Happy Birthday Katrina

What have you not heard about Katrina. It was Bush’s fault is the most common. Kane West had the Bush doesn’t care about Black people moment. Spike Lee had the documentary about the levees. You had the nurses putting people out of their misery. You had the retirement home tragedy. The school bus Nagen episode. The global Warming folks. Fema, the mobile home debacle, the ice idiocy, the police dept. breakdown, the Governor fighting with everyone, the sh**head Fema director Brown. Congressman Jefferson, Is that enough? Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was telling his followers that the levees in New Orleans may have been deliberately “blown up” to kill the city’s black population.

There is enough to go around. But who is really to blame for the mess that was Katrina. lets explore the levees first.

1.The flooding of metro New Orleans was an avoidable man-made disaster. The levee and canal walls failed because of human errors. “Experts say the New Orleans flood of 2005 should join the space shuttle explosions and the sinking of the Titanic on history’s list of ill-fated disasters attributable to human mistakes.”

2. Katrina missed New Orleans. Winds in the New Orleans area were in the Cat 1 to Cat 2 range and the tidal surges about a Cat 3. The storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain did not flow over the canal floodwalls as originally claimed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

3. The role of the US Army Corps of Engineers as defined in the Hurricane Protection Act of 1965 is to design and build flood protection for metro New Orleans from the most severe storm characteristic of the region. The local interest’s role is maintenance and visual inspections once the flood protection is completed. On August 29, 2005, flood walls and levees catastrophically failed throughout the metro area. Many collapsed well below design thresholds (17th Street and London Avenue Canals). Others collapsed after a brief period of overtopping ( Industrial Canal) caused by “scouring” or erosion of the earthen levee walls – an egregious design flaw. When Katrina struck, the flood protection was 60-90% complete, and scheduled for completion in 2015.

4. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now admits that faulty design specifications, incomplete sections and substandard construction of levee segments, not a hurricane was the primary cause of the flooding in the New Orleans area. The Corps of Engineers, a federal agency has sole authority over the design and construction of metro New Orleans’ flood protection as authorized by Congress in the Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Protection Project in the Flood Control Act of 1965.

5. Responsibility for the levee failures on August 29, 2005 in New Orleans rests squarely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and on Congress. This means that the federal government bears primary responsibility for the flooding of metro New Orleans and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes and livelihoods.

Now lets explore the hype.

We all remember the reports on the disintegration of public order, the explosion of black violence, rape and looting. However, later inquiries demonstrated that, in the large majority of cases, these alleged orgies of violence did not occur: Non-verified rumors were simply reported as facts by the media. For example, on September 3, the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department told The New York Times about conditions at the Convention Center: “The tourists are walking around there, and as soon as these individuals see them, they’re being preyed upon. They are beating, they are raping them in the streets.” In an interview just weeks later, he conceded that some of his most shocking statements turned out to be untrue: “We have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.”

The reality of poor blacks, abandoned and left without means to survive, was thus transformed into the specter of blacks exploding violently, of tourists robbed and killed on streets that had slid into anarchy, of the Superdome ruled by gangs that were raping women and children. These reports were not merely words, they were words that had precise material effects: They generated fears that caused some police officers to quit and led the authorities to change troop deployments, delay medical evacuations and ground helicopters. Acadian Ambulance Company, for example, locked down its cars after word came that armed robbers had looted all of the water from a firehouse in Covington — a report that proved totally untrue.

Even if all the reports on violence and rapes had proven to be factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be “pathological” and racist, since what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: “You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!” In other words, we would be dealing with what could be called lying in the guise of truth: Even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.

source: http://www.alternet.org/katrina/27442/

Blanco and Nagens incompetence. Ray Nagen had enough buses available to get all those who needed to be evacuated to higher ground but he didn’t do it. why? he later had this exchange with Tim Russert.

The mayor, questioned by NBC’s Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” claimed he could not find drivers for the metro and school buses, which were left to flood in the post-hurricane deluge. “Sure, there was lots of buses out there,” Nagin said. “But guess what? You can’t find drivers that would stay behind with a Category 5 hurricane, you know, pending down on New Orleans. We barely got enough drivers to move people on Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, to move them to the Superdome. We barely had enough drivers for that. So sure, we had the assets, but the drivers just weren’t available.”

Russert did not let up on the question, continuing into this exchange:

RUSSERT: But, Mr. Mayor, if you read the city of New Orleans’ comprehensive emergency plan– and I’ve read it and I’ll show it to you and our viewers–it says very clearly, “Conduct of an actual evacuation will be the responsibility of the mayor of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans will utilize all available resources to quickly and safely evacuate threatened areas. Special arrangements will be made to evacuate persons unable to transport themselves or who require specific life-saving assistance. Additional personnel will be recruited to assist in evacuation procedure as needed. Approximately 100,000 citizens of New Orleans do not have means of personal transportation.”

It was your responsibility. Where was the planning? Where was the preparation? Where was the execution?

MAYOR NAGIN: The planning was always in getting people to higher ground, getting them to safety. That’s what we meant by evacuation. Get them out of their homes, which – most people are under sea level. Get them to a higher ground and then depending upon our state and federal officials to move them out of harm’s way after the storm has hit.

RUSSERT: But in July of this year, one month before the hurricane, you cut a public service announcement which said, in effect, “You are on your own.” And you have said repeatedly that you never thought an evacuation plan would work. Which is true: whether you would exercise your obligation and duty as mayor or that – and evacuate people, or you believe people were on their own?

MAYOR NAGIN: Well, Tim, you know, we basically wove this incredible tightrope as it is. We were in a position of trying to encourage as many people as possible to leave because we weren’t comfortable that we had the resources to move them out of our city. Keep in mind: normal evacuations, we get about 60 percent of the people out of the city of New Orleans. This time we got 80 percent out. We encouraged people to buddy up, churches to take senior citizens and move them to safety, and a lot of them did. And then we would deal with the remaining people that couldn’t or wouldn’t leave and try and get them to higher ground until safety came.

When asked what his biggest mistake was in connection with the disaster, Nagin said, “My biggest mistake is having a fundamental assumption that in the state of Louisiana, with an $18 billion budget, in the country of the United States that can move whole fleets of aircraft carriers across the globe in 24 hours, that my fundamental assumption was get as many people to safety as possible, and that the cavalry would be coming within two to three days, and they didn’t come.” This guy had no clue.

Now Nagen goes off on Blanco,

After days of blaming the federal officials for not responding quickly enough to the Hurricane Katrina crisis, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin praised President Bush on Monday - and charged that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco had delayed federal rescue efforts by 24 hours.

“I’m so happy that the president came down here,” Nagin said of Bush’s Friday visit to Louisiana in an interview with CNN. “He came down and saw it, and he put a general on the field. His name is General Honore. And when he hit the field, we started to see action.”

But Nagin had harsh words for his state’s leaders, telling CNN: “What the state was doing, I don’t frigging know. But I tell you, I am pissed. It wasn’t adequate.”

The New Orleans Democrat said he urged Bush to meet privately with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco during the visit. The meeting took place aboard Air Force One, he said.

After reviewing the crisis with Gov. Blanco, Bush summoned Nagin for a private chat - where, according to Nagin, Bush explained: “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor. I said . . . I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.”

Reacting to the governor’s footdragging, Nagin lamented: “It would have been great if we could have left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out.”

“It didn’t happen, and more people died.”

Local Corruption

In December of 1995, the Orleans Levee Board, the local government entity that oversees the levees and floodgates designed to protect New Orleans and the surrounding areas from rising waters, bragged in a supplement to the Times-Picayune newspaper about federal money received to protect the region from hurricanes.

“In the past four years, the Orleans Levee Board has built up its arsenal. The additional defenses are so critical that Levee Commissioners marched into Congress and brought back almost $60 million to help pay for protection,” the pamphlet declared. “The most ambitious flood-fighting plan in generations was drafted. An unprecedented $140 million building campaign launched 41 projects.”

The levee board promised Times-Picayune readers that the “few manageable gaps” in the walls protecting the city from Mother Nature’s waters “will be sealed within four years (1999) completing our circle of protection.”

But less than a year later, that same levee board was denied the authority to refinance its debts. Legislative Auditor Dan Kyle “repeatedly faulted the Levee Board for the way it awards contracts, spends money and ignores public bid laws,” according to the Times-Picayune. The newspaper quoted Kyle as saying that the board was near bankruptcy and should not be allowed to refinance any bonds, or issue new ones, until it submitted an acceptable plan to achieve solvency.

Blocked from financing the local portion of the flood fighting efforts, the levee board was unable to spend the federal matching funds that had been designated for the project.

Katrina relief

Two years after the devastating floods that followed Hurricane Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans, and much of the Gulf Coast, has largely taken two paths: communities that have rebuilt themselves using private funds, insurance money and sheer will — and publicly funded efforts that have moved much more slowly.

Federal, state and local governments have struggled to speed up the release of funds and restore infrastructure. None of the 115 “critical priority projects” identified by city officials has been completed: For example, New Orleans’ police superintendent still works out of a trailer, as do most of the city’s firefighters. And analysts at the city’s crime lab don’t have a laboratory to match DNA samples.

The delays have affected the poor the most — those dependent on government assistance to rebuild their lives. While middle- and upper-class neighborhoods have rebuilt using private insurance and contacts, residents of low-income areas such as the Lower 9th Ward and Holy Cross — roughly 20,000 of them — for the most part remain scattered throughout the region, their return uncertain.

The flooding that began after Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, delivered an estimated $150 billion worth of damage to the Gulf Coast region, making it the worst disaster in U.S. history. Of the $116 billion appropriated by Congress to Gulf Coast recovery, $34 billion has been earmarked for long-term rebuilding. But less than half of that has made its way through federal checks and balances to reach municipal projects.

Throughout the Gulf Coast, residents are asking why their government — at every level — hasn’t done more to streamline the process and bring more rebuilding dollars to the region.

“We’re working ourselves close to death,” says Scott Darrah, a New Orleans civic activist. “But we can’t move it past further than what we have today. The government needs to step up.”

There are signs of progress. About 111 million cubic yards of debris — enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome more than 20 times — has been cleared from Gulf Coast communities. Electricity and water has been restored to virtually every city in the coastal region. And New Orleans’ population, at about 300,000, is back to more than 67% of what it was before Katrina.

The Army Corps of Engineers has received $7 billion since Katrina to fortify New Orleans’ flood-protection system, including installing new flood gates at the mouth of the Lake Pontchartrain and rebuilding broken levees.

Last week, the Corps unveiled a long-term plan to protect New Orleans from a 100-year storm — a relatively strong storm with a 1% chance of hitting Louisiana each year — that will cost an additional $7.6 billion and be completed by 2011.

Katrina was a 396-year storm, meaning that statistically, another storm of its magnitude would not hit for nearly 400 years.

source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007...

So we could blame Bush, Fema, Nagen, Blanco everyone, but that will not help those displaced by Katrina. This is a tragic story and the knee jerk lets blame someone makes for fighting instead of helping those who need to rebuild their lives. This was a breakdown in all forms of goverment, The only ones that worked were the Coast Guard and Army, of the estimated 60,000 people that needed to be rescued from rooftops and flooded homes, Coast Guardsmen saved more than 33,500, including rescuing from peril 24,135 lives and evacuating 9,409 medical patients to safety. The rescue and the response efforts were some of the largest in Coast Guard history, involving units from every district as well as a total of 5,600 Coast Guardsmen. Let us hope everyone learned something from Katrina I know I did.