohibition are met with "if it saves only one life..." The most loving person, however, must admit that A GOOD PERSON'S LIFE LOST BECAUSE A GUN WAS ABSENT IS AT LEAST AS VALUABLE AS A LIFE LOST BECAUSE A GUN WAS PRESENT. Since 50 to 75 lives are saved by a gun for every life lost to a gun, we must see deceitful images that pluck at our heartstrings for the lies they are - not a basis for public policy - even when a doctor, a policeman, or a medical journal is telling the lie!
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
SPREAD THE TRUTH! Make and distribute copies of this brochure, even to advocates of "gun control."
WRITE YOUR FEDERAL AND STATE LEGISLATORS. Insist that public policy be formulated using honest data and that their be no taxpayer funding of biased or incompetent research by the CDC or any other tax-funded group. Insist that taxpayer-funded studies, like the assault weapon studies by the California Attorney General's Office, be made public, not suppressed because the results were "politically incorrect."
WRITE newspapers, TV, and medical journals and tell them that you will not tolerate dishonest or imbalanced reporting on gun control and other issues. Expose the fallacies and show them the honest data.
GET INVOLVED AND VOTE for legislators that are truthful and that support your freedoms to defend yourself, your family, and your community.
DONATE to our group and others that support your rights to protect yourself from criminals, crazies, and tyrants.
FOR FURTHER READING...
POINT BLANK by Gary Kleck Ph.D. is a comprehensive evaluation of the research on gun control and violence available from the publisher, Aldine de Gruyter, at: (914) 747-0110.
THE SAMURAI, THE MOUNTIE, AND THE COWBOY: SHOULD AMERICA ADOPT THE GUN CONTROLS OF OTHER DEMOCRACIES? By David Kopel JD is a comprehensive cross-cultural comparison of gun control and violence in other countries available from the publisher, Prometheus Press, at: (716) 691-0133.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
SO, IF IT'S WHITE FOLK WHAT IS GETTING POOR, DOES THAT MAKE IT REAL?
U.S. poverty rate rises, ranks of poor whites expand
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. poverty rate rose in 2004 for the fourth year in a row, driven by an increase in poor whites, the government said on Tuesday in a report that White House critics called proof the economic recovery has bypassed most Americans.
The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.7 percent from 12.5 percent in 2003, the
Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report. The ranks of the poor rose to 37.0 million, as 1.1 million more people slipped into poverty from the previous year, the report said.
The Bush administration called the 2004 increase "modest" and said the rise was not altogether surprising because poverty rates improve more slowly than unemployment rates or the economy in general after a recession.
The Census Bureau pointed to a similar lag in poverty-rate improvement after the recession of the early 1990s.
"We're seeing the same thing today," said Charles Nelson, assistant division chief in the Census' Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.
But some economists and critics of the Bush administration's policies said the data was still worse than expected.
"The economy looks pretty snappy from 30,000 feet, but when you get down and look at how actual working families are doing, they're falling behind year after year," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at Economic Policy Institute.
"The main reason for that appears to be the fact that the job market has yet to generate the kind of increases in living standards you'd expect at this point," he said.
According to the Census Bureau report, the average poverty threshold for a family of four was an income of $19,307. It was $15,067 for a family of three, $12,334 for a family of two and $9,645 for individuals.
WHITE AND MIDWESTERN
The data showed three groups driving changes in poverty in the United States -- whites, Midwesterners and people aged 18 to 64.
Non-Hispanic whites were the only group that saw its poverty rate rise, hitting 8.6 percent for 2004 compared with 8.2 percent in 2003. The poverty rate declined for Asians and held steady for blacks and Hispanics, the report showed.
The Midwest was the only region where income declined, down 2.8 percent to $44,657, the report said.
Nationwide, real median household income totaled $44,389, roughly flat from 2003, the Census Bureau said. Real median household income has crept lower each year since 1999, the data showed.
Among age groups, the poverty rate increased for those aged 18 to 64 while it declined for people over 64 and held unchanged at 17.8 percent for children, according to the data.
Democrats pounced on the data as evidence
President Bush's policies have not helped middle-class Americans.
"Today's Census reports confirm that the Bush administration's economic policies have not benefited most working families," said Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record), top Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee.
"Many Americans are feeling the squeeze of thinner paychecks in the face of soaring gas prices and health care costs, but there's no relief in sight from this administration," he said.
The number of people with insurance coverage rose, as did the number of people without it. That left the percentage of the U.S. population without health insurance coverage unchanged at 15.7 percent in 2004, Census said.
But Democrats and some health care policy advocates said that flat showing on a percentage basis masked the fact that a larger number of employed people had no health coverage.
Government health insurance programs covered a higher percentage of people in 2004 than the year prior, while employment-based insurance covered a smaller percentage.
"Had it not been for these (government) programs, the number of uninsured would have increased even more in each of the past several years," said Kathleen Stoll, Health Policy Director of Families USA, a liberal-leaning policy group.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
GREENSPAN, MASTER OF THE OBVIOUS
Greenspan and the Bubble
By PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
Most of what Alan Greenspan said at last week's conference in his honor made very good sense. But his words of wisdom come too late. He's like a man who suggests leaving the barn door ajar, and then - after the horse is gone - delivers a lecture on the importance of keeping your animals properly locked up.
Regular readers know that I have never forgiven the Federal Reserve chairman for his role in creating today's budget deficit. In 2001 Mr. Greenspan, a stern fiscal taskmaster during the Clinton years, gave decisive support to the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts, urging Congress to reduce the federal government's revenue so that it wouldn't pay off its debt too quickly.
Since then, federal debt has soared. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Greenspan has never admitted that he gave Congress bad advice. He has, however, gone back to lecturing us about the evils of deficits.
Now, it seems, he's playing a similar game with regard to the housing bubble.
At the conference, Mr. Greenspan didn't say in plain English that house prices are way out of line. But he never says things in plain English.
What he did say, after emphasizing the recent economic importance of rising house prices, was that "this vast increase in the market value of asset claims is in part the indirect result of investors accepting lower compensation for risk. Such an increase in market value is too often viewed by market participants as structural and permanent." And he warned that "history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low-risk premiums." I believe that translates as "Beware the bursting bubble."
But as recently as last October Mr. Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: "While local economies may experience significant speculative price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely."
Wait, it gets worse. These days Mr. Greenspan expresses concern about the financial risks created by "the prevalence of interest-only loans and the introduction of more-exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages." But last year he encouraged families to take on those very risks, touting the advantages of adjustable-rate mortgages and declaring that "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage."
If Mr. Greenspan had said two years ago what he's saying now, people might have borrowed less and bought more wisely. But he didn't, and now it's too late. There are signs that the housing market either has peaked already or soon will. And it will be up to Mr. Greenspan's successor to manage the bubble's aftermath.
How bad will that aftermath be? The U.S. economy is currently suffering from twin imbalances. On one side, domestic spending is swollen by the housing bubble, which has led both to a huge surge in construction and to high consumer spending, as people extract equity from their homes. On the other side, we have a huge trade deficit, which we cover by selling bonds to foreigners. As I like to say, these days Americans make a living by selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from China.
One way or another, the economy will eventually eliminate both imbalances. But if the process doesn't go smoothly - if, in particular, the housing bubble bursts before the trade deficit shrinks - we're going to have an economic slowdown, and possibly a recession. In fact, a growing number of economists are using the "R" word for 2006.
And here's where Mr. Greenspan is still saying foolish things. In his closing remarks he suggested that "an end to the housing boom could induce a significant rise in the personal saving rate, a decline in imports and a corresponding improvement in the current account deficit." Translation, I think: the end of the housing bubble will automatically cure the trade deficit, too.
Sorry, but no. A housing slowdown will lead to the loss of many jobs in construction and service industries but won't have much direct effect on the trade deficit. So those jobs won't be replaced by new jobs elsewhere until and unless something else, like a plunge in the value of the dollar, makes U.S. goods more competitive on world markets, leading to higher exports and lower imports.
So there's a rough ride ahead for the U.S. economy. And it's partly Mr. Greenspan's fault.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.comTuesday, August 30, 2005
WAIT 'TILL THE PROPANE AND BEER RUNS OUT...
Big Easy' bites back: shrimp, warm beer, Hurricane drinks
NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - A sumptuous aroma of barbecued shrimp, the promise of warm beer and Hurricane cocktails drew disbelieving storm survivors to the only restaurant still open in the battered French Quarter of New Orleans.
Just off fabled Bourbon Street, The Oceana Grill beat the blackout with candles on tables and a makeshift, but mouthwatering, menu of gumbo, price 10 dollars, and Cajun-style barbecued shrimp, a steal at 15 bucks.
For diners who sweated through a grim day-and-a-half dodging rising floodwaters and terrifying winds, the sight of shrimps doused in a luscious, thick, red sauce, was too good to resist.
And for once, there were no complaints at the stale bread on the side.
"I found it this morning, and I bought a bunch of gumbo," said New Yorker Al Jennings, 53, who tried to evacuate with his friend Maria Torres, 36, from San Francisco, but couldn't get a flight or a rental car before Hurricane Katrina struck on Monday.
"We came back, saw it was still open and stayed for dinner. It's good food, the barbecued shrimp was great. The best I've ever had."
Further down Bourbon Street, a bar called Tricon House flogged off bottles of Budweiser and water for three dollars and cigarettes for five.
"Normally we sell beer at 4.25, now we are selling them for three dollars, we are doing the opposite of price gouging," said bartender Tammy Hoffman, 41.
"You don't want to hurt your neighbor."
Back at Oceana, a quiet settled over the restaurant, far removed from the laughter and revelry that normally fills one of the world's most renowned nightlife districts.
But diners seemed delighted that there was at least somewhere they could gather, swap stories and offer one another support over a glass of Hurricane cocktail, mixed from various rum varieties and grenadine plus orange and passion-fruit juices.
"Warm beer, warm beer, we have got the best warm beer in town," cried bartender Michelle Achee, as another group of surprised customers stepped through the door.
"I have watched Mardi Gras, I have watched other storms ... but this mood is a little heavier, it is a little darker. This is the first time I have been scared, really scared."
As she spoke, Achee pointed out a group of young girls walking down debris-strewn Bourbon Street passing on news culled from a phone call to friends in New York, to trapped residents and tourists with no televisions or radios.
"Those girls are town criers, they are making sure everyone has got the proper news. One of them is a stripper -- and she is a good one."
Word spread fast that another nearby bar, the legendary Johnny White's, also defied appalling conditions to keep lining them up -- as usual.
"They say that place doesn't even have doors because it never closes," said Achee.
Another group of girls said they had seen people walking down the streets with shopping carts packed with looted goods.
Police scotched rumors that National Guardsmen had been handing out aid at the shop and confirmed that the goods were indeed stolen.
"'We are not handing out food but we are not stopping them,'" one of the girls, Kerry Allen from Tucson, Arizona quoted police. She admitting that her group was so hungry they had also gone inside for some food.
"We got crackers and soup and veg and stuff like that -- there were cameras in my face, I am just hoping nobody saw me ... I felt really guilty but had nothing to eat."
Other customers were already looking forward to Oceana's promised plat du jour for Wednesday: barbecued steaks and burgers.
Amazingly, although without electrical power, the cooks at Oceana, a typical New Orleans fish house, managed to whip up meals on gas-powered grills.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
WHAT POVERTY? GWB AND FATCAT BUDDIES ARE DOING SWELL!
Poverty Rate Rises to 12.7 Percent
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - Even with a robust economy that was adding jobs last year, the number of Americans who fell into poverty rose to 37 million — up 1.1 million from 2003 — according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday.
It marks the fourth straight increase in the government's annual poverty measure.
The Census Bureau also said household income remained flat, and that the number of people without health insurance edged up by about 800,000 to 45.8 million people.
"I was surprised," said Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. "I thought things would have turned around by now."
While disappointed, the Bush administration — which has not seen a decline in poverty numbers since the president took office — said it was not surprised by the new statistics.
Commerce Department spokeswoman E.R. Anderson said they mirror a trend in the '80s and '90s in which unemployment peaks were followed by peaks in poverty and then by a decline in the poverty numbers the next year.
"We hope this is it, that this is the last gasp of indicators for the recession," she said.
Democrats seized on the numbers as proof the nation is headed in the wrong direction.
"America should be showing true leadership on the great moral issues of our time — like poverty — instead of allowing these situations to get worse," said
John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate. He has started a poverty center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Overall, the nation's poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year. Of the 37 million living below the poverty level, close to a third were children.
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, during the Clinton administration, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold. Since then, the number of people in poverty has increased steadily from 32.9 million in 2001, when the economy slipped into recession, to 35.8 million in 2003.
The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four was considered living in poverty last year if annual income was $19,307 or less. For a family of two, it was $12,334.
The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year — the best showing for the labor market since 1999. By contrast, there was only a tiny increase of 94,000 jobs in 2003 and job losses in both 2002 and 2001.
Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty — from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate for whites rose from 8.2 percent in 2003 to 8.6 percent last year. There was no noticeable change for blacks and Hispanics.
The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups, blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.
Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.
The number of people without health insurance coverage grew from 45 million to 45.8 million last year, but the number of people with health insurance grew by 2 million.
Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an "increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children's health insurance program that offset a decline in employment-based coverage."
The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau's Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.
___
On the Net:
Interactive map with state-by-state figures: http://wid.ap.org/interactives/census/050830poverty.html
Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
THE DESCENT INTO MADNESS BEGINS
Crews Pass Dead to Reach Storm Survivors
NEW ORLEANS (Associated Press) - Rescuers along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast pushed aside the dead to reach the living Tuesday in a race against time and rising waters, while New Orleans sank deeper into crisis and Louisiana's governor ordered storm refugees out of this drowning city.
Two levees broke and sent water coursing into the streets of the Big Easy a full day after New Orleans appeared to have escaped widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina. An estimated 80 percent of the below-sea-level city was under water, up to 20 feet deep in places, with miles and miles of homes swamped.
"The situation is untenable," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. "It's just heartbreaking."
The number of dead was still unclear, a day after Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds. But one Mississippi county alone was believed to have lost as many as 80 people — 30 of them from a beachfront apartment house that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water. And Louisiana said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead.
"We're not even dealing with dead bodies," Nagin said. "They're just pushing them on the side."
The flooding in New Orleans grew worse by the minute, prompting the evacuation of hotels and hospitals and an audacious plan to drop huge sandbags from helicopters to close up one of the breached levees. At the same time, looting broke out in some neighborhoods, the sweltering city of 480,000 had no drinkable water, and the electricity could be out for weeks.
With water rising perilously inside the Superdome, Blanco said the tens of thousands of refugees now huddled there and other shelters in New Orleans would have to be evacuated.
She asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer.
"That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors," she said. "Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild."
All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters pulled out shellshocked and bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. The Coast Guard said it has rescued 1,200 people by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn't make it.
"Oh my God, it was hell," said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans' low-lying Ninth Ward. "We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos."
Frank Mills was in a boarding house in the same neighborhood when water started swirling up toward the ceiling and he fled to the roof. Two elderly residents never made it out, and a third was washed away trying to climb onto the roof.
"He was kind of on the edge of the roof, catching his breath," Mills said. "Next thing I knew, he came floating past me."
Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. An untold number who heeded evacuation orders were displaced and 40,000 were in Red Cross shelters, with officials saying it could be weeks, if not months, before most will be able to return.
Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and
President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage.
Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown warned that structural damage to homes, diseases from animal carcasses and chemicals in floodwaters made it unsafe for residents to come home anytime soon. And a mass return also was discouraged to keep from interfering with rescue and recovery efforts.
That was made tough enough by the vast expanse of floodwaters in coastal areas that took an eight-hour pounding from Katrina's howling winds and up to 15 inches of rainfall. From the air, neighborhood after neighborhood looked like nothing but islands of rooftops surrounded by swirling, tea-colored water.
In New Orleans, the flooding actually got worse Tuesday. Failed pumps and levees apparently spilled from Lake Pontchartrain into streets. The rising water forced hotels to evacuate, led a hospital to move boatlift patients to emergency shelters, and drove the staff of New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper out of its offices.
Officials planned to use helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags into the breach, and expressed confidence the problem could be solved. But if the water rose a couple feet higher, it could wipe out water system for whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief Terry Ebbert.
In devastated Biloxi, Miss., areas that were not underwater were littered with tree trunks, downed power lines and chunks of broken concrete. Some buildings were flattened.
The string of floating barge casinos crucial to the coastal economy were a shambles. At least three of them were picked up by the storm surge and carried inland, their barnacle-covered hulls sitting up to 200 yards inland.
The deadliest spot yet appeared to be Biloxi's Quiet Water Beach apartments, where authorities said about 30 people were washed away. All that was left of the red-brick building was a concrete slab.
"We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window and then we swam with the current," 55-year-old Joy Schovest said through tears. "It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim."
"What I'm authorized to say now is we expect the death toll to be higher than anything we've ever seen before," said Jim Pollard, civil defense spokesman for Mississippi's Harrison County, which includes Biloxi and Gulfport.
Asked if the toll could be higher than Hurricane Camille in 1969 when 131 were killed in Mississippi and 40 went missing, Pollard referred back to his statement and said, "That would be higher wouldn't it?"
Said Biloxi Mayor A. J. Holloway: "This is our tsunami."
Looting became a problem in both Biloxi and in New Orleans, in some cases in full view of police and National Guardsmen.
On New Orleans' Canal Street, which actually resembled a canal, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores, some packing plastic garbage cans with loot to float down the street. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store.
"No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store!"
Outside the broken shells of Biloxi's casinos, people picked through slot machines to see if they still contained coins. "People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus," said Marty Desei, owner of a Super 8 motel.
Insurance experts estimated the storm will result in up to $25 billion in insured losses. That means Katrina could prove more costly than record-setting Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused an inflation-adjusted $21 billion in losses.
Oil prices jumped by more than $3 a barrel on Tuesday, climbing above $70 a barrel, amid uncertainty about the extent of the damage to the Gulf region's refineries and drilling platforms.
By midday Tuesday, Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression, with winds around 35 mph. It was moving northeast through Tennessee at around 21 mph, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes.
Katrina left 11 people dead in its soggy jog across South Florida last week, as a much weaker storm.Monday, August 29, 2005
HALEY BARBOUR IS A CROOKED DUMBASS FATCAT CRACKER POLITICIAN
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind”
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing
President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.
In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s strong statement affirming Bush’s CO2 promise former RNC Chief Barbour responded with an urgent memo to the White House.
Barbour, who had served as RNC Chair and Bush campaign strategist, was now representing the president’s major donors from the fossil fuel industry who had enlisted him to map a Bush energy policy that would be friendly to their interests. His credentials ensured the new administration’s attention.
The document, titled “Bush-Cheney Energy Policy & CO2,” was addressed to Vice President Cheney, whose energy task force was then gearing up, and to several high-ranking officials with strong connections to energy and automotive concerns keenly interested in the carbon dioxide issue, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, White House chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Nick Calio. Barbour pointedly omitted the names of Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, both of whom were on record supporting CO2 caps. Barbour’s memo chided these administration insiders for trying to address global warming which Barbour dismissed as a radical fringe issue.
“A moment of truth is arriving,” Barbour wrote, “in the form of a decision whether this Administration’s policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant. The question is whether environmental policy still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore.” He derided the idea of regulating CO2 as “eco-extremism,” and chided them for allowing environmental concerns to “trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years.”
The memo had impact. “It was terse and highly effective, written for people without much time by a person who controls the purse strings for the Republican Party,” said John Walke, a high-ranking air quality official in the Clinton administration.
On March 13, Bush reversed his previous position, announcing he would not back a CO2 restriction using the language and rationale provided by Barbour. Echoing Barbour’s memo, Bush said he opposed mandatory CO2 caps, due to “the incomplete state of scientific knowledge” about global climate change.
Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.
Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.
In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.
www.StopGlobalWarming.orgMonday, August 29, 2005
WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, MORONS
Brace for more Katrinas, say experts
PARIS (AFP) - For all its numbing ferocity, Hurricane Katrina will not be a unique event, say scientists, who say that global warming appears to be pumping up the power of big Atlantic storms.
2005 is on track to be the worst-ever year for hurricanes, according to experts measuring ocean temperatures and trade winds -- the two big factors that breed these storms in the Caribbean and tropical North Atlantic.
Earlier this month, Tropical Storm Risk, a London-based consortium of experts, predicted that the region would see 22 tropical storms during the six-month June-November season, the most ever recorded and more than twice the average annual tally since records began in 1851.
Seven of these storms would strike the United States, of which three would be hurricanes, it said.
Already, 2004 and 2003 were exceptional years: they marked the highest two-year totals ever recorded for overall hurricane activity in the North Atlantic.
This increase has also coincided with a big rise in Earth's surface temperature in recent years, driven by greenhouse gases that cause the Sun's heat to be stored in the sea, land and air rather than radiate back out to space.
But experts are cautious, also noting that hurricane numbers seem to undergo swings, over decades.
About 90 tropical storms -- a term that includes hurricanes and their Asian counterparts, typhoons -- occur each year.
The global total seems to be stable, although regional tallies vary a lot, and in particular seem to be influenced by the El Nino weather pattern in the Western Pacific.
"(Atlantic) cyclones have been increasing in numbers since 1995, but one can't say with certainty that there is a link to global warming," says Patrick Galois with the French weather service Meteo-France.
"There have been other high-frequency periods for storms, such as in the 1950s and 60s, and it could be that what we are seeing now is simply part of a cycle, with highs and lows."
On the other hand, more and more scientists estimate that global warming, while not necessarily making hurricanes more frequent or likelier to make landfall, is making them more vicious.
Hurricanes derive from clusters of thunderstorms over tropical waters that are warmer than 27.2 C (81 C).
A key factor in ferocity is the temperature differential between the sea surface and the air above the storm. The warmer the sea, the bigger the differential and the bigger the potential to "pump up" the storm.
Just a tiny increase in surface temperature can have an extraordinary effect, says researcher Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In a study published in Nature in July, Emanuel found that the destructive power of North Atlantic storms had doubled over the past 30 years, during which the sea-surface temperature rose by only 0.5 C (0.9 F).
Emanuel's yardstick is storm duration and windpower: hurricanes lasted longer and packed higher windspeeds than before.
Another factor in destructiveness is flooding. Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research suggests that hurricanes are dumping more rainfall as warmer seas suck more moisture into the air, swelling the stormclouds.
The indirect evidence for this is that water vapour over oceans worldwide has increased by about two percent since 1988. But data is sketchy for precipitation dropped by recent hurricanes.
"The intensity of and rainfalls from hurricanes are probably increasing, even if this increase cannot yet be proven with a formal statistical test," Trenberth wrote in the US journal Science in June. He said computer models "suggest a shift" toward the extreme in in hurricane intensities.
Monday, August 29, 2005
WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' URBAN GROWTH RESTRICTIONS
Hurricane Could Leave 1 Million Homeless
By MATT CRENSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans on Monday, it could turn one of America's most charming cities into a vast cesspool tainted with toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins released by floodwaters from the city's legendary cemeteries.
Experts have warned for years that the levees and pumps that usually keep New Orleans dry have no chance against a direct hit by a Category 5 storm.
That's exactly what Katrina was as it churned toward the city. With top winds of 165 mph and the power to lift sea level by as much as 28 feet above normal, the storm threatened an environmental disaster of biblical proportions, one that could leave more than 1 million people homeless.
"All indications are that this is absolutely worst-case scenario," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, said Sunday afternoon.
The center's latest computer simulations indicate that by Tuesday, vast swaths of New Orleans could be under water up to 30 feet deep. In the French Quarter, the water could reach 20 feet, easily submerging the district's iconic cast-iron balconies and bars.
Estimates predict that 60 percent to 80 percent of the city's houses will be destroyed by wind. With the flood damage, most of the people who live in and around New Orleans could be homeless.
"We're talking about in essence having — in the continental United States — having a refugee camp of a million people," van Heerden said.
Aside from Hurricane Andrew, which struck Miami in 1992, forecasters have no experience with Category 5 hurricanes hitting densely populated areas.
"Hurricanes rarely sustain such extreme winds for much time. However we see no obvious large-scale effects to cause a substantial weakening the system and it is expected that the hurricane will be of Category 4 or 5 intensity when it reaches the coast,"
National Hurricane Center meteorologist Richard Pasch said.
As they raced to put meteorological instruments in Katrina's path Sunday, wind engineers had little idea what their equipment would record.
"We haven't seen something this big since we started the program," said Kurt Gurley, a University of Florida engineering professor. He works for the Florida Coastal Monitoring Program, which is in its seventh year of making detailed measurements of hurricane wind conditions using a set of mobile weather stations.
Experts have warned about New Orleans' vulnerability for years, chiefly because Louisiana has lost more than a million acres of coastal wetlands in the past seven decades. The vast patchwork of swamps and bayous south of the city serves as a buffer, partially absorbing the surge of water that a hurricane pushes ashore.
Experts have also warned that the ring of high levees around New Orleans, designed to protect the city from floodwaters coming down the Mississippi, will only make things worse in a powerful hurricane. Katrina is expected to push a 28-foot storm surge against the levees. Even if they hold, water will pour over their tops and begin filling the city as if it were a sinking canoe.
After the storm passes, the water will have nowhere to go.
In a few days, van Heerden predicts, emergency management officials are going to be wondering how to handle a giant stagnant pond contaminated with building debris, coffins, sewage and other hazardous materials.
"We're talking about an incredible environmental disaster," van Heerden said.
He puts much of the blame for New Orleans' dire situation on the very levee system that is designed to protect southern Louisiana from Mississippi River floods.
Before the levees were built, the river would top its banks during floods and wash through a maze of bayous and swamps, dropping fine-grained silt that nourished plants and kept the land just above sea level.
The levees "have literally starved our wetlands to death" by directing all of that precious silt out into the Gulf of Mexico, van Heerden said.
It has been 40 years since New Orleans faced a hurricane even comparable to Katrina. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm, submerged some parts of the city to a depth of seven feet.
Since then, the Big Easy has had nothing but near misses. In 1998, Hurricane Georges headed straight for New Orleans, then swerved at the last minute to strike Mississippi and Alabama. Hurricane Lili blew herself out at the mouth of the Mississippi in 2002. And last year's Hurricane Ivan obligingly curved to the east as it came ashore, barely grazing a grateful city.
Monday, August 29, 2005
OKAY NO FUCKING AROUND NOW, THIS *IS* THE BIG ONE
Quote from the National Weather Service, New Orleans:
http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/la/allwarnings.html
HURRICANE Katrina...A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.
MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.
THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.
HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.
AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.
POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.
THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
FARMER'S ALMANAC KNOWS ALL, SEES ALL
Almanac Warns of Temperature Fluctuations
By JERRY HARKAVY, Associated Press
LEWISTON, Maine - Get your sweaters, mittens and hats ready. The Farmers' Almanac warns that the coming winter will bring unusually sharp fluctuations in temperature, and says readers "may be reminded of riding a roller, or in this case, 'polar' coaster."
"Mother Nature seems to be in the mood for some amusement this winter season," the almanac said in its 2006 edition, just off the presses.
The coldest weather will be in the Northeast, which also will get plenty of snow, the almanac said. It predicts cold weather for the South and Mid-Atlantic regions and snowy but mild weather in the Great Lakes and Midwest.
Parts of the Rockies and the Great Plains may have drier-than-normal weather, adding to the area's continuing drought, but wetter-than-normal weather is predicted for the Pacific Northwest and lower Texas.
The 189-year-old almanac claims 80 percent to 85 percent accuracy for the forecasts written under the name Caleb Weatherbee.
The forecasts are prepared two years in advance using a secret formula based on sunspots, the position of the planets and the tidal action of the moon, said editor Peter Geiger.
The
National Weather Service questions the accuracy of such long-range forecasts, but almanac officials say its predictions stack up well against those of traditional meteorologists.
Chris Vaccaro, a weather service spokesman in Silver Spring, Md., wouldn't comment on the almanac's predictions without knowing "the methodology or algorithms" used to produce them, but said any forecast more than a week in advance is subject to change.
The almanac, not to be confused with the New Hampshire-based Old Farmer's Almanac 24 years its senior, claims a circulation of nearly 5 million. Most are sold to businesses that give them away as a goodwill promotion. Other versions are sold by retailers in the United States and Canada.
This year's almanac contains the usual mix of recipes, anecdotes, corny jokes, quizzes and helpful hints.
"In today's busy world, people want an escape," said managing editor Sondra Duncan. "They look to the almanac to connect to the simple pleasures."
Pumpkins get plenty of ink this year, first in recipes that include pumpkin pie, pumpkin gratin, pumpkin dip and pumpkin pancakes.
But an article also describes how a hollowed-out pumpkin can be used as a boat, as is done each year at the Windsor-West Hants Pumpkin Festival and Regatta in Nova Scotia.
Potential participants beware: "Your pumpkin, or personal vegetable craft (PVC) as they are known, can rarely be used twice due to structural ravages," the almanac says.
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On the Net:
Farmers' Almanac: http://www.farmersalmanac.comSunday, August 28, 2005
FOOLISH GRASSHOPPERS, WINTER COME SOON
Equity Is Altering Spending Habits and View of Debt
By David Streitfeld, Los Angeles Times
As they happily watch their houses swell in value, Americans are changing their attitudes toward mortgage debt. Increasingly, a home is no longer a nest egg whose equity should never be touched, but a seemingly magical ATM enabling the owner to live it up or just live.
Homeowners took $59 billion in cash out of their houses in the second quarter, double the amount in the 2004 quarter and 16 times the average rate of the mid-1990s, according to data released this month by mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
People are cashing out so quickly that the term "homeowner" may soon be inaccurate. Fifty years ago, Americans owned, on average, three-quarters of their house and the lender owned the rest. These days, it's approaching an even split.
This spend-now-rather-than-save-for-later phenomenon has produced undeniable benefits. Experts attribute much of the nation's economic growth to cash-out refinancings, home equity loans and other methods of tapping rising home values. And additional real estate investments financed by home equity have contributed to the rising home prices that bring owners such pleasure.
But the spending spree has a price. With the savings rate at zero, consumers' eagerness to tap home equity is only worsening their retirement outlook, financial advisors say.
If mortgage rates rise sharply or home prices fall, many homeowners could be in financial turmoil. They may be unable to service their loans, or could even find that their homes are worth less than their mortgages.
Such a prospect seems unimaginably distant to Doug Levy, a university administrator in San Francisco.
When his two-bedroom condominium rose in value by 10% — which took nine months in the hot Bay Area real estate market — Levy refinanced. That increased the size of his mortgage but gave him $25,000 to pay bills and take a modest skiing vacation in British Columbia. He's considering tapping his equity again if his condo continues to appreciate.
"It's like I'm sleeping in my piggy bank," said Levy, 44. "In this market, real estate is a liquid asset."
Bill and Barbara Brockmann have a different view of their house. The retired Huntington Beach couple is sitting on half a million dollars of equity, but they're ignoring it. They aren't drawing on it to buy a new car or invest in a condo in Miami.
"I don't like debt," said Bill Brockmann, 79. "I don't buy anything I can't pay for."
Such thriftiness has gone out of fashion. What was once considered undesirable — taking on large debt — is now seen as smart. And what used to be smart — becoming debt-free — is described as imprudent.
"If you paid your mortgage off, it means you probably did not manage your funds efficiently over the years," said David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and author of "Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?" "It's as if you had 500,000 dollar bills stuffed in your mattress."
He called it "very unsophisticated."
Anthony Hsieh, chief executive of LendingTree Loans, an Internet-based mortgage company, used a more disparaging term. "If you own your own home free and clear, people will often refer to you as a fool. All that money sitting there, doing nothing."
The financial services industry is doing all it can to avoid letting consumers be foolish. Ditech.com touts home loans as a way to pay off credit cards, and Morgan Stanley says they're a good way to fund education expenses. Wells Fargo suggests taking a chunk out of your house to finance "a dream wedding."
One obvious reason for the 69% rise in mortgage debt over the last five years is the exploding cost of homes, which has far outstripped wage growth. That's led many buyers to interest-only loans and skimpy down payments, both of which minimize their equity.
The proportion of buyers whose down payment was less than 5% of the purchase price rose from 30.6% in 2000 to 38.1% this year, according to a new study by SMR Research Corp.
In California, housing prices have increased so much relative to incomes that buyers must stretch all they can.
Federal guidelines recommend homeowners devote less than $30 of every $100 in pretax income to housing. But 40% of Californians exceed that, according to a new report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
That's higher than in 1990, when the previous real estate boom was cresting after several years in which housing-price rises outpaced salary gains. The figure then was 36%.
Some Californians devote much more than a third of their incomes to housing. The report estimates that about one in seven homeowners in the state are using at least half of their income to pay for their house.
Many of these are first-time home buyers, and many of them are relatively young. The report calculates that the greatest increase in homeownership rates between 2000 and 2003 came in the 30-to-34 age group. Second-highest was 25-to-29.
"I think what's happening is that a lot of younger renters feel the ship is passing them by," said Hans P. Johnson, one of the authors of the report, titled "California's Newest Homeowners: Affording the Unaffordable." "If they don't buy a house now, they think, they never will."
If their incomes expand as they age, these new homeowners may pay down their mortgage debt. On the other hand, they might devote their additional spending power to toys, trips and other fun things, carrying their indebtedness forever.
For Levy, the university administrator, cashing in so quickly made sense. He bought his condo in expensive Marin County, north of San Francisco, for $510,000 in April 2004. The bank offered to finance the whole thing, but he decided to be a little conservative and put 5% down.
By January, the condo was worth $555,000, and Levy refinanced. He took out $25,000 in cash, less than the bank offered to give him. The money paid off what he describes as "really ugly" credit card debt.
The interest rate on the credit card had been more than double the rate on his mortgage, so he saved about $600 a month. Furthermore, his mortgage interest is tax-deductible; his credit card interest was not.
"It used to be that all debt was created equal and all debt was evil," Levy said. "But the tax breaks alone make a pretty compelling case to use home equity to finance just about everything."
He still has law school debts. He's tempted to dip in to his condo again — especially considering it is now worth about $600,000.
"There is no longer an incentive to paying off your mortgage," said Levy. "The only way I'll ever pay mine off is if I win the lottery."
That's probably the only way he'll ever be able to stop working, too. "I'm never going to be able to retire, because I'll never have enough money in the bank."
The temptation to add debt can be overwhelming. Between 1997 and 2003, the percentage of people who owned their own homes outright, without any mortgage debt, declined from 38.9% to 34.6%, according to Census figures.
"Why can't people stay on diets? Because once you get down to a certain level, you start feeling good, and then you splurge," said Richard Targett, a research analyst with Ernst & Young. "So when your home goes up in value, you take that cruise. You figure, I got money in my house, I didn't earn it, let me spend some."
But he warned that if home prices stopped their rapid ascent — which might be happening this summer — Doug Levy won't be the only one who has to have a job for the rest of his life.
"If you're not working, where would you get the two grand you need every month for your mortgage?" Targett said. "We're living longer, retiring younger, and don't want to give up our lifestyles. Something's got to give."
The old way had much less built-in risk.
For the Brockmanns and many others who bought their homes in the two decades after World War II, a mortgage was something that started off big and slowly shrank. Just as retirement loomed, it dwindled to nothing. Making that last payment was a welcome milestone for those who knew they now had to live without a weekly paycheck.
This too is changing. In 1997, the median length of time remaining on an older homeowner's mortgage was a decade, according to Census figures. By 2003, the median was 14 years. During that time, the number of older homeowners who owed more than $300,000 on their home went up tenfold.
New products give homeowners increasing leeway as to how much equity they can tap and how fast they can tap it. Credit cards that allow consumers to draw on their home equity loans are one such device.
CMG Financial Services, a mortgage company in San Ramon, Calif., introduced another tool this summer: a combination checking account and mortgage.
It works like this: Your paycheck is deposited into your account and immediately applied to your mortgage principal. Over the course of the month, as you spend money on food, gas and other necessities, the principal creeps back up. But the result is that your mortgage debt gets paid off more quickly.
That's the theory, at least. Of course, if you're indulgent, you can pay much less of your mortgage — like none. Any shortfall is added on to the principal.
"This loan gives you a lot of power," said CMG's vice president of marketing, Doug Nesbit. "You can use it, you can abuse it."
In the old days, retirees who were house-rich and cash-poor generally downsized, perhaps moving in with their kids or retiring to the Sunbelt. To help consumers avoid those fates, reverse mortgages have been developed, which allow them to drain the equity from their houses while still living in them.
Irvine-based Financial Freedom Corp. says one of the major reasons people buy its reverse mortgages is "lifestyle enhancement" — extra money to have fun. Financial Freedom says it is on track this year to nearly double the 5,000 reverse mortgages it sold in 2004 in California.
The Brockmanns have resisted all such newfangled products, as well as the advice of their 55-year-old daughter. "Take out a line of credit and go travel," Sandi Bandfield said she had suggested. "Interest rates are so low, your payments would be next to nothing. You'd be enjoying life."
They already do. The couple's four-bedroom house is about four miles from the ocean, in a section of Huntington Beach just off the Beach Boulevard commercial strip. They bought it in 1964, using their accumulated savings from three previous houses to make a down payment. The purchase price: $26,500.
After 30 years, when the loan was paid off, they got a home equity loan to help their four children buy their own properties. That's it for debt.
"I don't know of any bills we have," said Bill Brockmann, who spent most of his career in the electrical industry. "My pension and
Social Security aren't huge, but between them we do nicely. We don't require a whole lot."
As neighbors have come and gone, the couple stayed put. Late last year, the house next door was listed for $595,000, a high-water mark for the neighborhood. Everyone said the sellers were never going to get it, and then they did.
But even this couple has felt the lure of being a landlord. "We had good luck with a rental in Bellflower for five years," Bill Brockmann said. "After that couple moved out, the next was there only two or three months and kind of wrecked the place. I had to keep going back and forth. The upkeep!"
They sold the rental a decade ago. No regrets.
For their eldest daughter, the more houses the better. Bandfield was a medical transcriptionist until recently; her husband Bud, 49, is an independent electrical contractor. They bought their home in Boulder Creek, Calif., near Santa Cruz, for $157,000 in 1989. Substantially remodeled, it's now worth at least four times that.
Last year, the couple began talking about retirement. "We don't want to work forever, and someone's got to pay for this house," Bandfield said. "We have a nice life, but nothing in savings to speak of. I saw us relegated to a dinky gray condo in Las Vegas if we didn't do something."
Stocks? "I dabbled. I think I made $26 last year." Social Security? "It's piddly. Who wants to live like that?"
Real estate seemed the obvious, and only, answer. The couple attended seminars, began to educate themselves. They remortgaged their home to buy a three-bedroom in Visalia, then a two-bedroom cabin near Lake Arrowhead. More recently, they bought two houses in Colorado.
Buying houses to rent them out is a popular strategy. The National Association of Realtors estimates that as many as a quarter of all homes were purchased last year by investors, drawn by the lure of immediate rental income and long-term appreciation.
Bandfield's goal is 10 properties, each yielding $1,000 a month above the mortgage and upkeep. That would nicely fund their retirement. "If we don't do anything," she said, "we're going to have nothing."
Sunday, August 28, 2005
NONE SO BLIND AS THEM WHO WILL NOT SEE
Debt Load Makes Americans Vulnerable
By EILEEN ALT POWELL, Associated Press
NEW YORK - Buy now, pay later: It's been the mantra of American consumers for decades. The results are obvious in the ballooning balances on credit cards and mortgage loans, and in the mushrooming U.S. trade deficit, which reflects the nation's nearly insatiable appetite for cheap, imported goods.
Low interest rates, especially since the end of the 2001 recession, have fed the debt beast at home, allowing American consumers to accumulate nearly $11 trillion in debt as they buy more homes, more cars, more clothes, more dinners out. At the same time, foreign investment in the United States is helping to keep the dollar strong, which holds down prices on those imports that Americans covet.
But what would happen if interest rates suddenly weren't so benign, or if foreign governments, corporations and individuals stopped investing so heavily in America? Some analysts fear such actions could trigger doomsday scenarios in which the bills come due and Americans can't pay, with devastating consequences for the entire economy.
The Associated Press asked some experts to discuss what could burst the debt bubble in three areas that appear most vulnerable, and to offer a rebuttal from the perspective of people who believe that while the country may be in debt, it's not in danger.
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CREDIT CARD CRUNCH
The tool that has made it ever so easy for Americans to buy and buy and buy is the credit card. And buy they have.
Outstanding balances on credit cards have risen to more than $800 billion, or some $7,200 per U.S. household. That's the equivalent of three plasma TVs, or 24 iPod digital music players, or more than 1,200 Big Mac meals.
It's more than double the indebtedness of a decade ago — and it doesn't include an additional $1.3 trillion in debt for cars, appliances and personal loans.
With the savings rate hovering near all-time lows, most consumers don't have reserves, and so they're vulnerable to an economic shock.
What if interest rates suddenly shot up, say 3 percentage points or 4 percentage points, requiring burdened borrowers to greatly increase the amounts they have to pay each month on their debt?
"It would undermine the housing market, and could quickly result in credit problems that would affect the entire (American) financial system," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a forecasting firm in suburban Philadelphia.
Such an event isn't beyond the realm of possibility if global investors, for instance, lose confidence in the U.S. economy and quickly shift their money elsewhere, or if a terror attack riles financial markets.
Some American borrowers already are in trouble, contributing to a sharp rise in bankruptcy filings. Howard Dvorkin, head of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., warns that many more could be capsized soon.
As the
Federal Reserve continues to push interest rates higher, the rates on many of the nation's cards are going up in lockstep. Meanwhile, banks are raising minimum payments, in some cases doubling them. And starting in October, a new bankruptcy law will make it much harder for consumers to be relieved of their debt.
"You'll see creditors get more aggressive at collecting debt, the reason being that they can," Dvorkin says.
That will turn many borrowers into "the walking wounded," struggling to keep up with card payments and limited in what they can buy — a massive drag on the U.S. economy.
Robert Manning, a humanities professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of "Credit Card Nation," fears the rising debt burdens will have a tremendous social impact, too.
"We're looking at the possibility that millions won't be able to retire, that they'll have to work well into their 70s" as they juggle their debt, he says.
THE REBUTTAL: Skeptics don't see a big economic shock in the offing, arguing that doomsayers have warned for years that the sky is falling. Economy.com's Zandi says interest rates are most likely to go up at a measured pace, giving most consumers time to adjust to higher payments, and they may see their credit limits cut.
Still, much of the debt in recent years has been taken on by lower-income and lower-middle-income families, who borrowed aggressively to maintain their standard of living as wages stagnated. "Going forward it will be harder for them to maintain their spending — and their living standards," Zandi says.
Since the U.S. economy counts on consumer spending for two-thirds of its output, that translates to "living with slower growth" in the future, he says.
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MORTGAGE MANIA
Americans have taken on more than $8.8 trillion in mortgages to buy homes and apartments, up an astounding 42 percent since the 2001 recession. By most reckoning, this is "good" debt because consumers are investing in appreciating assets — and they get a tax break on interest payments to boot.
The fast run-up in prices in recent years has made many homeowners feel wealthy, so they can ramp up day-to-day spending.
But wait: Millions of Americans have taken advantage of low rates in recent years to refinance their mortgages, with as many as eight in 10 in some quarters taking on larger loans so they can cash out some of their equity, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac in McLean, Va.
And wait again: Borrowing against home equity rose to a record $715 billion last year, and it's projected to rise more this year, according to SMR Research in Hackettstown, N.J.
Why does that matter? Because the more home equity Americans tap now, the less they'll have in reserve for retirement or for emergencies.
The run-up in home prices — what Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan has described as "froth" — increasingly looks like a bubble.
"The bigger bubble is actually in the financing of homes," says economist Ed Yardeni of Oak Associates in Akron, Ohio. "Mortgage lenders have loosened their lending standards. Rather than telling a lot of would-be buyers, particularly in places like California, that they don't qualify, they're coming up with all sorts of so-called innovative alternative financing."
So millions are buying homes with no down payments. Or they have adjustable-rate mortgages or interest-only mortgages or optional payment mortgages.
What brings such a great party to an end?
"Interest rates going up just 2 percent would do it," says Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. That, he says, would suppress prices, lower sales and put a real squeeze on those who were marginally qualified to buy because their payments would suddenly go up.
"Some people will lose their homes," Morici says. "Many people will just be hurting."
One mortgage insurer, The PMI Group, Inc. of Walnut Creek, Calif., believes the party is closer to last call in some cities than in others.
PMI's most recent quarterly survey found that the risk of home price declines has increased in 36 of the nation's 50 largest markets, with the danger greatest in Boston, New York's Nassau and Suffolk counties and the California cities of San Diego and San Jose.
"What we're seeing in the riskiest areas — especially California and the Northeast — is that home prices are going up faster than local incomes, so homes become less affordable," a PMI Group report says.
THE REBUTTAL: Doug Duncan, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association trade group in Washington, D.C., acknowledges that there may be "tiny bubbles," particularly in areas such as Las Vegas and along both coasts, where speculators are rushing in to buy property and flip it quickly for a profit.
"It's the mentality of, 'We're watching our friends get rich in real estate, and we want some. So we put money down on six condos in Tampa,'" Duncan says.
Yet he believes most buyers see their homes as a place to live or to retire, with appreciation as "the frosting on the cake."
Duncan also believes Fed is sensitive to the potential impact higher rates could have the housing market. "The Fed has to be asking the question, 'If there's decline in equity in the housing sector, to what extent does that affect overall consumption?'" he says.
That argues for more of the plodding, quarter-point interest rate hikes the Fed has favored for the past year, not a rapid run-up in rates.
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INTERNATIONAL MONEY MART
Why is everyone so worried about China?
The reason, explains the University of Maryland's Morici, is because "we're getting their T-shirts — and the money to buy their T-shirts."
China's growing exports to the United States are a major factor in the explosion of the nation's trade deficit, which could exceed $700 billion this year. At the same time, China is one of the largest foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, with its holdings of $244 billion, second only to Japan.
The Chinese buy American bonds — and make other investments in the United States — because they need to recycle the dollars they earn from their exports. China also has bought dollars to keep its own currency, the yuan, lower in value so its exports are more price competitive internationally. That gives the U.S. government more cash to spend, both domestically and abroad.
Such investment in the United States by foreign powers, however, also means that "U.S. financial vulnerability continues to grow," Lehman Brothers analysts John Shin and Ethan S. Harris say in a research report. Their concern is that American efforts to slow Chinese imports, perhaps by imposing quotas, could trigger retaliation from China.
If China stopped buying U.S. securities, or even started dumping them, it would send the dollar into a tailspin. That, in turn, would push interest rates up in America and make imports more expensive, fueling inflation.
A rapid rise in interest rates could also bring the housing and mortgage booms to a quick end, possibly tipping the U.S. economy into recession.
THE REBUTTAL: C. Fred Bergsten, a former U.S. Treasury official who heads the Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., notes that China said in July it would no longer peg the yuan strictly to the dollar but to a basket of currencies and allow its currency to rise gradually in value. That reduces the chance of a jarring turn away from the dollar, though China's purchase of dollar-denominated securities could slow.
Even without that announcement, Bergsten thinks it "would be crazy" for China to alienate the United States. The reason: China needs Americas as a major export market to fuel its own economic growth and to create jobs.
That doesn't mean the dollar is entirely safe. A burst in the housing bubble, a sharp drop in the stock market or a recession could prompt foreigners to cut back on U.S. investments, too. But Bergsten sees the odds of such a crash as low.
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There have, of course, been any number of doomsday predictions in the past that didn't come true. But a number have.
Many Americans are too young to remember that the Great Depression was the result of a bubble bursting when a panic in the market caused the crash of stocks, real estate and commodities that had been bought by speculators with borrowed money.
More recently, in the late 1990s, investors bid the stocks of technology companies so high — even those without any profits — that prices couldn't be sustained and the market crashed in 2000, triggering a national recession. The stock market still hasn't fully recovered.
A recent study by analysts at the Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. investment bank in New York says most bubbles share the same characteristics: A strong economy and a sense of prosperity leads to speculation which leads to price pressures and a rise in interest rates which can lead to the bubble bursting.
The analysts — Francois Trahan, Kurt D. Walters and Caroline S. Portny — believe that at least eight of the 10 characteristics of a bubble environment currently exist in America. But they are not surprised that few see it: "The idea that a financial disaster could occur at any moment is too far-fetched for individuals to imagine during times of such heightened exuberance."
Sunday, August 28, 2005
HERE COMES THE BIG ONE
New Orleans Braces for Powerful Katrina
NEW ORLEANS (Associated Press) - Monstrous Hurricane Katrina barreled toward the Big Easy on Sunday with 175-mph wind and a threat of a 28-foot storm surge, forcing a mandatory evacuation, a last-ditch Superdome shelter and prayers for those left to face the doomsday scenario this below-sea-level city has long dreaded.
"Have God on your side, definitely have God on your side," Nancy Noble said as she sat with her puppy and three friends in six lanes of one-way traffic on gridlocked Interstate 10. "It's very frightening."
Katrina intensified into a Category 5 giant over the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico on a path to come ashore early Monday in the heart of New Orleans. That would make it the city's first direct hit in 40 years and the most powerful storm ever to slam the city.
"I'm really scared," resident Linda Young said as she filled her gas tank. "I've been through hurricanes, but this one scares me. I think everybody needs to get out."
Rain began falling on southeastern Louisiana by midday Sunday, the first hints of a storm with a potential surge of 18 to 28 feet, topped with even higher waves, tornadoes and as much as 15 inches of rain.
"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," Mayor Ray Nagin said in ordering the mandatory evacuation for his city of 485,000 people, surrounded by suburbs of a million more. "The storm surge will most likely topple our levee system."
Conceding that as many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport, the city arranged buses to take people to 10 last-resort shelters, including the Superdome.
Nagin also dispatched police and firefighters to rouse people out with sirens and bullhorns, and even gave them the authority to commandeer vehicles to aid in the evacuation.
"This is very serious, of the highest nature," the mayor said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."
For years, forecasters have warned of the nightmare scenario a big storm could bring to New Orleans, a bowl of a city that's up to 10 feet below sea level in spots and dependent on a network of levees, canals and pumps to keep dry. It's built between the half-mile-wide Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, half the size of the state of Rhode Island.
Estimates have been made of tens of thousands of deaths from flooding that could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a 30-foot-deep toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, and waste from ruined septic systems.
Katrina's eye was expected to make landfall around sunrise Monday on the southeastern Louisiana coast, although Mississippi also was in danger, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the
National Hurricane Center in Miami. Because Katrina was such a big storm with hurricane-force wind of at least 74 mph extending up to 105 miles from the center, areas far from the eye's landfall could still be devastated.
At 2 p.m. EDT, Katrina's eye was about 180 miles south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River. The storm was moving toward the west-northwest at nearly 13 mph and was expected to turn toward the north-northwest.
A hurricane warning was in effect for the north-central Gulf Coast from Morgan City, La., to the Alabama-Florida line, the hurricane center said. Tropical storm warnings extended east to Indian Pass, Fla., and west to Cameron, La., a spread of about 480 miles.
Despite the dire predictions, a group of residents in a poor neighborhood of central New Orleans sat on a porch with no car, no way out and, surprisingly, no fear.
"We're not evacuating," said 57-year-old Julie Paul. "None of us have any place to go. We're counting on the Superdome. That's our lifesaver."
The Superdome, the 70,000-seat home of football's Saints and the New Year's Sugar Bowl, opened at daybreak Sunday, giving first priority to frail, elderly people on walkers, some with oxygen tanks. They were told to bring enough food, water and medicine to last up to five days.
In the French Quarter, even bars that stayed open through the threat of past hurricanes were boarded up and the few people on the streets were battening down their businesses and getting out.
Don Russina has lived in the city for 20 years and never evacuated for a hurricane, until his wife told him early Sunday that Katrina had been upgraded to Category 5. "This is the first one that's been a direct hit. When the boss says 'no' I've got to go," he said as he took down the hanging signs from his Irish-themed gift shop.
Airport Holiday Inn manager Joyce Tillis spent the morning calling her 140 guests to tell them about the evacuation order. Tillis, who lives inside the flood zone, also called her three daughters to tell them to get out.
"If I'm stuck, I'm stuck," Tillis said. "I'd rather save my second generation if I can."
But the evacuation was slow going. Highways in Louisiana and Mississippi were jammed as people headed away from Katrina's expected landfall. All lanes were limited to northbound traffic on Interstates 55 and 59, and westbound on I-10.
Katrina was "unmitigated bad news" for motorists across the nation because it shut down offshore production of at least 1 million barrels of oil daily and threatened refinery and import operations around New Orleans, said oil analyst Peter Beutel. He predicted crude oil could top $70 a barrel by Monday or Tuesday.
Hotels were spared from evacuation orders to give tourists and locals a place for "vertical evacuation."
Tina and Bryan Steven, a couple from Forest Lake, Minn., who came to attend a conference of emergency medical services, sat glumly on the sidewalk outside their hotel in the French Quarter.
"We're choosing the best of two evils," said Bryan Steven. "It's either be stuck in the hotel or stuck on the road. ... We'll make it through it."
His wife, wearing a Bourbon Street T-shirt with a lewd message, interjected: "I just don't want to die in this shirt."
Only three Category 5 hurricanes — the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale — have hit the United States since record-keeping began. The last was 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which at 145-mph leveled parts of South Florida, killed 43 people and caused $31 billion in damage.
New Orleans has not taken a major direct hit from a hurricane since Betsy in 1965, when an 8- to 10-foot storm surge submerged parts of the city in seven feet of water. Betsy, a Category 3 storm, was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.
Rappaport warned that Katrina, already responsible for nine deaths in South Florida as a mere Category 1, could be far worse for New Orleans.
"It would be the strongest we've had in recorded history there," Rappaport said. "We're hoping of course there'll be a slight tapering off at least of the winds, but we can't plan on that. ... We're in for some trouble here no matter what."