Posts from — September 2005

[™ Kevin Drum]

Ringo Sleeping

Z-z-z-z-z.

[Editor: Ringo has been learning many weird things from Sox.]

Friday Ark

St. Bernard parish was in dire straits, but 50 EMTs from Vancouver got to them to help rescue people trapped in the flooded area.

My neighbor, the schoolbus driver, has five elementary school kids on her bus now from St. Bernard parish.

Thank you for remaining friends in spite of our current government.

You know Vancouver has to be a nice place to live.

Nothing was being sent to New Orleans until after the storm because there was no authorization.

Update: The area in yellow are those parishes included in the 08/27/2005 declaration:

Not necessarily the news:

During a super-secret, cross-your-heart, deep background briefing conducted in the “cone of silence”, a senior administration official who can’t remember his own name claimed that the fact that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the impeachment hearing for the President, had nothing to do with the request to conduct the confirmation hearings for John Roberts during the funeral service for Justice Rehnquist.

During his survey of the devastation on the Gulf coast, Vice President Cheney will be staying at the Convention Center in New Orleans. Mr. Cheney’s decision was based on the fact that even though people were watching live television shots of the Convention Center it took the government three days to find it, making it the most “undisclosed location” in the country.

A senior aide said that the government suspected voodoo was involved, or “one of those ‘invisibility cloaks’ we’ve been hearing about.”

The delay in the Federal response to the disaster was explained today when a member of the White House staff discovered the Louisiana governor’s request for Federal assistance in the lint trap of the dryer.

A spokeman remarked, “You know how it is. Someone hands you a note while you’re on vacation, and you put it in your pocket. Next thing you know it gets thrown in the washer.”

Three audio links from NPR’s All Things Considered:

Today: [available after 7:30PM EDT]

Robert Siegel’s A Family’s Life in Limbo After Katrina, covers the American tribute to Franz Kafka – applying for assistance from FEMA. Understand this is a story about the trials of an extended family of middle class homeowners, professionals with insurance, college educated, trying to make their way through an artificial labyrinth create by people who are supposed to help them.

[Editor: note the reference to the SBA, the Small Business Administration. She is not mistaken, they are, for some reason, involved in the process, even if you are not applying for aid as a small business owner.]

Jim Zarroli’s Small Towns Await Katrina Aid points to the lack of concern for remote areas and confirms the FEMA policy that vehicles are more important than people – every vehicle gets one ration, whether it’s for a single person or three families.

Yesterday in Looking to Rebuild on the Mississippi Coast, Melissa Block talks with Rep. Gene Taylor (D-MS).

Taylor talks about the loss of 80% of the homes along the coast, including his, and how people have been coping – by “borrowing” the contents of the local Wal-Mart [it’s not New Orleans, so he must be wrong when he says looting].

Mr. Taylor wants the local FEMA representative fired for interfering with the efforts to help the people affected. FEMA insists that individuals should make their own way to a central distribution point. This is a very efficient system for FEMA but it assumes a way of communicating with those affected and that they have transportation. In the FEMA system the individuals have the responsibility of finding help rather than expecting FEMA to find them.

“Where’s the cavalry?” They’re in the fort waiting for you to make your way there.

CNN has a short obituary.

We have a generator that is capable of powering a small air conditioner, the refrigerator, lighting, and a radio, specifically because it is always a battle to get her out.

After watching the coverage, she told me today that she’s leaving four days before any storms hit the area because: “those people would kill me. I can’t stand in line in this heat. What good is a generator if you can’t get gas for it? They just don’t care, there’s not a Christian among them.”

The local “special needs” shelter doesn’t even have a generator, and we found out that our local hospice tries to get their patients admitted to the hospitals for the duration of the storm, because there’s no other place for them to go that’s has any hope of maintaining their life. If you’re wondering why hospice does this, remember that they are trying to help these people to live their last days in comfort and dignity. I didn’t see much of that at the SuperDome.

The “dead zone”, an area in the Gulf south of New Orleans in which nothing can live because of the absence of oxygen in the water, will no doubt expand as the toxic slug and sewage filling the depression that holds the city is pumped out.

It will be a while before I try another oyster or mudbug.

By now everyone has heard that assistance was prevented from entering New Orleans for days after it was available and people were begging for it. The reasoning put forward by Homeland Security was: if food and water was allowed into New Orleans people would refuse to evacuate.

I was somewhat stunned to be asked to accept that the Federal officials in charge of this effort actually believed that human beings would choose to live in the abject conditions of filth, discomfort and danger seen in and around the SuperDome and Convention Center if you gave them something to eat and clean water to drink. I can only conclude that Mr. Chertoff assumes that the residents of New Orleans are less than human.

The Federal officials wanted people out of New Orleans, so they laid siege to the city. They sealed it off from the outside world. They didn’t provide the communications equipment that was sitting in warehouses and might have helped the overwhelmed public safety personnel maintain control of the situation. On Meet The Press Mr. Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, tells us that FEMA cut emergency communications in his area. They might have been successful if members of the media with satellite phones hadn’t managed to get in before they could complete their encirclement of the area.

They are still intent on starving out any stragglers. They have declared war on the city. They didn’t want civil order to be maintained, they have done everything they could to prevent it.

This page will open in a new window. I’ve read the glowing reports about the response to Florida’s storms last year. I wish that people could listen to the local Emergency Operations Center briefings up here on the Panhandle. Many of our local officials are not quite as thrilled with the response as some national media outlets.

Update 1: This is from the archives of the Pensacola News Journal [no link because they charge for archived articles] an editorial from March 22, 2005:

Will FEMA deliver before the next storm? It’s getting to be an old, old story. But that makes it even harder to understand. So just what is the Federal Emergency Management Agency waiting for before it reimburses area governments for Hurricane Ivan cleanup — another hurricane season? A few months ago, that might have been the tag line for a bad joke. Now it looks like a serious possibility. We could go through another hurricane before FEMA finishes reimbursing expenses from the last…

Update 2 [Ivan response]: The “Blue Roof” program is only for owner-occupied homes. If you rent, you can drown while your landlord tries to find a roofer or a tarp.

FEMA distribution points are only for vehicles: people don’t count. You can only get food and water if you drive through, and every vehicle gets the same ration. If a group of people pool their gas to get one vehicle to the distribution point, they are only going to get one ration.

Both were issued and in place while Katrina was out in the Gulf.

I keep hearing this crap about “the local officials didn’t ask”. Excuse me, but when exactly did the governor of Louisiana ask the Federal government to ship the state’s National Guard and equipment to Iraq?

Update: Jillian of skippy pointed to a Larry Johnson post at the TPM Cafe on the National Response Plan that gives FEMA the power and responsibility to do whatever it believes is necessary, like they did last year in Florida.

If you can’t make that commitment, remember: there are any number of projects that offer various merchandise with the proceeds going to disaster relief that can be used as gifts.

You can make donations in the name of those on your gift list and many organizations will send a letter acknowledging the gift to the person.

This is a long-term problem and I think we can all agree that the government is not up to the task.

For those who wondered why the Secretary of State needed to cancel her vacation for a “domestic problem”, this is why.

You would think that the senior cabinet officer [check your Constitution] might be able to do something about this, but apparently not.

Checking around it turns out that the people seen doing calisthenics and playing basketball on Keesler AFB are security and engineering people as the rest of the base was evacuated and now being re-assigned as there is little for them to return to. The base is supplying Biloxi with clean water and generators because they don’t need them. There are reports that the base personnel had to repel looters.

The Air Force sent an engineering force to the base on August 30 ^th, but it is possible that the base won’t be re-built. Keesler AFB is second only to the casinos as an employer in Biloxi.

Also lost was a veteran’s nursing home near the base.

CBC is reporting that U.S. Air Force sends men home to help their families cope. These are people who were sent to the Middle East from bases that were affected. Their families would have remained at the bases, and there are some things that can only be dealt with by a member of the military regarding reimbursement and relocation.

Somewhere in the scanning I’ve been doing, probably on a .mil site I saw the Commander of Northern Command, the military component that handles things in the US, wondering why FEMA hasn’t asked for more assistance.

It will be interesting to see if Trent Lott and the Mississippi delegation can convince the Pentagon to rebuild.