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Natural disasters
Hurricane Katrina (I)

The body of a victim of Hurricane Katrina
floats in floodwaters
in New Orleans
01 September, 2005.
Katrina was the costliest hurricane on record,
and
took the lives of over 1,800 people.
Photograph: JAMES NIELSEN
AFP/Getty Images
Boston Globe > Big Picture
The decade in news photographs
December 18, 2009
http://archive.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/
the_decade_in_news_photographs.html
Hurricane death toll rises;
Bush back in
New Orleans
Sun Sep 11, 2005
11:02 PM ET
Reuters
By Kieran Murray
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The official death
toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 400 on Sunday as President George W.
Bush arrived in New Orleans where there were signs of renewed life even as
soldiers hunted for the dead.
The confirmed death count from the August 29 storm, which has displaced a
million people, was far lower than initial projections that ran into the
thousands.
"We didn't lose as many lives as had been predicted although we're still in the
process of finding those we lost," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
Bush was greeted at the airport by Mayor Ray Nagin as he began his third visit
to the disaster region. They took a helicopter to the USS Iwo Jima, a U.S.
Marine helicopter ship docked near downtown New Orleans on the Mississippi
River, where Bush planned to spend the night.
On Sunday evening he went to a base camp for hundreds of firefighters from
around the country who had come to help, shaking hands and putting his arm
around shoulders.
The search for the dead -- and perhaps some victims still alive and trapped --
went on in the now largely deserted city that was home to 450,000 people before
Katrina.
Members of the Oklahoma National Guard moved through a middle-class residential
area, breaking down doors.
The water in that area had once stood 7 feet deep but had now receded, leaving a
layer of stinking sludge. Soldiers were stumbling out of houses coughing and
choking from the overwhelming stench.
"Oh, it's bad in there," said Spec. Bobby Cunningham as he came out of one home.
"You're out of air anyway from kicking the door down and then that smell hits
you."
"There could be someone who can't get up out of bed, an elderly lady could be in
there dying. So we go into every room, every closet, in every house," added
Spec. Daniel Robinson.
Boat teams navigated the flooded streets of the worst-hit neighborhoods, using
axes to break into the attics of homes. Helicopters spun overhead all day
although there were no signs of rooftop rescues.
SIGNS OF LIFE
There were increasing signs that the below-sea-level city was staggering back to
life following the flood that engulfed most of it when levees were breached
after Katrina stormed into Mississippi and Louisiana.
New Orleans police said they had decided not to forcibly evict anyone still in
the city, despite an order for everyone to get out and earlier threats to use
force. The thousands of holdouts who stayed were being told that if they
remained, they would be on their own facing floodwaters poisoned by sewage and
chemicals.
Public health officials announced they would start spraying for flies and
mosquitoes on Monday.
Louisiana State Police said they would issue permits for business owners to
visit their properties in the central commercial district but told them they
could go nowhere else in the city.
Gary LaFarge, head of the Port of New Orleans, said the facility suffered
serious damage but not as bad as feared, and could be back to normal in four to
five months. Twenty percent of U.S. imports and exports pass through the port
and it provides jobs for 100,000 in the region.
Louisiana raised its official death count to 197, while Mississippi, the other
hardest hit state, had 211 confirmed killed. There were also fatalities, though
much lower numbers, in Alabama and Florida.
"I think it's going to be a lower number, much lower than the 10,000," said Army
Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is in charge of the military forces in the area,
citing one early estimate of the death toll. "That 10,000 was based at a time
when we didn't know what we didn't know."
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said 1,600 children were
still listed as missing by their parents, or were seeking their families.
INSURANCE WOES
In coastal Mississippi where some towns were flattened, residents trying to pick
up the pieces had another battle on their hands.
"The pitiful thing here is that insurance companies are trying to stiff us,"
said Eve Jaspers, a Mississippi deputy sheriff, who didn't buy flood coverage
because her house was built on high land.
"They're telling me this was flood damage," she said. "The walls fell out. The
front door is in the garage, God knows where the garage door is. It was clearly
a small tornado."
Bush's latest visit to the region coincided with the fourth anniversary of the
September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which killed 2,700 people.
Then, he was able to unite and rally the nation but now he faces withering
criticism for a faltering government response to the August 29 hurricane. His
approval ratings is at the lowest point of is presidency.
In the flooded city, hundreds of New York firefighters who battled the
conflagrations in their city four years ago, attended an outdoor Catholic mass
in New Orleans.
Michael Weinlein, assistant chief of operations for the New York fire
department, said: "We worked side by side as we dug through the rubble of the
World Trade Center. We have come to repay that debt."
"Our life has been changed for ever," added Peter Weiss, a New Orleans fire
department chaplain at the service and New York native. "We'd always heard of
the Big One but we'd always escape it. On August 28, Katrina had New Orleans in
its sights and nothing was going to change its destination."
Hurricane death toll rises; Bush back in New Orleans,
R,
11.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-12T030117Z_01_KNE077648_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Waters recede
but frustration high in New
Orleans
Sun Sep 11, 2005
11:03 AM ET
Reuters
By Kieran Murray
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - President George W.
Bush headed to the U.S. Gulf Coast on Sunday to confront a region where the
flood waters of Hurricane Katrina were receding but anger and frustration still
overflowed.
"I'm finding a lot of frustration, and it's a lot easier to deal with
frustration than anger," said Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the
U.S. Coast Guard, who was put in charge of rescue and recovery on Friday.
Bush's visit coincided with the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks
on New York and Washington which killed some 2,700 people.
Then, he was able to unite and rally the nation. Now, he faces withering
criticism for a bumbling governmental response to the August 29 hurricane and is
suffering the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on NBC's "Meet the Press" he had the impression
Bush was badly informed in the immediate aftermath of the storm which flooded
his city, stranding thousands of people unwilling or unable to evacuate.
"I think the president for some reason probably did not understand the full
magnitude of this catastrophe on the front end," said Nagin, who is himself
facing severe criticism for his performance.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco could not reach either Bush or his
chief of staff on the day the hurricane hit and had to leave a message pleading
for help with a low level adviser, Time magazine reported.
Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said Bush seemed to lack empathy for those
stranded by the hurricane, which devastated a large swathe of the Gulf Coast of
Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, driving around a million people from their
homes
"It's puzzling, given his immediate response during 9/11, that he did not feel a
greater sense of empathy toward the folks that were experiencing this enormous
disaster," Obama said on ABC's "This Week."
He said the Bush administration was excellent at public relations but less
effective when it came to action.
REPAY DEBT
Allen, appearing on the same program, again urged residents still refusing to
leave New Orleans, thought to number several thousand, to do so.
"The conditions in which they're living -- the water is deteriorating, the
environmental conditions -- this is not a safe place to be until we get
everybody out, the water has been completely drained and we do environmental
assessments here," he said.
"Everybody needs to be out of New Orleans so we can move forward and repair the
infrastructure."
In the flooded city, hundreds of New York firefighters who battled the
conflagrations in their city four years ago, attended a Catholic mass on a field
north of New Orleans.
New York fire department assistant chief of operations Michael Weinlein said:
"We worked side by side as we dug through the rubble of the World Trade Center.
We have come to repay that debt."
The most hopeful sign emerging from the tragedy was that initial estimates that
fatalities could reach as high as 10,000 appeared to be wildly exaggerated.
"I think it's going to be a lower number, much lower than the 10,000. That
10,000 was based at a time when we didn't know what we didn't know," Army Lt.
Gen. Russell Honore told CNN.
"From talking to the city officials and communicating with the parish
presidents, I think intuitively we were saying that number will be much lower,"
he said,
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said on Saturday it would take half the time
originally thought to pump New Orleans dry -- 40 days not 80. Seventy-four of
the city's 174 pumps were operating, sucking water poisoned with chemicals,
gasoline and sewage out of the historic below-sea level city.
In Louisiana, the official death toll stood at 154. Mississippi, the other
hardest hit state, had 211 confirmed killed. There were also fatalities, though
much lower numbers, in Alabama and Florida.
THIRD TRIP
Bush's visit to Mississippi and Louisiana on Sunday and Monday will be his third
since Katrina hit.
The White House has dispatched a host of top officials, from Vice President Dick
Cheney to members of the Cabinet, on almost daily trips in the past week to the
Gulf Coast to see the storm damage but also to blunt criticism the
administration was unaware of the depth of the crisis and slow to respond.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's much maligned chief, Michael Brown,
was abruptly recalled to Washington last week and relieved of direct supervision
of the hurricane recovery efforts.
With the rising cost of Katrina and concerns among the public and on Capitol
Hill about the price tag, estimated to be between $100 billion to $200 billion,
polls indicated Americans wanted the White House to do more.
An estimated one million people have been displaced from their homes in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
FEMA said it has distributed $688 million in aid to displaced families. The
money went to nearly 268,000 households in Louisiana, 52,000 in Mississippi and
12,000 in Alabama.
The American Red Cross said it has received $503 million in gifts and pledges
for hurricane relief and has been able to provide 6 million meals and operate
675 shelters in 23 states.
The organization, which has 36,000 volunteers in the field, said it is seeking
40,000 more.
Waters recede but frustration high in New Orleans, R, 11.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-11T150222Z_01_KNE077648_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
N.O. airport demand recovery
make take
years
Sun Sep 11, 2005
1:48 PM ET
Reuters
BATON ROUGE (Reuters) - It could be as little
as a year or as long as five years before New Orleans' main airport experience
the kind of demand it had before Hurricane Katrina struck the region last week,
the airport's aviation director said on Sunday.
"We're going to get back to 174 daily departures, maybe in 12 months, maybe in
36 months, maybe 60 months -- it's too early to say," Roy Williams told Reuters.
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport handles 80 percent of the
state's commercial and cargo air traffic.
The airport is set to reopen to commercial traffic on Tuesday.
Williams told reporters in a daily briefing that Delta Air Lines, Northwest
Airlines Corp. and Continental Airlines all want to return to the airport as
soon as possible.
Williams also said Southwest Airlines "will definitely be back in force."
Southwest is the largest carrier operating at the airport.
But the airport's two international carriers, Air Canada and Grupo Taca, may
take longer to return, he said, because of some of the other emergency
operations that are utilizing the international facilities at the airport.
Some traffic will be better than none for the airport. The facility runs
entirely on user fees and does not get any local tax revenue, so it has been
losing $200,000 a day since the storm hit August 29.
Williams said officials were already talking with the Federal Aviation
Administration about how it might help.
"They have already contacted us about how they can help with the impact of this
situation," he said.
N.O.
airport demand recovery make take years, R, 11.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&story
ID=2005-09-11T174720Z_01_EIC164054_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-AIRPORT-DC.XML
Officials Cite Progress,
Though Many
Problems Remain
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 - Government officials
leading the response to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina said today that
they had made significant progress over the weekend toward restoring calm,
control and some services in New Orleans, even as President Bush headed there
for a symbolic overnight stay in the area.
"Things are working wonderfully here on the ground," Vice Admiral Thad Allen,
the United States Coast Guard official now overseeing federal relief efforts,
said on Fox Television today, in one of the more upbeat assessments offered
since Hurricane Katrina's disastrous passage nearly two weeks ago.
Staggering problems remained in the devastated region, not least the continued
recovery of the dead, and the aching needs of the roughly one million people
displaced from their homes. But a few positive indicators emerged.
With a systematic search well under way, the official death toll for the region
has remained under 400, and while it is certain to increase, officials believe
it will be well below the earlier worst-case prediction by Mayor C. Ray Nagin of
perhaps 10,000 in the New Orleans area alone.
Referring to that prediction, the army officer overseeing active-duty forces in
the region, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, said on CNN that he expected the total to be
"a heck of a lot lower than that." He said better information would be available
by midweek as house-to-house searches continued.
The Army Corps of Engineers, halving an earlier estimate of 80 days, said that
New Orleans might be completely drained by mid-October. Hundreds of city
engineers have worked nonstop the last two weeks, sleeping on floors in their
pumping stations. Water has fallen 5 feet in places, allowing sludge-covered
buildings slowly to emerge.
Most of the city's central business district now has power - City Hall will soon
have electricity and running water, officials said - and life in some
restaurants, shops and inns has begun to stir.
. Meanwhile, relief efforts have continued to expand, as aid has poured in from
across the country and from abroad, and evacuees have been offered housing and
help across the country.
But sharp criticism of the government's efforts remained. Senator Mary Landrieu
of Louisiana, a Democrat, said she welcomed Admiral Allen's comments, but
insisted that local officials were not alone to blame for an evacuation that
initially left as many as 100,000 people behind in New Orleans. So many were
left behind, she said in an interview on Fox Television, "because this federal
government won't support cities to evacuate people, whether it's from
earthquakes, tornadoes or hurricanes. That's the truth."
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader who has harshly
attacked the federal response to the disaster, was asked on CNN whether she was
satisfied with an improved response. "I don't know what there is to be satisfied
with," she said.
Meanwhile, officials announced today that they planned to resume commercial
flights into and out of Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on
Tuesday, a vital step to bolster reconstruction efforts in the flood-ravaged
city.
The cost of those efforts continued to rise. Federal spending on relief and
reconstruction now appear certain to reach $200 billion in coming weeks.
Analysts said these costs might eventually approach the more than $300 billion
spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps forcing some tough reordering
of priorities in Congress.
And while New Orleans is drying out, extensive pipe breaks in the sewerage and
water systems mean it could be three months before the full city has drinkable
tap water.
Underscoring the vast scope of continued needs, the American Red Cross appealed
Saturday for 40,000 people to volunteer to help the Gulf Coast. The organization
already has 36,000 volunteers working in 675 shelters, tending to the needs of
more than 160,000 evacuees.
In one sign of how thoroughly lives have been uprooted, Mr. Nagin has bought a
house in Dallas and enrolled his daughter in school there, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune reported. The mayor, whose own house suffered extensive storm
damage, said he would continue to spend most of his time in New Orleans.
After observing a moment of silence Sunday morning for victims of the 2001
terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush was flying back to the region, in his third visit
since Katrina hit, this time to spend the night. The president was schedule to
arrive in the late afternoon on the USS Iwo Jima, anchored near New Orleans, and
will spend the night there before visiting New Orleans and Mississippi tomorrow.
Admiral Allen, named Friday to take over direct operations of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency from its embattled head, Michael D. Brown, said on
Fox that he had all the authority he needed to cut through bureaucratic barriers
to action.
"I have specific marching orders from Secretary Chertoff; I'm enabled to make
decisions down here," he said, referring to the Homeland Security secretary,
Michael Chertoff. "I feel empowered."
"I have the full support of FEMA and I think things are working wonderfully here
on the ground."
Admiral Allen insisted that coordination among local, state and federal
officials had improved considerably. "I've been actually overwhelmed with the
unity of purpose," he said.
Still, a contentious debate lingered about whether the response was slower
because its victims were predominantly poor and black - criticism the
administration has pointedly rejected. The only African-American senator, Barack
Obama of Illinois, said that the feeling among many blacks was clear.
" I think that, in the African American community, there's a sense that the
passive indifference that's shown towards the folks in the Ninth Ward of New
Orleans or on the West Side of Chicago or in Harlem - that that passive
indifference is as bad as active malice," he said on ABC-TV.
But a Republican, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, said, with evident
frustration, that he was weary of the "ridiculous arguments from Washington"
about who was to blame.
"Nobody here in the stricken area is talking about that nonsense," he said on
CNN. "I just wish folks in Washington would get with it, and get real and focus
on the challenge on hand and stop this from becoming a political football."
General Honore said again today that federal troops would not take part in
forcible evacuations. "That is a local and state law enforcement task not to
include federal troops," he told CNN. The general said his men were providing
food, water and assistance even to those refusing to leave; he said local
officials were doing the same.
Many of those residents who managed to ride out the storm, especially those
whose homes are on higher ground, have complained that they see no need to quit
the city now, leaving their houses perhaps to be looted. They say they are
determined to stay and help in rebuilding efforts.
So long as federal and state authorities, whose growing presence has provided
essential support to local police officers, remain reluctant to use force, it
was unclear how that standoff would finally be resolved.
Officials Cite Progress, Though Many Problems Remain, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11cnd-storm.html
New Orleans Airport
to Reopen for
Commercial Flights
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 11 - Officials
announced today that they plan to resume commercial flights into and out of
Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on Tuesday, a critical
precursor to any reconstruction effort in the flood-ravaged city.
The airport also formally reopened for cargo traffic today, and its largest
freight carrier, Federal Express, intended to fly into the airport by nightfall.
On Tuesday, the airport hopes to have 30 daily departures and arrivals - down
from 174 before the storm - and 60 each day by the end of October.
The 2.5-square-mile airport is about 15 miles west of New Orleans, in the town
of Kenner, in Jefferson Parish. Hurricane Katrina cut power to the airport,
partly flooded one of the two runways and caused significant roof damage to one
concourse.
But the main airline terminal, which dates to 1959, was barely damaged, and
power and electricity were restored within four days. Now the airport is home to
nearly 5,000 soldiers and airmen and a medical triage center that the Army is
converting into a field hospital.
The airport's director, Roy A. Williams, had said in an interview on Friday that
he hoped to resume civil flights by Sept. 19. But today, before a news
conference in Baton Rouge, he said that the airlines and cargo carriers, as well
as the local authorities, had all urged him to reopen the airport even sooner.
"Initially we expect more inbound customers than outbound as people come back in
and participate in disaster recovery," Mr. Williams said. Continental, Delta and
Northwest airlines all have committed to operate flights on Tuesday, but the
three carriers told the airport that they would not have their schedules
finalized and publicly available until Monday.
The airport, which is run by the New Orleans Aviation Board, a nine-member
municipal panel, was the conduit for 80 percent of passenger and air cargo
traffic in Louisiana before the storm. In the past two weeks officials worried
that the airport would be eclipsed by Baton Rouge Municipal Airport, as relief
workers, government officials and government workers have poured into the state
capital.
The airport has been transformed dramatically over the past two weeks and Mr.
Williams acknowledged that the terminal would have to be configured to accept
passengers again. Some of the food and retail shops will reopen, and the baggage
conveyor belts will start moving again.
"We actually have converted the baggage claim into a very large sleeping hall,"
Mr. Williams said today. "It is air-conditioned and relatively quiet. We will
shift around and the baggage claim will become a functioning baggage claim."
The restoration of flights to and from the airport does not signify a larger
return to normalcy.
New Orleans remains under a virtual lockdown, with checkpoints at each of the
entrances into the city. The police officers, sheriff's deputies, soldiers and
airmen who guard the checkpoints have largely restricted access to members of
government agencies, relief organizations and the news media to enter.
Mr. Williams made it clear that ordinary citizens from New Orleans trying to
return may not be able to go from the airport to the city.
At first, government officials, nonprofit and humanitarian workers and
journalists will probably be the main people flying in, compared with the
tourist and leisure travelers who were a mainstay of the airport before the
storm. "Ninety-nine percent of the folks coming in and out of Armstrong in the
next few weeks are going to have a purpose and they're going to have a reason to
be there," Mr. Williams said.
The airport, which was known as Moisant Field when it opened in 1946 on surplus
Army property that the federal government sold to the City of New Orleans, was
once one of the largest commercial airports in the nation. It was renamed New
Orleans International Airport in 1960 and renamed again, for the jazz trumpeter
Louis Armstrong, in 2001.
New
Orleans Airport to Reopen for Commercial Flights, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11cnd-airport.html
Breakdowns Marked Path
From Hurricane to
Anarchy
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON,
CHRISTOPHER DREW,
SCOTT SHANE
and DAVID ROHDE
The governor of Louisiana was "blistering
mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people from
the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500
vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody
in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people
had no cars. Yet the federal, state and local officials who had failed to round
up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before
they found enough to empty the shelters.
The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have
already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a terrorist
attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial examination of
Hurricane Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal
government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff
between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana,
interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to
direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and
New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they
were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure
what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide
rapid and considerable aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and
logistics, proceeded at a deliberate pace.
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning
from the National Hurricane Center that it could cause "human suffering
incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban
search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at
all into New Orleans until after the hurricane passed on Monday, Aug. 29.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by
helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of
destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to
understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is
what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled.
State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to
prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with
two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and
order.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than
3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It
lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and
had to abandon much of its most advanced communications equipment, guard
officials said.
Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New Orleans
convention center, which interviews show was even worse than previously
described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging into the darkness,
guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs' handguns, said Capt. Jeffrey Winn.
"In 20 years as a cop, doing mostly tactical work, I have never seen anything
like it," said Captain Winn. Three of his officers quit, he said, and another
simply disappeared.
Officials said yesterday that 10 people died at the Superdome, and 24 died at
the convention center site, although the causes were not clear.
Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view shared
by many in city and state government: that a national disaster requires a
national response. "Everybody's trying to look at it like the City of New
Orleans messed up," Mr. Thomas said in an interview. "But you mean to tell me
that in the richest nation in the world, people really expected a little town
with less than 500,000 people to handle a disaster like this? That's ludicrous
to even think that."
Andrew Kopplin, Governor Blanco's chief of staff, took a similar position. "This
was a bigger natural disaster than any state could handle by itself, let alone a
small state and a relatively poor one," Mr. Kopplin said.
Federal officials seem to have belatedly come to the same conclusion. Michael
Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said future "ultra-catastrophes" like
Hurricane Katrina would require a more aggressive federal role. And Michael D.
Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whom President Bush
had publicly praised a week earlier for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed
aside on Friday, replaced by a take-charge admiral.
Russ Knocke, press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that
any detailed examination of the response to the storm's assault will uncover
shortcomings by many parties. "I don't believe there is one critical error," he
said. "There are going to be some missteps that were made by everyone involved."
But Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White
House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and
state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising"
about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks.
"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath said.
Initial Solidarity
At midafternoon on that Monday, a few hours after the hurricane made landfall,
state and federal leaders appeared together at a news conference in Baton Rouge
in a display of solidarity.
Governor Blanco lavished her gratitude on Mr. Brown, the FEMA chief.
"Director Brown," she said, "I hope you will tell President Bush how much we
appreciated - these are the times that really count - to know that our federal
government will step in and give us the kind of assistance that we need."
Senator Mary L. Landrieu pitched in: "We are indeed fortunate to have an able
and experienced director of FEMA who has been with us on the ground for some
time."
Mr. Brown replied in the same spirit: "What I've seen here today is a team that
is very tight-knit, working closely together, being very professional doing it,
and in my humble opinion, making the right calls."
At that point, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the storm,
although some areas were already being flooded through breaches in levees. But
when widespread flooding forced the city into crisis, Monday's confidence
crumbled, exposing serious weaknesses in the machinery of emergency services.
Questions had been raised about FEMA, since it was swallowed by the Department
of Homeland Security, established after Sept. 11. Its critics complained that it
focused too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for natural disasters, and
that it had become politicized. Mr. Brown is a lawyer who came to the agency
with political connections but little emergency management experience. That's
also true of Patrick J. Rhode, the chief of staff at FEMA, who was deputy
director of advance operations for the Bush campaign and the Bush White House.
Scott R. Morris, who was deputy chief of staff at FEMA and is now director of
its recovery office on Florida, had worked for Maverick Media in Austin, Tex.,
as a media strategist for the Bush for President primary campaign and the
Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And David I. Maurstad was the Republican lieutenant
governor of Nebraska before he became director of FEMA's regional office in
Denver and then a senior official at the agency's headquarters.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA
employees, wrote to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff members
are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and contractors."
With the new emphasis on terrorism, three quarters of the $3.35 billion in
federal grants for fire and police departments and other first responders were
intended to address terror threats, instead of an "all-hazards" approach that
could help in any catastrophe.
Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA
priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a response.
In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters
are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which
is why the federal government needs to play a role. There are a half-dozen or so
contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is
right there in your backyard."
Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the hurricane
response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when Hurricane Katrina
hit. State officials said it did not yet address transportation or crime
control, two issues that proved crucial. Col. Terry J. Ebbert, director of
homeland security for New Orleans since 2003, said he never spoke with FEMA
about the state disaster blueprint. So New Orleans had its own plan.
At first glance, Annex I of the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency
Management Plan" is reassuring. Forty-one pages of matter-of-fact prose outline
a seemingly exhaustive list of hurricane evacuation procedures, including a
"mobile command center" that could replace a disabled city hall.
New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage
exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency
communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was to be
completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and water
supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last resort," as
part of a new deal with the tenants, the New Orleans Saints.
But the city's plan says that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of
personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they
would be sheltered.
Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and cities to
file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict standards for
evacuation plans.
"There is a very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what the
quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland
School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security.
"There is not a lot of urgency."
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely
followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory
evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans's population left, as many as
100,000 people remained.
Colonel Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter, assuming
the city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48 hours, until the
storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Hurricane Katrina moved across the Gulf of
Mexico, officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington
discussed the need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there,"
recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA
and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the
storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major
steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Drivers Afraid
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded
with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug.
30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began
resisting.
Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to drive.
So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses."
FEMA stepped in to assemble a fleet of buses, said Natalie Rule, an agency
spokeswoman, only after a request from the state that she said did not come
until Wednesday, Aug. 31. Greyhound Lines began sending buses into New Orleans
within two hours of getting FEMA approval on Wednesday, said Anna Folmnsbee, a
Greyhound spokeswoman. But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence
at the Superdome led to the governor's frustrated appeal in the state emergency
center on Wednesday night.
She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over
their buses, said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, operations director for the
state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of the
dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation problem
arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.
State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans and
signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies, according to
Louisiana officials.
Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated
before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing
Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home
in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.
Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency
preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the city.
An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during evacuation.
"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come, people
were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home managers
ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep their frail
patients in place and wait out the storm.
Symbols of Despair
The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn two
of the most visible features of the New Orleans skyline - the Superdome and the
mile-long convention center - into deathtraps and symbols of the city's despair.
At the Superdome, the initial calm turned to fear as a chunk of the white roof
ripped away in the wind, dropping debris on the Saints' fleur-de-lis logo on the
50-yard-line. The electricity was knocked out, leaving only dim lights inside
the windowless building. The dome quickly became a giant sauna, with
temperatures well over 100 degrees.
Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside were women, children or elderly,
and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent
overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the
Louisiana National Guard. And it didn't take long for the stench of human waste
to drive many people outside.
Chief Swain said the Guard supplied water and food - two military rations a day.
But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses expected
early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.
Chief Swain and Colonel Ebbert said in interviews that the first buses arranged
by FEMA were diverted elsewhere, and it took several more hours to begin the
evacuation. By Friday, the food and the water had run out. Violence also broke
out. One Guard soldier was wounded by gunfire and the police confirmed there
were attempts to sexually assault at least one woman and a young child, Chief
Swain said.
And even though there were clinics at the stadium, Chief Swain said, "Quite a
few of the people died during the course of their time here."
By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were so
dehydrated that guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while
walking to the buses. State officials said yesterday that a total of 10 people
died in the Superdome.
"I'm very angry that we couldn't get the resources we needed to save lives,"
Chief Swain said. "I was watching people die."
Mayor Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, P. Edwin Compass III, said in
interviews that they believe murders occurred in the Superdome and in the
convention center, where the city also started sending people on Tuesday. But at
the convention center, the violence was even more pervasive.
"The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough security," said Capt. Winn,
the head of the police SWAT team. "The only way I can describe it is as a
completely lawless situation."
While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was no
time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in a
volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and
patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place
nearly every night.
Capt. Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing
cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number
of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped - and that murders
were occurring.
"We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions," Mr. Compass
said. "And we essentially had to become the lion tamers."
Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the
center's six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.
But the police were at a disadvantage: they could not fire into the crowds in
the dimly lit facility. So after they saw muzzle flashes, they would rush toward
them, searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.
Meanwhile, those nearby "would be running for their lives," Capt. Winn said. "Or
they would lie down on the ground in the fetal position."
And when the SWAT team caught some of the culprits, there was not much it could
do. The jails were also flooded, and no temporary holding cells had been set up
yet. "We'd take them into another hall and hope they didn't make it back," Capt.
Winn said.
One night, Capt. Winn said, the police department even came close to abandoning
the convention halls - and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said a captain in
charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the regular police
officers by helicopter when 100 guardsmen rushed over to help restore order.
Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were dumped
near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration, emergency medics have
said. State officials said yesterday that 24 people died either inside or just
outside the convention center.
The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of
those deaths may have been murders. Capt. Winn said that when his team made a
final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including one
with multiple stab wounds.
Capt. Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials
said that nearly 10 regular officers stationed at the Superdome and 15 to 20 at
the convention center also quit, along with several hundred other police
officers across the city.
But, Capt. Winn said, most of the city's police officers were "busting their
asses" and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I just
didn't expect for it to explode the way it did."
Divided Responsibilities
As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the
response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Governor
Blanco controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed
city workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the
federal government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on
television saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually
upbeat FEMA chief appear at competing daily news briefings and interviews.
The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would
prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its role,
offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local governments.
"Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state
agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
With Hurricane Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing with
disasters and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.
FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses,
food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific
requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time
to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Colonel Ebbert,
the city's emergency operations director.
Telephone and cellphone service died, and throughout the crisis the state's
special emergency communications system was either overloaded or knocked out. As
a result, officials were unable to fully inventory the damage or clearly
identify the assistance they required from the federal government. "If you do
not know what your needs are, I can't request to FEMA what I need," said Colonel
Doran, of the state office of homeland security.
To President Bush, Governor Blanco directed an ill-defined but urgent appeal.
"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on
Monday. "I am going to need all the help you can send me."
"We went from early morning to late night, day after day, after day, after day.
Trying to make critical decisions," Ms. Blanco said in an interview last week.
"Trying to get product in, resources, where does the food come from. Learning
the supply network."
She said she didn't always know what to request. "Do we stop and think about
it?" she asked. "We just stop and think about help."
FEMA attributed some of the delay to miscommunications in an overwhelming event.
"There was a significant amount of discussions between the parties and likely
some confusion about what was requested and what was needed," said Mr. Knocke,
the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered sending
active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to have combat
troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's arranged under our
Constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted at a news briefing
last week, "state and local officials are the first responders."
Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the
president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But
they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority,
according to the officials involved in the discussions. They ultimately rejected
the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National Guard
forces, including many trained as military police.
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, explained
that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically moved combat
forces into an American city, without the governor's consent, for purposes of
using those forces - untrained at that point in law enforcement - for law
enforcement duties? Yes."
But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"
For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed remote.
Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor Nagin and
Colonel Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words of assurance
federal relief officials had offered. "It was like, 'they are coming, they are
coming, they are coming, they are coming,' " she said in an interview. "It was
all in route. Everything was in motion."
'Stuck in Atlanta'
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the Gulf Coast drew offers of every
possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting
bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters, who responded to a nationwide call for help in the
disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on
community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated
area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New
Orleans.
"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?' " said Joseph
Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. "We
didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
Ms. Rule, the FEMA spokeswoman, said there was no urgency for the firefighters
to arrive because they were primarily going to do community relations work, not
rescue.
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and
water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks
carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La.,
a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The
drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from
Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in the world
is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's ridiculous."
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of Mr.
Vines, said, "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA.
Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA." When the state of
Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people
displaced by flooding, she said, "they were told they could not go. I don't
really know why."
On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., and
president of the National Sheriffs' Association, sent out an alert urging
members to pitch in.
"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the paperwork,"
he said.
Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit,
Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Mr. Sexton on Sept. 1 The next day, he
led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks and 33 deputies,
despite public pleas from Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to wait for formal requests.
"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn't in good conscience
wait for a coordinated response," he said. He dropped off food, water and
medical supplies in Mobile and Gonzales, La., where a sheriffs' task force
directed him to the French Quarter. By Saturday, Sept. 3, the Michigan team was
conducting search and rescue missions.
"We lost thousands of lives that could have been saved," Sheriff Evans said.
Mr. Knocke said the Department of Homeland Security could not yet respond to
complaints that red tape slowed relief.
"It is testament to the generosity of the American people - a lot of people
wanted to contribute," Mr. Knocke said. "But there is not really any way of
knowing at this time if or whether individual offers were plugged into the
response and recovery operation."
Response to Sept. 11
An irony of the much-criticized federal hurricane response is that it is being
overseen by a new cabinet department created because of perceived shortcomings
in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And it is governed by
a new plan the Department of Homeland Security unveiled in January with
considerable fanfare.
The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end result
is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and tribal
organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing
the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."
The evidence of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina raised doubts about
whether the plan had, in fact, improved coordination. Mr. Knocke, the homeland
security spokesman, said the department realizes it must learn from its
mistakes, and the department's inspector general has been given $15 million in
the emergency supplemental appropriated by Congress to study the flawed rescue
and recovery operation.
"There is going to be enough blame to go around at all levels," he said. "We are
going to be our toughest critics."
Jason DeParle, Robert Pear,
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
contributed
reporting for this article.
Breakdowns
Marked Path From Hurricane to Anarchy, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11response.html
Some signs of hope
in New Orleans
Sun Sep 11, 2005
2:23 AM ET
Reuters
By Jason Webb
and Kieran Murray
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - All the dead from
Hurricane Katrina had not yet been recovered, and staggering destruction
littered block after block of New Orleans, but there were signs of hope in and
around the nearly empty city on Sunday.
President George W. Bush, hit by criticism for his administration's response to
the storm, prepared to return to the devastated region later in the day for
another visit, his third and longest. It will include an overnight stay with
stops in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
There was good news from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which said it will
take half the time originally thought to pump the city dry -- 40 days not 80.
Forty-seven pumps were pulling water poisoned with chemicals, gasoline and
sewage out of the historic below-sea level city,
New Orleans Louis Armstrong International Airport will reopen to passenger
traffic on Tuesday and was already open for freight traffic. Officials in
Plaquemines Parish south of the city said they would lift a mandatory evacuation
order for some areas on Sunday.
Most importantly, the fear of a death toll numbering in the thousands in New
Orleans that some officials predicted had not come true -- though the search for
victims was far from over.
"We'll be well. We can do it," remarked Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. "I see
signs of hope all around us. Lights are coming on, and things are happening all
around."
A Time Magazine poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe New
Orleans should be rebuilt, with a better levee system to protect against another
flooding catastrophe like the one caused by the storm that came ashore August
29.
MAYOR MOVES OUT
But the city where 450,000 once lived faced long-term disruption. Some may never
return to ruined homes. The New Orleans Times Picayune reported on Saturday that
Mayor Ray Nagin had bought a house in Dallas and moved his family there. Nagin
said he would return to New Orleans and make occasional visits to his family.
By boat and on foot, firefighters, soldiers and trained mortuary workers pried
open doors and cut their way through walls across the city. They found bodies
and even survivors, still clinging to life where they had been trapped since the
storm smashed levees that had held back Lake Pontchartrain.
In Louisiana, the official death toll stood at 154. Mississippi, the other
hardest hit state, had 211 confirmed killed. There were also fatalities, though
much lower numbers, in Alabama and Florida.
"I thought there would be thousands of dead but it seems it's a lot less," said
Staff Sgt. Jason Geranen of the 82nd Airborne Division following a search on
Saturday.
"We keep going because we are still finding some survivors. There was one
yesterday, another one today," Perry Peake, who heads a search and rescue team,
said Saturday. "You can't just leave people behind."
SOME DEFIANT
Some still defied orders to evacuate, including one Bourbon Street bar that has
refused to close. Though the mayor had ordered everyone to leave, police and
soldiers were in general using persuasion instead of force in most cases, and
officials have said forcible evictions would be a last resort.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, attacked by civic officials and
politicians for underestimating a disaster that eventually uprooted a million
people, said it had distributed $688 million in aid to displaced families in
"record time."
The money went to nearly 268,000 households in Louisiana, 52,000 in Mississippi
and 12,000 in Alabama, it said.
The agency's much criticized chief, Michael Brown, was recalled to Washington
and relieved of direct supervision of the hurricane recovery efforts.
Bush also suffered from the political fall-out.
A Newsweek poll found his approval rating at its lowest -- 38 percent. The
survey found 53 percent of Americans no longer trusted him to make correct
decisions in a foreign or domestic crisis, compared to 45 percent who did.
Some federal officials have put Katrina's cost at between $100 billion and $200
billion. Congress has approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by
Bush, who said further requests will come.
There has been an outpouring of private donations, from across the United States
and abroad. The American Red Cross, which has 36,000 volunteers in the field,
said it had launched a drive to recruit 40,000 more volunteers.
The (U.S.) State Department said there had been no confirmed deaths of foreign
nationals in the coastal area ravaged by the storm though efforts are still
under way to account for those who have not been heard from.
Some
signs of hope in New Orleans, R, 11.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-11T062228Z_01_KNE077648_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Disarray Marked the Path
From Hurricane to Anarchy
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON,
CHRISTOPHER DREW,
SCOTT SHANE
and DAVID ROHDE
The governor of Louisiana was "blistering
mad." It was the third night after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans, and
Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco needed buses to rescue thousands of people
from the fetid Superdome and convention center. But only a fraction of the 500
vehicles promised by federal authorities had arrived.
Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody
in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.
They were an obvious linchpin for evacuating a city where nearly 100,000 people
had no cars. Yet the federal state and local officials who had failed to round
up buses in advance were now in a frantic hunt. It would be two more days before
they found enough buses to empty the shelters.
The official autopsies of the flawed response to the catastrophic storm have
already begun in Washington, and may offer lessons for dealing with a terrorist
attack or even another hurricane this season. But an initial examination of
Katrina's aftermath demonstrates the extent to which the federal government
failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11 attacks to face domestic
threats as a unified, seamless force.
Instead, the crisis in New Orleans deepened because of a virtual standoff
between hesitant federal officials and besieged local and state authorities,
interviews with dozens of officials show.
Federal Emergency Management Agency officials expected the state and city to
direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed. Leaders in Louisiana and
New Orleans, though, were so overwhelmed by the scale of the storm that they
were not only unable to manage the crisis, but they were not always exactly sure
what they needed. While local officials assumed that Washington would provide
rapid and massive aid, federal officials, weighing legalities and logistics,
proceeded at a deliberate pace.
Russ Knocke, press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said that
any detailed examination of the response to Katrina's assault will uncover
shortcomings by many parties. "I don't believe there is one critical error," he
said. "They are going to be some missteps that were made by everyone involved."
FEMA appears to have underestimated the storm, despite an extraordinary warning
from the National Hurricane Center that it would cause "human suffering
incredible by modern standards." The agency dispatched only 7 of its 28 urban
search and rescue teams to the area before the storm hit and sent no workers at
all into New Orleans until after Katrina passed on Aug. 29, a Monday.
On Tuesday, a FEMA official who had just flown over the ravaged city by
helicopter seemed to have trouble conveying to his bosses the degree of
destruction, according to a New Orleans city councilwoman.
"He got on the phone to Washington, and I heard him say, 'You've got to
understand how serious this is, and this is not what they're telling me, this is
what I saw myself,' " the councilwoman, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, recalled the FEMA
official saying.
State and federal officials had spent two years working on a disaster plan to
prepare for a massive storm, but it was incomplete and had failed to deal with
two issues that proved most critical: transporting evacuees and imposing law and
order.
The Louisiana National Guard, already stretched by the deployment of more than
3,000 troops to Iraq, was hampered when its New Orleans barracks flooded. It
lost 20 vehicles that could have carried soldiers through the watery streets and
had to abandon its most advanced communications equipment, Guard officials said.
Partly because of the shortage of troops, violence raged inside the New Orleans
convention center, which interviews show was even worse than previously
described. Police SWAT team members found themselves plunging into the darkness,
guided by the muzzle flashes of thugs' handguns, said Capt. Jeffrey Winn.
"In 20 years as a cop, doing mostly tactical work, I have never seen anything
like it," said Captain Winn. Three of his officers quit, he said, and another
simply disappeared.
A National Disaster
Oliver Thomas, the New Orleans City Council president, expressed a view shared
by many in city and state government: that a national disaster requires a
national response.
"Everybody's trying to look at it like the City of New Orleans messed up," Mr.
Thomas said in an interview. "But you mean to tell me that in the richest nation
in the world, people really expected a little town with less than 500,000 people
to handle a disaster like this? That's ludicrous to even think that."
Andrew Kopplin, Governor Blanco's chief of staff, took a similar position. "This
was a bigger natural disaster than any state could handle by itself, let alone a
small state and a relatively poor one," Mr. Kopplin said.
Federal officials seem to have belatedly come to the same conclusion. Michael
Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said future "ultra-catastrophes" like
Katrina would require a more aggressive federal role. And Michael D. Brown,
director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whom President Bush had
publicly praised a week earlier for doing "a heck of a job," was pushed aside on
Friday, replaced by a take-charge admiral.
Richard A. Falkenrath, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White
House, said the chief federal failure was not anticipating that the city and
state would be so compromised. He said the response exposed "false advertising"
about how the government has been transformed four years after the Sept. 11,
2001 terrorist attacks.
"Frankly, I wasn't surprised that it went the way it did," Mr. Falkenrath said.
At mid-afternoon on that Monday, a few hours after Katrina made landfall, state
and federal leaders appeared together at a press conference in Baton Rouge in a
display of solidarity.
Governor Blanco lavished her gratitude on Mr. Brown, the FEMA chief.
"Director Brown," she said, "I hope you will tell President Bush how much we
appreciated - these are the times that really count - to know that our federal
government will step in and give us the kind of assistance that we need."
Senator Mary L. Landrieu pitched in: "We are indeed fortunate to have an able
and experienced director of FEMA who has been with us on the ground for some
time."
Mr. Brown replied in the same spirit: "What I've seen here today is a team that
is very tight-knit, working closely together, being very professional doing it,
and in my humble opinion, making the right calls."
At that point, New Orleans seemed to have been spared the worst of the storm,
although some areas were already being flooded through breaches in levees. But
when widespread flooding forced the city into crisis, Monday's confidence
crumbled, exposing serious weaknesses in the machinery of emergency services.
A Focus on Terrorism
Questions had been raised about FEMA, which had been swallowed by the Department
of Homeland Security, established after 9/11. Its critics complained it focused
too much on terrorism, hurting preparations for natural disasters, and that it
had become politicized. Mr. Brown is a lawyer who came to the agency with
political connections but little emergency management experience. That's also
true of Patrick J. Rhode, the chief of staff at FEMA, who was deputy director of
advance operations for the Bush campaign and the Bush White House.
Scott R. Morris, who was deputy chief of staff at FEMA and is now director of
its recovery office on Florida, had worked for Maverick Media in Austin, Tex.,
as a media strategist for the Bush for President primary campaign and the
Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And David I. Maurstad was the Republican lieutenant
governor of Nebraska before he became director of FEMA's regional office in
Denver and then a senior official at the agency's headquarters.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents FEMA
employees, had written to Congress in June 2004, complaining, "Seasoned staff
members are being pushed aside to make room for inexperienced novices and
contractors."
In addition, the government's emphasis on terrorism had affected the type of
equipment states could buy with federal emergency preparedness money, said Trina
R. Sheets, executive director of the National Emergency Management Association,
which represents state officials.
Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA
priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a response.
In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters
are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which
is why the federal government needs to play a role. There are a half-dozen or so
contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is
right there in your backyard."
Federal officials vowed to work with local authorities to improve the hurricane
response, but the plan for Louisiana was not finished when Katrina hit. State
officials said it did not yet address transportation or crime control, two
issues which proved crucial. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New
Orleans since 2003, said he never spoke with FEMA about the state disaster
blueprint. New Orleans had its own plan.
At first glance, Annex I of the "City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency
Management Plan" is reassuring. Forty-one pages of matter-of fact prose outline
a seemingly exhaustive list of hurricane evacuation procedures, including a
"mobile command center" that could replace a disabled city hall and schools
designated as shelters.
New Orleans had used $18 million in federal funding since 2002 to stage
exercises, train for emergencies and build relay towers to improve emergency
communications. After years of delay, a new $16 million command center was to be
completed by 2007. There was talk of upgrading emergency power and water
supplies at the Superdome, the city's emergency shelter of "last resort," as
part of a new deal with the tenants - the New Orleans Saints.
But the city's plan said that about 100,000 residents "do not have means of
personal transportation" to evacuate, and there are few details on how they
would be sheltered.
No Strict Standards
Although the Department of Homeland Security has encouraged states and cities to
file emergency preparedness strategies it has not set strict standards for
evacuation plans.
"There is very loose requirement in terms of when it gets done and what the
quality is," said Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland
School of Law and director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security.
"There is not a lot of urgency."
He said the New Orleans experience illustrates that disaster response was not
coordinated between levels of government, which was part of the agenda
Washington outlined in its National Response Plan issued after the Sept. 11
attacks.
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin largely
followed the city plan, eventually ordering the city's first-ever mandatory
evacuation. Although 80 percent of New Orleans' population left, as many as
100,000 people remained.
Mr. Ebbert decided to make the Superdome the city's lone shelter, assuming the
city would only have to shelter people in the arena for 48 hours, until the
storm passed or the federal government came and rescued people.
As early as Friday, Aug. 26, as Katrina moved across the Gulf of Mexico,
officials in the watch center at FEMA headquarters in Washington discussed the
need for buses.
Someone said, "We should be getting buses and getting people out of there,"
recalled Leo V. Bosner, an emergency management specialist with 26 years at FEMA
and president of an employees' union. Others nodded in agreement, he said.
"We could all see it coming, like a guided missile," Mr. Bosner said of the
storm. "We, as staff members at the agency, felt helpless. We knew that major
steps needed to be taken fast, but, for whatever reasons, they were not taken."
Drivers Afraid
When the water rose, the state began scrambling to find buses. Officials pleaded
with various parishes across the state for school buses. But by Tuesday, Aug.
30, as news reports of looting and violence appeared, local officials began
resisting.
Governor Blanco said the bus drivers, many of them women, "got afraid to drive.
So then we looked for somebody of authority to drive the school buses."
FEMA offered to help, the governor said, by requisitioning buses. Greyhound
Lines began sending buses into New Orleans within two hours of getting FEMA
approval on Wednesday, Aug. 31, said Anna Folmnsbee, a Greyhound spokeswoman.
But the slow pace and reports of desperation and violence at the Superdome led
to the governor's frustrated appeal in the state emergency center on Wednesday
night.
She eventually signed an executive order that required parishes to turn over
their buses, said Colonel William J. Doran III, operations director for the
state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
"Just the logistics of wrangling up enough buses to get the people out of the
dome took us three days," Colonel Doran said. A separate transportation problem
arose for nursing homes. In some cases, delays proved deadly.
State regulations require nursing homes to have detailed evacuation plans and
signed evacuation contracts with private transportation companies, according to
Louisiana officials.
Yet 70 percent of the New Orleans area's 53 nursing homes were not evacuated
before the hurricane struck Monday morning, according to the Louisiana Nursing
Home Association. This week, searchers discovered 32 bodies in one nursing home
in Chalmette, a community just outside New Orleans.
Mark Cartwright, a member of the nursing home association's emergency
preparedness committee, said 3,400 patients were safely evacuated from the city.
An unknown number of patients died awaiting evacuation or during evacuation.
"I've heard stories," Mr. Cartwright said. "Because rescuers didn't come, people
were succumbing to the heat." Mr. Cartwright said some nursing home managers
ignored the mayor's mandatory evacuation order, choosing to keep their frail
patients in place and wait out the storm. During previous hurricane evacuations,
nursing home managers were criticized after elderly patients perished while
sitting on buses snarled in massive traffic jams.
Symbols of Despair
The confluence of these planning failures and the levee breaks helped turn two
of the most visible features of the New Orleans skyline - the Superdome and the
mile-long convention center - into deathtraps and symbols of the city's despair.
At the Superdome, the initial calm turned to fear as a chunk of the white roof
ripped away in the wind, dropping debris on the Saints' fleur-de-lis logo on the
50-yard-line. The electricity was knocked out, leaving only dim lights inside
the windowless building. The dome quickly became a giant sauna, with
temperatures well over 100 degrees.
Two-thirds of the 24,000 people huddled inside were women, children or elderly,
and many were infirm, said Lonnie C. Swain, an assistant police superintendent
overseeing the 90 policemen who patrolled the facility with 300 troops from the
Louisiana National Guard. And it didn't take long for the stench of human waste
to drive many people outside.
Chief Swain said the Guard supplied water and food - two military rations a day.
But despair mounted once people began lining up on Wednesday for buses expected
early the next day, only to find them mysteriously delayed.
Chief Swain and Colonel Ebbert said in interviews that the first buses arranged
by FEMA were diverted elsewhere, and it took several more hours to begin the
evacuation. By Friday, the food and the water had run out. Violence also broke
out. One Guard soldier was wounded by gunfire and the police confirmed there
were attempts to sexually assault at least one woman and a young child, Chief
Swain said.
And even though there were clinics at the stadium, Chief Swain said, "Quite a
few of the people died during the course of their time here."
By the time the last buses arrived on Saturday, he said, some children were so
dehydrated that Guardsmen had to carry them out, and several adults died while
walking to the buses. State officials said Saturday that a total of 10 people
died in the Superdome.
"I'm very angry that we couldn't get the resources we needed to save lives,"
Chief Swain said. "I was watching people die."
Mayor Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, P. Edwin Compass III, said in
interviews that they believe murders occurred in the Superdome and in the
Convention Center, where the city also started sending people on Tuesday. But at
the convention center, the violence was even more pervasive.
"The biggest problem was that there wasn't enough security," said Capt. Winn,
the head of the police SWAT team. "The only way I can describe it is as a
completely lawless situation."
While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was no
time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in a
volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and
patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place
nearly every night.
Capt. Winn said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing
cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number
of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped - and that murders
were occurring.
Lambs 'With the Lions'
"We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions," Mr. Compass
said. "And we essentially had to become the lion tamers."
Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the
center's six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.
But the police were at a disadvantage: they could not fire into the crowds in
the hot and dimly lit facility. So after they saw muzzle flashes, they would
rush toward them, searching with flashlights for anyone with a gun.
Meanwhile, those nearby "would be running for their lives," Capt. Winn said. "Or
they would lie down on the ground in the fetal position."
And when the SWAT team caught some of the culprits, there was not much it could
do. The jails were also flooded, and no temporary pens had been set up yet.
"We'd take them into another hall and hope they didn't make it back," Capt. Winn
said.
One night, Capt. Winn said, the police department even came close to abandoning
the convention halls - and giving up on the 15,000 there. He said a captain in
charge of the regular police was preparing to evacuate the regular police by
helicopter when 100 Guardsmen rushed over to help restore order.
Before the last people were evacuated that Saturday, several bodies were dumped
near a door, and two or three babies died of dehydration, emergency medics have
said. State officials said Saturday that 24 people died either inside or just
outside the convention center.
The state officials said they did not have any information about how many of
those deaths may have been murders. Capt. Winn said that when his team made a
final sweep of the building last Monday, it found three bodies, including one
with multiple stab wounds.
Capt. Winn said four of his men quit amid the horror. Other police officials
said that nearly 10 regular officers stationed at the Superdome and 15 to 20 at
the convention center also quit, along with several hundred other policemen
across the city.
But, Capt. Winn said, most of the city's policemen were "busting their asses"
and hung in heroically. Of the terror and lawlessness, he added, "I just didn't
expect for it to explode the way it did."
As the city become paralyzed both by water and by lawlessness, so did the
response by government. The fractured division of responsibility - Gov. Blanco
controlled state agencies and the National Guard, Mayor Nagin directed city
workers and Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA, served as the point man for the federal
government - meant no one person was in charge. Americans watching on television
saw the often-haggard governor, the voluble mayor and the usually upbeat FEMA
chief appear at competing daily press briefings and interviews.
Power-Sharing by Design
The power-sharing arrangement was by design, and as the days wore on, it would
prove disastrous. Under the Bush administration, FEMA redefined its role,
offering assistance but remaining subordinate to state and local governments.
"Our typical role is to work with the state in support of local and state
agencies," said David Passey, a FEMA spokesman.
With Katrina, that meant the agency most experienced in dealing with disasters
and with access to the greatest resources followed, rather than led.
FEMA's deference was frustrating. Rather than initiate relief efforts - buses,
food, troops, diesel fuel, rescue boats - the agency waited for specific
requests from state and local officials. "When you go to war you don't have time
to ask for each round of ammunition that you need," complained Mr. Ebbert, the
city's emergency operation director.
With communications out and much of the city inaccessible, officials couldn't
always be precise. "If you do not know what your needs are, I can't request to
FEMA what I need," said Lt. Col. William J. Doran III, of Louisiana's Office of
Homeland Security and Preparedness.
To President Bush, Governor Blanco directed an ill-defined but urgent appeal.
"I need everything you've got," the governor said she told the president on
Monday. "I am going to need all the help you can send me."
Ms. Blanco, in an interview this week, said she was frantic as conditions grew
more perilous. "We went from early morning to late night, day after day, after
day, after day. Trying to make critical decisions," she said. "Trying to get
product in, resources, where does the food come from. Learning the supply
network."
She said she didn't always know exactly what to request. "Do we stop and think
about it?" she asked. " We just stop and think about help."
FEMA's assistance was crucial, but its pace seemed slow. "Once it moves, it is
big," said Colonel Doran of the agency. "But until they get moving, it takes a
while to get them ramped up."
The disaster agency attributed some of the delay to miscommunications in an
overwhelming event. "There was a significant amount of discussions between the
parties and likely some confusion about what was requested and what was needed,"
said Mr. Knocke, the spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security..
As New Orleans descended into near-anarchy, the White House considered sending
active-duty troops to impose order. The Pentagon was not eager to have combat
troops take on a domestic lawkeeping role. "The way it's arranged under our
constitution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted at a press briefing
this week, "state and local officials are the first responders."
Pentagon, White House and Justice officials debated for two days whether the
president should seize control of the relief mission from Governor Blanco. But
they worried about the political fallout of stepping on the state's authority,
according to the officials involved in the discussions. In the end, they
rejected the idea and instead decided to try to speed the arrival of National
Guard forces, including many trained as military police.
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, explained
that decision in an interview this week. "Could we have physically have moved
combat forces into an American city, without the governor's consent, for
purposes of using those forces - untrained at that point in law enforcement -
for law enforcement duties? Yes."
But, he asked, "Would you have wanted that on your conscience?"
For some of those on the ground, those discussions in Washington seemed remote.
Before the city calmed down six days after the storm, both Mayor Nagin and Mr.
Ebbert lashed out. Governor Blanco almost mocked the words of assurance federal
relief officials had offered. "It was like they are coming, they are coming,
they are coming, they are coming," she said in an interview. "It was all in
route. Everything was in motion." 'Stuck in Atlanta'
The heart-rending pictures broadcast from the gulf coast drew offers of every
possible kind of help. But FEMA found itself accused repeatedly of putting
bureaucratic niceties ahead of getting aid to those who desperately needed it.
Hundreds of firefighters , who responded to a nationwide call for help in the
disaster, were held by the federal agency in Atlanta for days of training on
community relations and sexual harassment before being sent on to the devastated
area. The delay, some volunteers complained, meant lives were being lost in New
Orleans.
"On the news every night you hear, 'How come everybody forgot us?'" said Joseph
Manning, a firefighter from Washington, Pa., told The Dallas Morning News. "We
didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."
William D. Vines, a former mayor of Fort Smith, Ark., helped deliver food and
water to areas hit by the hurricane. But he said FEMA halted two trailer trucks
carrying thousands of bottles of water to Camp Beauregard, near Alexandria, La.,
a staging area for the distribution of supplies.
"FEMA would not let the trucks unload," Mr. Vines said in an interview. "The
drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road about 10 miles from
Camp Beauregard. FEMA said we had to have a 'tasker number.' What in the world
is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork, and it's ridiculous."
Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas, who interceded on behalf of Mr.
Vines, said "All our Congressional offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA.
Governors' offices have had difficulty contacting FEMA. " When the state of
Arkansas repeatedly offered to send buses and planes to evacuate people
displaced by flooding, "they were told they could not go. I don't really know
why."
On Aug. 31, Sheriff Edmund M. Sexton, Sr., the sheriff of Tuscaloosa County,
Alabama and president of the National Sheriffs' Association, sent out an alert
urging members to pitch in.
"Folks were held up two, three days while they were working on the paperwork,"
he said.
Some sheriffs refused to wait. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit,
Sheriff Warren C. Evans got a call from Mr. Sexton on Sept.1 The next day, he
led a convoy of six tractor-trailers, three rental trucks, and 33 deputies,
despite public pleas from Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm to wait for formal requests.
"I could look at CNN and see people dying, and I couldn't in good conscience
wait for a coordinated response," he said. He dropped off food, water, and
medical supplies in Mobile and Gonzales, La., where a sheriffs' task force
directed him to the French Quarter. By Saturday, Sept. 3, the Michigan team was
conducting search and rescue missions. "We lost thousands of lives that could
have been saved."
"It testament to the generosity of the American people - a lot of people wanted
to contribute," Mr. Knocke said. "But there is not really any way of knowing at
this time if or how localized offers were plugged into the response and recovery
operation."
Lofty Goals An irony of the much-criticized federal hurricane response is that
it is being overseen by a new cabinet department created in response to
perceived shortcomings in the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
And it is governed by a new plan the Department of Homeland Security unveiled in
December with considerable fanfare.
The National Response Plan set out a lofty goal in its preface: "The end result
is vastly improved coordination among federal, state, local and tribal
organization to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing
the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of incident management."
Jason DeParle, Robert Pear, James Risen and Thom Shanker
contributed
reportingfor this article.
Disarray Marked the Path From Hurricane to Anarchy, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11response.html
FEMA Chief Was Recalled
After High-Level
Meeting
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 - On Wednesday afternoon,
at a contentious briefing in the White House press room, President Bush's top
spokesman publicly but cautiously praised the work of Michael D. Brown, the head
of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. When pressed, the spokesman, Scott
McClellan, said Mr. Bush stood by his previous statement that Mr. Brown had been
doing "a heck of a job."
But it fact, just hours before, in a meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Brown's
fate had been all but sealed. Michael Chertoff, the onetime judge who has told
friends he was shocked by the state of the Department of Homeland Security,
which he inherited earlier this year, told Mr. Bush and the White House chief of
staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., that he wanted to remove Mr. Brown from the
day-to-day management of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, although he would
remain the head of FEMA.
The assignments of officials below cabinet level do not usually require
consultation with the president, but these were highly unusual circumstances.
The day after the meeting, Vice President Dick Cheney toured the region and was
briefed by Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, the man who would replace
Mr. Brown in overseeing the relief effort.
Mr. Cheney's role in the final decision to remove Mr. Brown is unclear. On
Saturday in Austin, Tex., Mr. Cheney was asked whether he had recommended Mr.
Brown's removal. Mr. Cheney characteristically would not reveal his advice. He
said: "Mike Chertoff made the decisions. And certainly I support it."
At the Oval Office meeting, the president also expressed support for Mr.
Chertoff, said an aide, who paraphrased Mr. Bush as saying, "I will support you
in whatever decision you make." On Saturday, several administration officials
said it was unclear to them whether Mr. Bush's response had been intended to
make it clear to Mr. Chertoff that he had finally understood the president's
desires or whether the president was really leaving the decision to the cabinet
secretary responsible for the relief effort.
Either way, how the White House moved, in a matter of days, from the president's
praise of a man he nicknamed "Brownie" to a rare public reassignment explains
much about fears within the administration that its delayed response to the
disaster could do lasting damage to both Mr. Bush's power and his legacy. But
more important to some members of the administration, it dented the
administration's aura of competence.
Mr. Bush, his aides acknowledge, is loath to fire members of his administration
or to take public actions that are tantamount to an admission of a major
mistake. But the hurricane was different, they say: the delayed response was
playing out every day on television, and Mr. Brown, fairly or unfairly, seemed
unaware of crucial events, particularly the scenes of chaos and death in the New
Orleans convention center. The only real analogy to his removal, they say, was
Mr. Bush's decision in the spring of 2003 to push aside Jay Garner, the retired
lieutenant general who had been sent to Iraq immediately after fighting ended to
begin the reconstruction process that proved ill-fated. Within a month, he had
been replaced by L. Paul Bremer III and by June 2003, he had left his post
altogether.
But Mr. Brown did not even have a month. By the time Mr. Chertoff stepped into
the Oval Office that morning, Mr. Bush had received many complaints about the
federal response.
Still, Mr. McClellan was left in the awkward position of having to publicly
reiterate praise for Mr. Brown's efforts - he frequently spoke of the
president's appreciation for all that FEMA was doing - even while he had to
signal that Mr. Bush was still "not satisfied." It was a balancing act that
could not last.
But until the Oval Office meeting on Wednesday morning, there was no plan. One
emerged, officials said, around the time Vice Adm. Allen arrived in Louisiana.
He had been sent to act as Mr. Brown's special deputy early in the week because
of his experience in the recovery from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It became clear, officials said, that Admiral Allen was adept at getting the
cogs of the federal government and the military moving. When Vice President
Cheney visited the region with Mr. Chertoff, it was Admiral Allen who impressed
the visitors.
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat, said Admiral Allen
"gave a comprehensive report to Vice President Cheney and me and demonstrated a
comprehensive understanding of our situation."
"I welcome him," Governor Blanco added, "and know that we must have a long-term
relationship in order to alleviate the suffering and frustration of our people."
By Thursday night, administration officials say, Mr. Chertoff had called Mr.
Card to say a final decision had been made: Mr. Brown would be sent back to
Washington, and Admiral Allen would be put in charge of the relief effort. Mr.
Card wasted no time in informing the president. "This was well under way before
Cheney took his trip," one official said. "But the Cheney trip pushed it along."
Mr. Brown's removal was welcomed by many Republicans, perhaps in hopes that it
would enable Mr. Bush's allies to argue that eventually the White House had
gotten the message. Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said that Mr.
Brown had been acting "like a private instead of a general" and that FEMA had
shown itself to be "overwhelmed, undermanned and not capable of doing its job."
As for his plans, Mr. Brown, in an interview with The Associated Press, said:
"I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good
Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep. And then I'm going
to go right back to FEMA and continue to do all I can to help these victims."
Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this
article.
FEMA
Chief Was Recalled After High-Level Meeting, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11fema.html
As Recovery Starts,
Some Lights Go On,
Some
Mail Is Delivered
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
and MICHAEL LUO
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 10 - After nearly two weeks
of unrelenting crisis, workers here and across the battered Gulf Coast region
began making small but meaningful strides on Saturday in reconnecting power and
other utilities, rebuilding highways, delivering mail and restoring a sense of
order.
About 700 city residents have been allowed to return temporarily to their homes
to check on their property and retrieve belongings in largely affluent
neighborhoods like Lakeview on the northern edge of the city along Lake
Pontchartrain and in the Lower Garden District, flush along the crescent that
the Mississippi River forms around this city.
At City Hall, running water had been restored and one engineer said he expected
the building to have power soon. Newly hired workers carted city property
records from the basement, saying they would be refrigerated to prevent mold
from damaging them.
In Baton Rouge, state health officials revised the death toll to 154, from 118 a
few days earlier, but said it would not be the final count. They said that
caution, accuracy and respect were their goals and that they would not work
hastily.
"I'm not going to make estimates," said Melissa Walker, a spokeswoman for the
Louisiana Department of Health and Hospital Services. "These are individuals who
perished in a storm, and each one is very important."
But even as the toll grows, officials said on Friday that their first systematic
sweep of the city had found far fewer bodies than expected, and that the number
of dead would probably be well below the 10,000 that some officials had
initially feared.
The expanding relief effort continued to have complications. The American Red
Cross, nearing exhaustion from the largest domestic disaster relief operation in
its history, issued an urgent appeal for 40,000 new volunteers to relieve those
who have been serving since Hurricane Katrina hit.
John H. Degnan, a spokesman for the private agency, said that 36,000 volunteers
are now operating 675 shelters in 23 states that have taken in more than 160,000
storm evacuees. He said many of them have been away from home for two weeks and
needed to be replaced. He said the Red Cross plea for new volunteers was the
largest it had ever made.
"This is unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope and in fact is
responding to a disaster that is unprecedented in the United States," Mr. Degnan
said.
He said that the new volunteers would receive several hours of training and that
many would be sent to the Gulf Coast to staff the many shelters in the region.
Foreign governments and overseas private organizations have pledged more than
$700 million in cash and material assistance to storm victims, including two
tons of disposable diapers from South Korea, according to a State Department
official.
Joseph G. Sullivan, the United States ambassador to Zimbabwe, is running a small
State Department office in Baton Rouge to coordinate aid from foreign donors and
to locate foreign citizens displaced by the storm. He said that several hundred
foreign visitors remain unaccounted for, but that there have been no confirmed
deaths.
Ambassador Sullivan said 115 countries and 12 international organizations have
pledged aid to the United States. He said an elderly woman in Lithuania,
grateful for past American assistance to her country, sent her life savings of
1,000 Euros.
Across the Gulf Coast region, efforts to restore basic infrastructure continued,
if haltingly. The Postal Service said that it had resumed limited mail service
in some areas affected by the storm.
In Mississippi, work began on Friday on a temporary road to handle two-way
traffic on U.S. Highway 90, which runs along the state's Gulf Coast and was
destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Federal transportation officials said the first
phase of that project is to be completed in 90 days. In Louisiana, officials
were set to begin work on the Interstate 10 Bridge, which connects New Orleans
with Slidell. They hoped to have one-lane, two-way traffic flowing within 45
days and two-lane, two-way traffic within 120 days. When completed, the project
will restore road access into New Orleans from the east, officials said.
In New Orleans, power was being restored bit by bit to parts of the city,
including the central business district. And by the end of Saturday, a rail link
to New Orleans was expected to be reconnected, the Federal Department of
Transportation said. Norfolk Southern Railroad has been working to repair a
bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect the city by rail from the east.
In stark contrast with the lawlessness that took over the city in the immediate
aftermath of the storm, police officials said Saturday that they had fully
restored order in this sodden city.
"We have complete control over the city at this time," said Edwin P. Compass
III, superintendent of the New Orleans police. "I think we have had three crimes
in the last four days. This is the safest city in America."
Mr. Compass said the department was trying to get supplies, including uniforms
and vehicles, so they could get officers back on the streets. Wal-Mart sent six
to eight trailers full of food, water, batteries and toiletries for the
department this week.
Mr. Compass added, though, that despite the gains that other workers were making
in restoring basic services, "we're still in the process of rescuing people from
their homes."
It remained unclear whether the city would attempt to evacuate people by force.
Mr. Compass on Saturday referred questions on the policy to the city's attorney,
who could not be reached.
"We will begin to compel people to leave their homes when the decision is made
to do so," said Capt. Marlon Defillo, a spokesman for the Police Department.
For now, he said, "we're appealing to their common sense," telling them in the
strictest terms possible that they must leave, and that if they stay, they are
hindering the police.
The Department of Homeland Security said Saturday that 49,700 rescues had been
performed and that 208,000 people were being housed in shelters. It said 20,000
active duty military members, 50,800 National Guard members, 4,000 Coast Guard
members and 8,900 Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel had responded to
the storm.
Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who on Friday was given
responsibility for managing the federal relief effort after the FEMA chief,
Michael D. Brown, was reassigned to Washington, said he had spent the day
helping the parishes in the New Orleans region establish an "organizational
coordinating mechanism" to make relief efforts more efficient. Admiral Allen
said that the relief effort was focusing on moving evacuees from shelters into
temporary housing and that trailers would be brought in to help.
Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, who had been critical of the
federal response to the storm, appeared with Admiral Allen and praised him as "a
man of resource, a man of innovation, and a man of action. And that's all we've
ever needed from Day One."
Mr. Broussard offered a staccato accounting of progress in his parish.
"We're feeding more people," he said. "We're recovering more people. The
infrastructure's more improved. We're clearing more roads. We've got more power.
We're building more power lines. We've got more drainage lines. Every day, more
victories."
In New Orleans, residents who were allowed to return on Saturday used
four-wheel-drive vehicles to reach their homes, while others hitched rides with
contractors who had been hired to pump water out of the city.
And after days in which the city seemed to house only soldiers, rescuers and
stragglers, there were the beginnings of a job boom.
Brian Massey, 50, who rode out the hurricane in his home two miles west of
downtown, was part of a city-hired cleanup crew working along Canal Street on
Saturday.
"I needed a job," said Mr. Massey, who said he had worked as a plasterer before
Hurricane Katrina tore holes in his roof. He said he did not have homeowner's
insurance.
Mr. Massey and the others in his crew of 11 were being paid about $125 a day for
10 hours of work by an Illinois-based disaster-recovery company. All crew
members were New Orleans residents who refused to evacuate. They had heard
through word of mouth that the company, Omni Pinnacle, was hiring laborers, and
they went to the firm's base camp near the convention center.
At least some people here were able to focus on events elsewhere.
Six emergency management officials with the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey who have been helping officials here for a week planned to hold a small
ceremony on Sunday morning to recognize the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. Some 300 officers from the New York Police Department will
also attend.
In Houston, which is host to about 100,000 storm evacuees, officials said they
had suspended a program to distribute debit cards, worth up to $2,000 per
family, to the storm victims at the Astrodome complex. Officials said about
12,000 cards were handed out on Thursday and Friday.
According to The Associated Press, FEMA officials said workers would finish
distributing the cards this weekend at shelters in Texas. Evacuees in other
states will have to supply bank account information to receive aid via direct
deposit.
"We tried it as an innovative way to get aid to evacuee populations in Texas,"
said Natalie Rule, a spokeswoman for FEMA. "We decided it would be more
expeditious with direct deposits."
President Bush, in his weekly radio address, drew parallels between what the
nation faced after the Sept. 11 attacks and the havoc caused by Hurricane
Katrina.
"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and
loss of life," Mr. Bush said. "This time, the devastation resulted not from the
malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind."
President Bush plans to make his third trip to the devastated region on Sunday
and Monday. Vice President Dick Cheney spent the day in Austin, Tex., where he
visited evacuees.
Mr. Cheney, dispatched by Mr. Bush this week to cut through bureaucratic red
tape that might be hampering the relief effort, said the federal government
would play a critical role in helping states shoulder the burden of so many
evacuees. He said that should be the case, especially in helping finance school
systems that were accepting new students and local housing agencies that were
being turned into long-term residences for displaced residents.
"There are a lot of lessons we want to learn out of this process in terms of
what works, how we can do it better, how we can improve our performance around
the country," Mr. Cheney said.
Sewell Chan contributed reporting from New Orleans for this article,
John
Broder from Baton Rouge, La., and Anne E. Kornblut from Austin, Tex.
As
Recovery Starts, Some Lights Go On, Some Mail Is Delivered, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11hurricane.html
With Small but Steady Steps,
Cleanup and
Repair Progressing
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 10 - After nearly two weeks
of crisis, officials and workers here and in other devastated parts of the Gulf
Coast began making small but meaningful strides Saturday in restoring services
and rebuilding the shattered infrastructure.
About 700 city residents were temporarily allowed to return to their homes on
Saturday to check their property and to retrieve valuables in largely affluent
neighborhoods like Spanish Fort on the northern edge of the city along Lake
Pontchartrain and in the Lower Garden District, flush along the crescent the
Mississippi River forms around this city.
At City Hall, running water had been restored and one engineer said he expected
the building to have power soon. Workers carted city property records from the
basement, saying they would be refrigerated to prevent mold from damaging them.
Health officials revised the death toll to 154, from 118 a few days earlier, but
said it would not be the final count. They said caution, accuracy and respect
were their goals and that they would not work hastily.
"I'm not going to make estimates," said Melissa Walker, a spokeswoman for the
Louisiana Department of Health and Hospital Services. "These are individuals who
perished in a storm and each one is very important."
But whatever the final toll, officials said on Friday that their first
systematic sweep of the city had found far fewer bodies than expected, and that
the toll would probably be much less than the 10,000 that some officials had
initially feared.
Across the region, efforts to restore basic infrastructure continued haltingly.
The Postal Service said that it had resumed limited mail service in the three
states affected by the storm.
In Mississippi, work began on Friday on a temporary road to handle two-way
traffic on U.S. Highway 90, which runs along the state's Gulf Coast and was
destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Federal transportation officials said the first
phase of that project is to be completed in 90 days. Officials also were set to
begin work on the I-10 Bridge in Louisiana, which connects New Orleans with
Slidell. They hoped to have one-lane, two-way traffic flowing within 45 days and
two-lane, two-way traffic within 120 days. When completed, the project will
restore road access into New Orleans from the east, officials said.
In New Orleans, power was being restored bit by bit to parts of the city,
including the central business district. And by the end of the day on Saturday,
a rail link to New Orleans was expected to be reconnected, the Federal
Department of Transportation said. Norfolk Southern Railroad has been working to
repair a rail bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect the city by rail
from the east for the first time since the storm hit Aug. 29.
One man recruited to help transport property records from City Hall said he had
evacuated and returned to find work. "I wanted to see the city and help the
city," said Anthony Condoll, 21.
In the historic Uptown neighborhood, on higher ground by Mississippi River, many
of the old oaks at Audubon Park, still stood, but some were heavily pruned by
the storm.
Many of the residents who were allowed to return Saturday used four-wheel-drive
vehicles to reach their homes, while others hitched rides with contractors who
had been hired to pump water out of the city. One resident arrived in a pontoon
plane that landed on Lake Pontchartrain.
At least some people here were able to focus on events elsewhere.
Six emergency management officials with the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey who have been helping officials here for a week planned to hold a small
ceremony on Sunday morning to recognize the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks.
President Bush, in his weekly radio address, drew parallels between what the
nation faced after those attacks and the havoc caused by Hurricane Katrina.
"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and
loss of life," Mr. Bush said. "This time the devastation resulted not from the
malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind."
"Once more our hearts ache for our fellow citizens, and many are left with
questions about the future," he said. "Yet we are again being reminded that
adversity brings out the best in the American spirit."
President Bush plans to make his third trip to the devastated region on Sunday
and Monday. Vice President Dick Cheney was headed for Texas on Saturday to visit
storm evacuees.
Sewell Chan and Michael Luo contributed reporting for
this article.
With
Small but Steady Steps, Cleanup and Repair Progressing, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11hurricane.html
Uprooted and Scattered
Far From the
Familiar
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
BLUFFDALE, Utah, Sept. 9 - Carrying the scraps
of their lives in plastic trash bags, citizens of the drowned city of New
Orleans landed in a strange new place a week ago and wondered where they were.
The land was brown, and nearly everyone they saw was white.
"I'm still not sure where I am - what do they call this, the upper West or
something?" said Shelvin Cooter, 30, one of 583 people relocated from New
Orleans to a National Guard camp here on a sagebrush plateau south of Salt Lake
City, 1,410 miles from home.
"We're getting shown a lot of love, but we're also getting a lot of stares like
we're aliens or something," Mr. Cooter said. "Am I the only person out here with
dreadlocks?"
Hurricane Katrina has produced a diaspora of historic proportions. Not since the
Dust Bowl of the 1930's, or the end of the Civil War in the 1860's have so many
Americans been on the move from a single event. Federal officials who are
guiding the evacuation say 400,000 to upwards of one million people have been
displaced from ruined homes, mainly in the New Orleans metropolitan area.
Texas has taken in more than 230,000 people, according to Gov. Rick Perry. But
others are scattered across the United States, airlifted from a city that is
nine feet below sea level to mile-high shelters in Colorado, to desert mesas in
New Mexico, piney woods of Arkansas, flatlands of Oklahoma, the breezy shore of
Cape Cod and beige-colored Wasatch Mountain front in Utah.
Many say they will never go back, vowing to build new lives in strange lands,
marked forever by the storm that forced their exodus. They seem dazed and
disconnected, though happy to be alive, to be breathing clean air, to be dry.
Others say they still feel utterly lost, uprooted from all that is familiar,
desperate to find a missing brother or aunt.
"The people are so nice, but this place is really strange to me," said Desiree
Thompson, who arrived in Albuquerque, last Sunday with six of her children and
two grandchildren, along with about 100 other evacuees. "The air is different.
My nose feels all dry. The only thing I've seen that looks familiar is the
McDonalds."
It came as a shock to Ms. Thompson and others when they were told of their
destination - mid-flight. They had boarded a military plane out of New Orleans
last weekend, expecting to go to Texas, many of them said.
"In the middle of the flight they told us they were taking us to New Mexico,"
Ms. Thompson said. "New Mexico! Everyone said, 'My God, they're taking us to
another country.' "
It was bad enough, Ms. Thompson said, that one of her sons is in another city
and a close family friend is still missing. She cried at the thought of them.
Being in a place that felt so far away and foreign only added to the sense of
dislocation.
Not that New Mexico - the Land of Enchantment, rainbow-colored chili peppers and
a black population of barely 3 percent - has not tried to make the exiled
residents of New Orleans feel at home. Naomi Mosley offered free hair styling -
"mostly relaxers and hair-straightening," she said - to a handful of women at
her parlor, and the Rev. Calvin Robinson was one of the preachers doling out
counseling and soul food at a church in Albuquerque.
"This is almost like the exodus of Moses," Mr. Robinson said. "These people have
left everything behind. Their friends and relatives are far away. Most of what
they had is gone forever. They feel abandoned by the government, but we are
trying to make them feel at home."
Indeed, after he consumed two plates of mustard greens, fried chicken, potato
salad and corn bread at God's House Church in Albuquerque, 67-year-old Walter
Antoine said the dinner was the nearest thing to New Orleans comfort food he has
had in more than a week. Like others, he was sleeping in a cot at the
Albuquerque Convention Center and was bused to the church for dinner.
But sitting outside at sunset, with the 10,000-foot-high Sandia Mountains in the
background, Mr. Antoine was pining for home, his wife and anything that looked
or felt familiar. He had walked through knee-high water to a levee, where a
helicopter rescued him. "See, I can't get around all that well because I'm a
double amputee," he said, lifting his pants to show two prosthetic legs. "If I
had a brother or sister or someone here, maybe I might stay. But I don't know
anybody. If I'm gonna die, I want to die back in New Orleans."
But with the prospect that New Orleans could remain uninhabitable for months,
many of those displaced by the hurricane say they are eager to start anew and
never go back. They will always have what federal officials are calling the
worst natural disaster in the United States as their common ground, but for now
many people say they want to blend in and shed the horror of predatory winds,
fetid water and lost loved ones.
"It's just time for another change, for me to start my life over," said Matthew
Brown, 37, newly relocated to Amarillo, in the dusty panhandle of Texas. "I have
a job and a couple of offers. The money's nice. People like me, treat me right."
Some 70 years ago, Amarillo was losing people, as the largest city inside the
hardest hit area of the Dust Bowl. As skies darkened with mile-high walls of
dust, and the land dried up, nearly 250,000 people fled from parts of five
states in the Southern Plains. They were called Okies and Arkies, and many of
them were not welcome in places like Los Angeles, where sheriff's deputies
arrested people without visible means of support.
Now the Texas Panhandle, along with Oklahoma to the north, is on the receiving
end of people made homeless by a force of nature. And while the evacuees say
they have been struck by the kindness of the volunteers and citizens, their
relocation could start to strain state services. Texas officials have already
indicated that state facilities are near capacity. Nearly 6,000 children from
Louisiana have enrolled in Texas schools. After a request from Governor Perry,
evacuees were flown to at least 12 other states. But thousands simply moved on
their own, arriving by bus or car.
"In some ways this is comparable to the close of the Civil War, or the Dust
Bowl, but we have greater numbers now and there's the suddenness of this
movement - within a day or two, nearly a million people left their homes," said
Jeff Ferrell, a professor of sociology at Texas Christian University in Fort
Worth, who has studied urban dislocation.
"There's been a tremendously generous response," he said. "But what happens over
the next few months? In Texas, we couldn't even get the Legislature to fully
fund the schools."
The diaspora is also concentrated close to home. Baton Rouge has nearly doubled
from its pre-storm population of 250,000, according to some city estimates, and
that has already caused some grumbling among its residents. From there, evacuees
spread out in ripples, with heavy populations in Georgia, Arkansas and Texas,
and then to the nation's far corners, to the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific
Northwest and New England.
For now, after complaints from people who said they were being moved too many
times, making it difficult to get anchored, federal officials say they putting a
hold on plans to fly large groups of people to other states.
Joseph Haynes moved his wife, a family friend and two grown sons to Seattle,
arriving in two cars after a 2,100-mile journey from their home in New Orleans.
Mr. Haynes said he left behind a house he owns and a mechanic's job that he
suspects will never come back. He headed for Seattle because one of his sons
lives there.
"What good is me going back with my family to a city that is dead?" he said.
"Then my life would be dead. So I need to move on."
Here in Utah, more than a 100 of the evacuees have boarded buses from the
shelter to go to Denver and Dallas, and then beyond. They said they needed to be
closer to home. But others have already found jobs in the Beehive State, which
has a black population of less than 1 percent according to the last census, and
say they intend to stay.
"I didn't have a clue where they were taking us," said Reginald Allen, 36,
smoking a cigarette outside his temporary home at Camp Williams. "But when they
told us it was Utah, I just said, 'Well, it's a change. I gotta adapt.' And now
I got a job, and I plan to make this my home. I think I could be a cold-weather
guy.' "
The Red Cross, which has been widely praised for running many of the shelters,
helped to organize a job fair here on Thursday, which resulted in the hiring of
40 people.
But there are some incongruous sites. Inside the community center at Camp
Williams, where people are staying in barracks-style rooms, a posted sign gave
notice of the chance to use the "rock-climbing wall today" as well the impending
arrival of "ethnic hair products."
Like other shelters that are now fast-emptying as people move into apartments,
the one here was full of rolling rumors about a $2,000 debit card from the
government - initially offered, then withdrawn by FEMA, then offered again - and
clues about missing family members. Some of the evacuees still have a 2,000-mile
stare in their eyes , and they are frustrated by their inability to connect to
people who were left behind and who may be dead or lost or in another distant
shelter.
"I got out on a helicopter line, but I saw one woman, she was too heavy, and she
snapped the cable and fell into the water," said George Lee Jr., 24. "Back home,
the roof caved in on my bedroom, in my grandma's house. But I'm O.K. My plan now
is to find a job, save some money, and then maybe move to Florida."
For those who do stay here, one question was whether they would become more like
people in Utah, or if Utahans would become more like them. There was some
evidence of the latter. This week, a Cajun-themed dinner was planned in Salt
Lake for one of the most far-flung of the wandering tribes of New Orleans.
Maureen Balleza, in Houston, and David Carrillo Peñaloza, in Seattle,
contributed reporting for this article.
Uprooted and Scattered Far From the Familiar, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11diaspora.html
What Will It Take
to Safeguard New Orleans?
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By BILL MARSH
NEW ORLEANS has long lived with the hurricane
protection that it, and the nation, were willing to pay for. Measured against
the costs of Katrina's fury, however, better armor may suddenly seem more
affordable.
With officials vowing to rebuild New Orleans, the question of how fully to
defend the city against another catastrophe will be examined as never before.
Unlike San Francisco or Los Angeles, where there is no way to prevent widespread
destruction from the most powerful earthquakes, New Orleans is uniquely
dependent on one feature: its aging network of levees. If levees hold back the
water, the city is spared. If they fail, much of the city is ruined.
"For people to feel confident about coming back again, they're going to have to
rebuild the levee system," said Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the
Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. They must be taller and stronger,
he said, built for the worst-case Category 5 storm. Existing levees were
designed decades ago to withstand only a quickly receding Category 3.
The success of levees in a restored New Orleans will depend partly on the
resilience of other civil engineering, and on wetlands between the city and the
Gulf of Mexico. Today, the condition of these outer defenses is poor: Barrier
islands and wetlands are disappearing, and gates to protect against storm surges
and waves are years away.
Mississippi River levees have choked off the sediment that built and nourished
surrounding wetlands. With the rise in sea levels, about 30 square miles is
submerged every year. The slow march of the gulf shore toward New Orleans can
only be bad for civil defense. Computer modeling shows that in smaller, more
frequent hurricanes, storm surges increase as land is diminished.
"Land absorbs wave energy; the physics have been well established," said Gregory
W. Stone, a professor of coastal geology at Louisiana State University. His
study found that coastal surges increased 8 to 10 feet from 1950 to the 1990's
because of land loss.
In another 15 years, models project, surges and waves on the coast will have
increased a further 6 to 12 feet if the erosion continues.
But the benefit of revived wetlands to New Orleans may be limited.
"I don't think a city should depend on tall grass," said Hassan Mashriqui, a
professor of engineering at Louisiana State. "In general, if there is a barrier,
that helps. If there is a 25-foot surge coming, does that make it two feet less
in New Orleans? It has yet to be proven."
That's because a Katrina-size hurricane, on course to blow a large surge into
the city, has yet to occur - an eventuality too serious, some say, to count on
islands and marshes to stop the water.
"The enemy is the Gulf of Mexico," said Roy K. Dokka, a professor of engineering
at Louisiana State. "If you're at sea level and the National Weather Service
tells you you're going to have a 20-foot storm surge, you need to have a wall
more than 20 feet high."
The engineering challenges are daunting and costly: The city is sinking, and old
elevation measurements used to determine levee heights are obsolete. (They were
inaccurate, anyway.) Bigger levees are heavier and more likely to sink. Gates
that block surges entering Lake Pontchartrain might deflect the water elsewhere,
perhaps to other coastal settlements, which would in turn need their own levee
systems.
Those gates were proposed and blocked on environmental and other grounds in the
1970's. "Probably a lot of lives could have been saved if they had been in
place," said Mr. Stone.
What
Will It Take to Safeguard New Orleans?, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/weekinreview/11marsh.html
Business, Though Not as Usual,
Starts Stirring in New
Orleans
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 9 - Bones broken, vital
organs far from functional, the faintest pulse has begun to beat in the battered
and beleaguered streets of the Big Easy.
The Drury Inn welcomed its first post-hurricane guests on Friday night, warning
that housekeeping would be weekly, not daily, the exercise room was off-limits
and continental breakfast was canceled. A tow-truck driver collected a dozen
Cadillacs taken from a dealership during the chaos. A dozen men with
walkie-talkies worked on wiring the 51 floors of One Shell Square, the city's
largest office building.
There is a very tired man patching tires for $12 on St. Claude Avenue in the
Bywater neighborhood, and there is a gruff Irish bartender opening icy bottles
of Budweiser and Bud Light (Heineken if you know somebody) for $3 in the French
Quarter. And on many a downtown street, there is a guy with a blower strapped to
his back or a broom in his hand, trying to tidy the place up.
"It may not be the grandest job," said Joe Salazar, 50, who said he used to be a
clerk in a medical clinic, but now is one of dozens donning dirty R.F.Q., for
Rebuild French Quarter, T-shirts as they sweep. "I feel that every street that's
clean, that makes it easier for the city to come back."
The vast majority of businesses here are locked tight, the only sign of survival
the spray-painted signs promising that looters will be shot. Yet there are
snippets of economic activity and signs of more to come soon.
Thousands of emergency personnel and journalists are being joined by contractors
and cleanup crews, busting the borders of the makeshift encampment of motor
homes along Canal Street. They need somewhere to sleep, and how many meals ready
to eat can a person eat?
So far, Salvation Army trucks and free-for-all barbecues at Harrah's casino, the
police staging area, have sufficed, but the owner of the Palace Café was here on
Friday with men in paper masks and knee-high boots to clean out the walk-in
freezers.
"The one thing we can do in New Orleans, if they are coming down here, is feed
them some good food," said Dickie Brennan, who owns four downtown restaurants,
including the 300-seat Palace. "We can serve five-star meals."
The day before, Jason Mohney, owner of the Hustler and three other local strip
clubs, arrived with a few dancers and bouncers and some high-powered
flashlights, and found little damage to the red velvet heart-shaped couches and
shiny disco balls, just a little moisture and mold on carpets - probably
flooded, but perhaps from spilled beer.
"As soon as we have power, that will be the only thing that's keeping us from
opening," Mr. Mohney said. "There'll be couch dances as soon as we can get
open," he promised, though one of the dancers, Dawn Beasley, offered one on the
spot ($30).
According to the Entergy Corporation's storm center Web site, 89 percent of
Orleans Parish, which includes the city, remained without power heading into the
weekend, though the lights were back on at several buildings and hotels in the
central business district considered critical to the recovery effort, as well as
at a sewage station on Avenue C and the Audubon Zoo.
The Drury Inn was one of the first hotels to reopen, the electricity restored
early because it is next to Bell South headquarters. It is swapping a week's
worth of 75 rooms, about half its capacity, for the help the phone company
provided leading its staff through checkpoints into the city and setting its
systems straight.
"If we house them, then that allows them to do their job," said Omar Willis,
general manager of a Drury Inn in Houston, who is here for the duration. "It's
mutually beneficial."
Guests got a memo along with their room keys that explained the strange
situation. "We do not know if the shower/tub and tap water is safe for bathing,"
it warned. The switchboard would not be staffed day and night. Trash cans and
dirty towels should be placed in hallways.
"We're going to do with what we have," said the general manager, Palestine
Riles. "We have electricity, we have A.C., we have clean beds. It's some sort of
normality back in the city. We're trying to get back on our feet."
But as some hotels were reopening, the Best Western on St. Charles Avenue, which
had filled its 123 rooms every night since the storm despite the lack of running
water and electricity, posted a sign Friday night saying everybody would have to
check out by 4 p.m. Saturday. The manager, Melissa Kennedy, said she could not
continue to operate because her employees and special cleanup crews were blocked
from getting into the city; a laundry service came to pick up linens for the
first time Thursday, but spent six hours stuck at a highway checkpoint Friday
and never made it back.
"We have mold growing in the building, not enough people to clean it out," said
Ms. Kennedy, who has been running the place from a folding table topped with an
open jar of Jif peanut butter and half a loaf of bread. "We'll reopen as soon as
security lightens up."
With the computer system down, Ms. Kennedy took credit-card imprints and logged
checkouts by hand from the journalists who had spent days hovered at the lobby
bar, where there was wireless Internet service and people ate cold ravioli and
kidney beans from the can. "I'm hoping everyone in the media's honest enough to
give me a valid credit card," she said. "I tell them I can give a handwritten
receipt on stationary, or mail them one when the computers get up and running."
Outside the historic former City Hall annex in the central business district,
lawyers from the firm of Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann filled a U-Haul with
files and computer servers to take to their temporary office in Baton Rouge.
"We're not moving out forever, we're just getting some essential equipment,"
said John Colbert, a partner. "We want to come back as soon as we can."
Around the corner, a crew from Walton Construction assessed the damage at one of
eight La Quinta hotels, preparing to start repairs Monday. "I'm fortunate to be
in the construction business," said the owner, Bill Petty. "You see bankers,
retail people, hoteliers, all out of work."
Scattered throughout the French Quarter, a smattering of taverns and cafes are
already serving, some never having stopped. At Alex Patout's Louisiana
Restaurant on Friday, an open bottle of Champagne on a sidewalk table was
surrounded by Mardi Gras beads, one strand attached to an envelope that held a
condom and read, "Prepare to Party."
Molly's at the Market, on Decatur Street, is open daily from 11 a.m. to the
city's 6 p.m. curfew rather than its usual 6 a.m. last call, and the owner, Jim
Monahan, makes change from a metal lockbox. There are no lights - the beer is on
ice that friends mysteriously manage to muster each day - but there are regulars
on the stools.
"The place has been closed 29 hours in 31 years - it's a tradition," said Mr.
Monahan, who inherited the bar four years ago from his father. "It's just what
my father taught me. You come to work every day. We're hard-working Irish
people."
Dollars line the bar for tips, though much of the business within the city
borders these days is done by barter. Georgia Walker, who has 20 cats, traded
water for cat food the other day with "a bum on the street"; Frank Shea had a
surplus of dog food and ended up with oranges. Benjamin Blackwell, who is
earning $125 a day running nine-man cleanup crews for Omni Pinnacle, a private
company hired by FEMA, swapped cold water for eyewash with an ambulance driving
by.
And if you bust a tire, well, there is only one place to go. St. Claude Used
Tires looks as if it was barely standing before the hurricane hit; since, it has
replaced or repaired nearly 100 tires. Joe Peters, the broken-down owner of the
broken-down shop, was sitting outside one day after the storm when a police
officer asked if he could fix a flat; another lined up behind him, and it has
hardly stopped since.
"I charge the media because they have an expense account," Mr. Peters said,
pointing to the price list, $6 for a plug, $12 for a patch, $35 for a 16-inch
tire, at least until he runs out. "The City of New Orleans, the government, they
sign the book, we'll square up later."
Mr. Peters said, "It feels good to be doing something for my city that's in such
bad shape." Sure he is making a little money besides, "but where I'm going to
spend it at?"
"I can't go buy a beer," he said, gesturing at the wide boulevard of shuttered
stores. "I can't get no red beans and pork chops."
Business, Though Not as Usual, Starts Stirring in New Orleans, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11orleans.html

Storm Stretches Refiners Past a Perilous
Point
NYT 11.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/business/11refine.html
Storm Stretches Refiners
Past a Perilous
Point
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By JAD MOUAWAD
For the nation's oil refiners, Hurricane
Katrina was a disaster long in the making.
Analysts and industry executives had for years feared the consequences of a
storm ramming into the country's largest energy hub - a complex infrastructure
that spans most of the coastline between Texas and Alabama, where nearly half of
the nation's refineries are located.
Hurricane Katrina confirmed the worst predictions. Wreaking havoc along the
coastal states, drowning New Orleans and leaving many dead, the storm shut down
nearly all the gulf's offshore oil and gas production for over a week. Racing to
restore operations, the industry has brought about 60 percent of that back.
But even more crucially, it knocked off a dozen refineries at the peak of summer
demand, sending oil prices higher and gasoline prices to inflation-adjusted
records.
The events of the last two weeks have demonstrated how close to the edge the
country's refining system had been operating, even before the storm. Because the
last American refinery was built nearly 30 years ago - with only a single new
one now in the works - the problem is unlikely to disappear quickly.
As a consequence, even though crude oil prices have fallen back to pre-Katrina
levels, prices for gasoline, heating oil, diesel and jet fuel are expected to
remain higher than they were before the storm for a much longer period of time.
"There is now a greater realization that we don't have much extra capacity,"
said Edward H. Murphy, a refining specialist at the American Petroleum
Institute, a trade and lobbying group. "It doesn't take a Katrina, but even a
smaller event can create a dislocation in the market. Disasters like this can
give you a billboard on the need to address this. We need more capacity."
The rapid run-up in oil prices over the last two years has translated into a
boon for refiners after many years of meager returns. This year, the refining
margin - the difference between the cost of buying crude oil and selling refined
end products - has exceeded $20 a barrel, far above the long-term average of $6.
That has meant record profits for oil companies and refiners and above-average
stock performance on Wall Street.
With profits soaring, the nation's refiners are now being blamed by many drivers
and politicians for contributing to the run-up in prices. Indeed, to critics of
the industry, the higher profits are evidence of a policy to intentionally limit
refining capacity to improve the bottom line.
"Oil companies have jacked up gasoline prices through a simple mechanism:
reducing inventories and refining capacity," said Jamie Court, president of the
Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, an advocacy group, whose views are
widely shared by industry opponents.
"They are supposed to compete and bring the lowest price to consumers," Mr.
Court said. "But the truth is that a small number of oil companies cheat by
working together by artificially reducing supplies."
But that argument misses the point, said Bob Slaughter, the president of the
National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.
"What's happened can be explained by the higher cost of crude oil, the
difficulties in building new refineries and the disaster that cut right through
the heart of the industry," Mr. Slaughter said.
Currently, four major refineries, owned by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips
and Murphy Oil, are either flooded or without power, and are likely to be out of
commission for several weeks, perhaps months. Together, these refine 880,000
barrels a day, or 5 percent of domestic capacity. "It's very significant," said
Colm McDermott, an oil analyst at John S. Herold Inc. The loss is equal to 1
percent of the world's refining capacity. "It's a global market and that's
certainly enough to have an impact on a global level."
As many as 15 other refineries, also affected by the storm, are resuming
production, but some are still operating at limited capacity.
"There's going to be a lot of pressure on these people to get things up and
running and deal with the maintenance issues as they come up," said James W.
Jones, a vice president at Turner, Mason & Company, a refining consultancy in
Dallas.
Many parts of the industry are recovering rapidly. The most damage offshore was
sustained by Royal Dutch Shell, which said Friday that its production, usually
about 450,000 barrels a day, would be down by 40 percent through the end of the
year.
But even as oil and gas production returns in the gulf, the time that it will
take refineries to get back to full speed will be a key factor in determining
how long product prices will remain elevated.
Under normal conditions, because of the close proximity of volatile materials,
high pressure and fire, restarting a refinery is a dangerous process that can
take anywhere between three to seven days.
In the refinery, oil is heated to around 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit, turned into
vapor and then collected at various temperatures, creating products that are
further refined to remove impurities, allowing for the production of gasoline,
heating oil, diesel fuel and kerosene.
For the four damaged refineries - three are in the vicinity of New Orleans, and
the fourth is in Pascagoula, Miss. - restarting will involve a much longer
process. First, power must be restored. Once that happens, generators, pumps and
other electrical equipment flooded by brackish water will need to be dried out.
Removing salt sediments will add to the ordeal. Then the operators must check
that none of their main systems have suffered any structural damage before
firing them back up.
So far, none of the refineries have provided an estimate of how long all that
will take. In its latest report, Chevron, whose 325,000 barrels-a-day refinery
is the largest of the four, said "it will be days before a full estimate of
damage is known or when operations can be safely brought back online."
Most Americans now pay more than $3 a gallon for gasoline - matching
inflation-adjusted highs reached after the Iranian revolution in the late 1970's
and early 1980's and the equivalent, on a per-barrel basis, to $126. Oil prices,
which touched a high of $70.85 a barrel last week, now trade around $64 a
barrel, still about $20 short of the record set in 1981.
"If we lose three or four refiners for two or three months, that shortfall is
going to be very difficult to make up," said William E. Greehey, the chief
executive of Valero, the nation's largest independent refiner. "I don't know how
anyone can blame it on us when we've just had the worst natural disaster in the
United States' history."
The refining outages prompted an international response from industrialized
nations to send emergency stocks of oil and gasoline to the United States to
plug the shortfall.
But that is only a temporary solution to a crisis that has been waiting to erupt
for years.
Since the 1980's, the number of refiners in the United States has been cut in
half. From a peak of 324 in 1981, the industry has shrunk to 149 as the smaller,
less efficient and less profitable operators once protected by price controls
closed, leaving mostly larger companies in place.
Refining capacity has fallen about 10 percent, to 17 million barrels a day,
while oil consumption rose by 33 percent over the same 24-year period, to 20.8
million barrels a day.
Meanwhile, refiners have been increasing their skill in turning crude into
useful products; efficiency improved by 27 percent between 1981 and 2004. Still,
the difference must be made up by direct imports of refined products, with
gasoline imports now at 1 million barrels a day.
As their numbers dwindled, most remaining refiners expanded their plants and
added equipment to process more oil. Many refiners now typically run at 95
percent of capacity, a level that is dangerously high and that has led to a
growing number of accidents in recent years.
In March, for example, a blast at BP's Texas City refinery, the country's
third-largest, killed 15 and injured 170 people. The company was blamed by
investigators with the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board for
"systemic lapses."
Following the agency's recommendation, BP appointed an independent panel last
month to review the "safety culture" of its American refining operations.
Only one project to build a new refinery is currently under way. For the last
six years, Glenn McGinnis said he has been struggling to line up the permits,
funding and oil supplies to build a refinery from scratch in a remote patch in
Southwest Arizona.
"The fundamental reason why there has not been a new refinery built for years is
really two reasons - economics and uncertainty," Mr. McGinnis said.
Traditionally, the profit margin for refineries has averaged about 6 percent, a
rate of return too low to encourage much new investment. Added to that is the
lengthy process involved in securing the permits from state and federal
agencies. "If you take permits, and engineering, and building," Mr. McGinnis
said, "you're talking about a 10-year horizon from the time you decide to build
to the day the refinery is completed."
Another issue that has slowed expansion, refiners said, was the cost of
complying with environmental regulations set in the 1990's under the Clean Air
Act. The American Petroleum Institute estimates that refiners have spent $47
billion over the last decade to meet carbon-emission standards and low-sulfur
regulations, with more investments needed through 2007. That, refiners say, is
money not spent to raise capacity.
It has been cheaper to add refining capacity through acquisitions rather than
new projects. Valero recently bought Premcor for $10,000 a barrel of capacity, a
price many analysts deemed high. But that is well below the $16,000 a barrel
that Arizona Clean Fuels, Mr. McGinnis' project, expects to invest.
Elsewhere in the world, some oil producers are planning to build new refineries.
Saudi Arabia is one of them. "We cannot keep producing oil with no refineries,"
Ali Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, told the industry newsletter Petroleum
Argus a few months ago. "There is a limit."
While helpful, such moves abroad would mostly serve to shift the country's
increasing reliance on foreign oil producers to a greater dependence on refiners
abroad.
"We are going to be importing more products," Mr. Murphy of the American
Petroleum Institute said. "That is a certainty if we don't expand our capacity.
But the problem there is that you've changed one form of dependency for
another."
Barnaby J. Feder contributed reporting for this
article.
Storm
Stretches Refiners Past a Perilous Point, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/business/11refine.html
No Fixed Address
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON — The images of starving,
exhausted, flood-bedraggled people fleeing New Orleans and southern Mississippi
over the last two weeks have scandalized many Americans long accustomed to
seeing such scenes only in faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places like
Kosovo, Sudan or Banda Aceh.
But Hurricane Katrina delivered America its own refugee crisis, arguably the
worst since Sherman's army burned its way across the South. And though the word
"refugee" is offensive to some, and not accurate according to international law,
it conveys a fundamental truth: these are people who will be unable to return
home for months, possibly years. Many almost certainly will make new homes in
new places.
It is not the first time the United States has faced a mass internal migration:
think of the "Okies" who fled the drought-ravaged Dust Bowl for fertile
California in the 1930's, or Southern blacks who took the Delta blues to Chicago
in the first half of the last century.
But the wreckage wrought by Katrina across the Gulf Coast is probably
unprecedented in American history. No storm has matched the depth and breadth of
its devastation. And the two disasters that demolished major cities - the
Chicago fire of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 - occurred when
the federal government lacked the resources and agencies to help the displaced.
They offer few clues about how to aid and comfort Katrina's victims.
For that reason, many experts say, the federal government should look for
long-term strategies among the groups that have resettled millions of refugees
from those faraway storm-tossed or war-ravaged places - two million of them here
in the United States since 1975.
"These groups have a different way of seeing the problem: that it's not just
short-term emergency relief," said Roberta Cohen, an expert on refugees at the
Brookings Institution who helped write guidelines on aiding internally displaced
people for the United Nations.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has welcomed some help from agencies
that specialize in disaster relief overseas, including the United Nations and
the United States Agency for International Development.
But despite Katrina's magnitude, FEMA officials say their approach to resettling
evacuees is not likely to differ significantly from the approach here to past
disasters. They have ordered 100,000 trailers and mobile homes that will be
placed in "trailer cities" in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. They have
begun finding short-term apartments in Houston and Baton Rouge. And the Red
Cross and other aid groups plan to provide psychological counseling and housing
assistance at its temporary shelters.
"This is larger, but the process is the same," said James McIntyre, a FEMA
spokesman.
Experts in refugee resettlement say the old ways might not be enough. Thousands
of the New Orleans evacuees were poor or elderly; many were on welfare or have
limited job skills. Many have been sent far from family and friends. Meeting
their needs, and rebuilding the shattered Gulf Coast cities, will take a far
more long-term and comprehensive plan, those experts say.
"The approach now is very ad hoc," said Mark Franken, executive director of
migration and refugee services for the United States Conference of Catholic
Bishops. "They are moving people from one temporary environment to another."
Mr. Franken said nine resettlement organizations had proposed re-creating their
refugee services for evacuees: finding jobs and long-term independent housing,
acclimating people to new communities and providing careful case management that
lasts months. The Bush administration is still reviewing that proposal, he said.
The administration, he added, said groups should be prepared to care for half a
million evacuees.
Other experts contend that the federal government should create a large-scale
public works program to employ evacuees, possibly in rebuilding New Orleans
itself. Gene Dewey, who retired in June as the assistant secretary of state for
population, refugees and migration, said one model, as far-fetched as it sounds,
might be the Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps - named after the Depression-era
program started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt - that the Bush
administration created in Afghanistan in 2003. By paying returnees to build
roads, plant trees and restore schools, the program provided dignity as well as
money, Mr. Dewey said.
"This is a time when you need that kind of Franklin Roosevelt thinking," he
said.
Hugh Parmer, who worked for the United States Agency for International
Development in the 1990's and who has advised federal officials on a
post-Katrina strategy, said the Kosovo crisis of 1999 taught him that the most
humane way to resettle refugees was to avoid placing them in large shelters or
camps.
Mr. Parmer added that the organization he currently leads, the American Refugee
Committee International, plans to open mobile health clinics in Louisiana this
week. It will be the first time the group, founded in 1979 to assist Southeast
Asian refugees, has done work inside the United States.
"We run six mobile clinics in Darfur, and we've been joking that we're going to
move the Sudan model to southern Louisiana," Mr. Parmer said.
Julia Taft, who directed a Ford administration task force that oversaw the
resettlement of 131,000 Southeast Asian refugees in the United States in 1975,
said religious groups and private relief agencies were able to resettle those
refugees in nine months because they had a vast network of volunteers, churches
and synagogues.
"What we need to do is treat them like refugees," Ms. Taft said of the
hurricane's victims. "We've got to recognize that they are going to be displaced
for a significant period of time."
Some people, most prominently the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have objected to calling
the storm victims refugees, asserting that the word is inappropriate and even
racist. Under international law, refugees are defined as people who cross
national borders to flee persecution.
Ms. Cohen of the Brookings Institution said the evacuees from the Gulf Coast fit
neatly into a newer category: "internally displaced persons." In the 1990's,
when the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to
ethnic strife and civil war across the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa, the term
was popularized by aid workers who contended that Western nations should
intervene, with force if necessary, when governments failed to help large
numbers of displaced people.
The United States, thanks to its resources, has largely been spared such
dislocations. But not completely. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 may have
displaced more than half a million people. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906
displaced more than 200,000 people. The Chicago fire of 1871 left 100,000
residents, a third of the city, homeless.
Donald L. Miller, professor of history at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and
author of "City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America,"
said the 1871 fire, like Katrina, had a sudden and catastrophic impact,
particularly on poor Irish immigrants.
The federal government dispatched troops to keep order, but offered little
direct assistance to victims. Churches, charities and business groups tried to
fill the vacuum, but most of the displaced drifted into tent cities and
shantytowns to fend for themselves, Professor Miller said.
But if the fire offers few clear tips on how government should respond to
Katrina, he said, it is instructive in one way: many of the evacuees stayed
close to Chicago and helped rebuild it. By the late 1880's, it was the
fifth-largest city in the world, a commercial hub and birthplace of a new, more
muscular - and more fireproof - architecture.
"I don't understand the despair regarding New Orleans," he said. "We rebuilt
Chicago. We rebuilt Berlin and Tokyo. We can do it again."
No
Fixed Address, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/weekinreview/11james.html
In New Orleans,
Some Business Begins to
Stir
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 9 - The faintest pulse has
begun to beat in the battered and beleaguered streets of the Big Easy.
The Drury Inn and Suites welcomed its first post-Katrina guests on Friday night,
warning that housekeeping would be weekly, not daily, the exercise room was off
limits and continental breakfast was canceled. A tow-truck driver collected a
dozen Cadillacs taken from a dealership during the flooded chaos. A dozen men
with walkie-talkies worked on wiring the 51 floors of One Shell Square, the
city's largest office building.
There is a very tired man patching tires for $12 on St. Claude Avenue in the
Bywater neighborhood, and there is a gruff Irish bartender opening icy bottles
of Budweiser and Bud Lite (Heineken if you know somebody) for $3 in the French
Quarter. And on many a downtown street, there is a guy with a blower strapped to
his back or a broom in his hand, trying to tidy the place up.
"It may not be the grandest job," said Joe Salazar, 50, who said he used to be a
clerk in a medical clinic, but now is one of dozens donning dirty R.F.Q., for
Rebuild French Quarter, T-shirts as they sweep. "I feel that every street that's
clean, that makes it easier for the city to come back."
The vast majority of businesses here are locked tight, the only sign of survival
the spray-painted signs promising looters will be shot. Yet there are snippets
of economic activity and symptoms of more to come soon. Thousands of emergency
personnel and journalists are being joined by contractors and cleanup crews,
busting the borders of the makeshift encampment of motor homes along Canal
Street. They need somewhere to sleep, and how many meals ready to eat can a
person eat?
So far, Salvation Army trucks and free-for-all barbecues at Harrah's casino, the
police staging area, have sufficed, but the owner of the Palace Café was here on
Friday afternoon with men in paper masks and knee-high boots to clean out the
walk-in freezers.
"The one thing we can do in New Orleans, if they are coming down here, is feed
them some good food," said Dickie Brennan, who owns four downtown restaurants,
including the 300-seat Palace. "We can serve five-star meals."
The day before, Jason Mohney, owner of the Hustler and three other local strip
clubs, arrived with a few dancers and bouncers and some high-powered
flashlights, and found little damage to the red velvet heart-shaped couches and
shiny disco balls, just a little moisture and mold on carpets - probably
flooded, but perhaps from spilled beer.
"As soon as we have power, that will be the only thing that's keeping us from
opening," Mr. Mohney said. "There'll be couch dances as soon as we can get
open," he promised, though one of the dancers, Dawn Beasley, offered one on the
spot ($30).
The Drury Inn was one of the first hotels to reopen, the electricity restored
early because of its location next door to Bell South headquarters. It is
swapping a week's worth of 75 rooms, about half its capacity, for the help the
phone company provided leading its staff through checkpoints into the city and
setting its systems straight.
"If we house them, then that allows them to do their job," said Omar Willis,
general manager of a Drury Inn in Houston who is here for the duration. "It's
mutually beneficial."
Guests got a one-page memo along with their room keys that explained the strange
situation. "We do not know if the shower/tub and tap water is safe for bathing,"
it warned. The switchboard would not be staffed day and night. Trash cans and
dirty towels should be placed in hallways.
"We're going to do with what we have we have electricity, we have A.C., we have
clean beds," said the general manager, Palestine Riles. "It's some sort of
normality back in the city. We're trying to get back on our feet."
A few blocks away at the Best Western, there is no running water, telephone
service or television, but all of its 123 rooms have nonetheless been booked
every night since the storm for $99, most by the media. There is wireless
Internet service in the air-conditioned bar, where people eat cold ravioli and
kidney beans from the can. On Thursday, for the first time, a laundry service
picked up linens; it was unclear Friday afternoon when they might return.
"Our biggest problem hasn't been contractors willing to come out and help us,
it's been security not letting them in," said Melissa Kennedy, the manager, who
is running the place from a folding table topped with an open jar of Jif peanut
butter and half a loaf of bread.
With the computer system down, Ms. Kennedy is taking credit card imprints and
keeping a check-in-and-out log by hand. "I'm hoping everyone in the media's
honest enough to give me a valid credit card," she said. "I tell them I can give
a handwritten receipt on stationery, or mail them one when the computers get up
and running."
Outside the historic former City Hall annex in the central business district,
lawyers from the firm of Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann filled a U-Haul with
files and computer servers to take to their temporary office in Baton Rouge.
"We're not moving out forever, we're just getting some essential equipment,"
said John Colbert, a partner. "We want to come back as soon as we can."
Around the corner, a crew from Walton Construction assessed the damage at one of
eight La Quinta hotel properties, preparing to start repairs Monday. "I'm
fortunate to be in the construction business," said the owner, Bill Petty. "You
see bankers, retail people, hoteliers, all out of work."
Scattered throughout the French Quarter, a smattering of taverns and cafes are
already serving, some never having stopped. At Alex Patout's Louisiana
Restaurant on Friday afternoon, an open bottle of Champagne on a sidewalk table
was surrounded by Mardi Gras beads, one strand attached to an envelope that held
a condom and read, "Prepare to Party."
Molly's at the Market, on Decatur Street, is open daily from 11 a.m. to the
city's 6 p.m. curfew rather than its usual 6 a.m. last call, and the owner, Jim
Monahan, makes change from a metal lockbox. There are no lights - the beer is on
ice that friends mysteriously manage to muster each day - but there are regulars
on the stools.
"The place has been closed 29 hours in 31 years - it's a tradition," said Mr.
Monahan, who inherited the bar four years ago from his father. "It's just what
my father taught me. You come to work every day. We're hard-working Irish
people."
Dollars line the bar for tips, though much of the business within the city
borders these days is done by barter. Georgia Walker, who has 20 cats, traded
water for cat food the other day with "a bum on the street"; Frank Shea had a
surplus of dog food and ended up with oranges. Benjamin Blackwell, who is
earning $125 a day running nine-man cleanup crews for Omni Pinnacle, a private
company contracted by FEMA, swapped cold water for eyewash with an ambulance
driving by.
And if you bust a tire, well, there is only one place to go. St. Claude Used
Tires looks like it was barely standing before the hurricane hit; since, it has
replaced or repaired nearly 100 tires. Joe Peters, the broken-down owner of the
broken-down shop, was sitting outside one day after the storm when a police
officer asked if he could fix a flat; another lined up behind him, and it has
hardly stopped since.
"I charge the media because they have an expense account," Mr. Peters said,
pointing to the price list, $6 for a plug, $12 for a patch, $35 for a 16-inch
tire, at least until he runs out. "The City of New Orleans, the government, they
sign the book, we'll square up later."
Mr. Peters said, "It feels good to be doing something for my city that's in such
bad shape." Sure he is making a little money besides, "but where I'm going to
spend it at?"
"I can't go buy a beer," he said, gesturing at the wide boulevard of shuttered
stores. "I can't get no red beans and pork chops."
In
New Orleans, Some Business Begins to Stir, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11orleans.html
For Storm Survivors,
a Mosaic of
Impressions
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 10 - For the survivors
of Hurricane Katrina, there is no shared moment to put one's finger on, no
clock-stopping space-holder of history as there was on Nov. 22, 1963, or on
Sept. 11 to remind them: this was where we were and what we were doing when it
all came down.
The disaster was incremental rather than cataclysmic. Instead of a crystalline
moment of memory, there are infinite numbers, each with its own marker: a long
journey, a recurring noise, the last words of a dear relative. Depending on
where people were, what decisions they made in the blur of the crisis and how
the authorities responded, every portrait of the storm is different, like a
jigsaw puzzle in which no two pieces are alike.
For Robert Newman Jr., a 32-year-old resident of St. Bernard's Parish, about
seven miles south of New Orleans, the thing that sticks in his head about the
storm is a chorus of screams. People in his community, one of the most
devastated areas in Katrina's path, watched for days in growing rage and
frustration as helicopter after helicopter raced overhead, bound north for New
Orleans with no acknowledgment of the stranded, beleaguered people below. He
came to understand, he said, how a person could go crazy enough to shoot at a
helicopter, if only from the unbearable stress and anxiety of being ignored for
days on a roof without water and food.
"People are just screaming and screaming on every roof," he said, sitting on the
couch of his cousin's apartment here in Baton Rouge where he and other family
members have taken up temporary residence. "But who do you help?"
Mr. Newman and his brother Paul, 24, eventually managed to find a boat, and
rescued as many people as they could, including an elderly couple who were
standing side by side, neck deep in a swamp surrounded by snakes. They almost
passed the old couple by, until the woman managed to reach up and wave.
But the rescue they both wanted to talk about most because it was the most
serendipitous and unlikely came when they were trying to siphon gas from the
engine of an empty boat that they had captured. Their own motor was turned off,
and that is the only reason they heard the tapping sound from a roof nearby.
They hacked through the shingles with a machete and found an elderly woman under
the eaves with her little dog.
The strange thing was, they said, that the woman had a hatchet in her hand. They
took her and the dog and the hatchet and chugged off into the neighborhood.
Some people, like Stephen Stearns, 20, of St. Bernard's Parish, have been
thinking about decisions that altered the course of events, for better or for
worse. His mother, Marion Stearns, 54, insisted on riding out Katrina at home,
as she had every hurricane before.
But this was not every hurricane before.
On Monday, Aug. 29, with almost no warning, the flood waters surged in St.
Bernard's Parish, smashing down the front door of their house, Mr. Stearns said.
He managed to get outside, but his mother and his father, Arthur Stearns, were
trapped.
They got separated by the raging waters, as the furniture banged and careened
through the house. Arthur Stearns dived repeatedly searching for his wife, and
finally saved himself by smashing a fist through the ceiling and pushing his
head through the hole into the attic to breathe.
Mrs. Stearns didn't make it and drowned.
Her last words to her husband were about their son: "Make sure Stephen gets
out," Stephen Stearns said.
Margaret Chopin's family was piling together in their cars on Sunday before the
storm to head north out of New Orleans across the Lake Pontchartrain for higher
ground and safety.
At the last second, her younger brother, Roy Joseph Jr., 54, stepped out of the
car. His phobia of crossing over water, he told the family, was too much. He
could not face the trip and would stay in town.
"We talked to him Monday night," said Ms. Chopin, who is 55, as she stood by the
family's cots at one of Baton Rouge's largest shelters this week. "He said his
car had been crushed by a tree and was underwater, but that he was all right. We
haven't heard from him since."
People who specialize in the rich oral history and folklore of Louisiana say
that Katrina's stories must be saved and that plans are already being put
together for a more organized and formal accounting of what hundreds of
thousands of people did and thought during the storm. The first interviews could
begin as early as this week.
"We want to create a central data base for all the different organizations that
are collecting stories," said Jocelyn Donlon, co-executive director of the
Center for Cultural Resources, a non-profit group based in Baton Rouge that
works on oral history. "We want to focus on how these stories might influence
future public policy."
Some people came together during the storm in support and self-defense,
sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, in picaresque, improbable journeys that
framed the experience through bonds of friendship.
"We called ourselves the Band," said Greg Lupo, a tourist from Ohio who walked
out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River with his girlfriend, Cathi
Pentella, and three New Orleans residents who all met one another waiting for a
rescue bus that never came.
Mr. Lupo, a 45-year-old drummer and cable television lineman, armed himself with
an eight-foot long steel rod to protect the group. But nothing happened. The
gangs that he saw breaking windows and smashing cars along the way let the Band
pass.
Netanya Watts Hart, a coordinator for the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at
Xavier University, described the journey from her shattered New Orleans
neighborhood on the afternoon of Aug. 31 in tones that almost sound like a
parable from the Bible.
"We eventually walked out of the Ninth Ward in about five feet of water and we
put all the children - 14 children - we put them in a flatboat along with a
woman with one leg and walked a mile in the water," she said. "Then the water
went down enough, and we walked about two more miles and all the children were
holding hands, singing gospel songs two by two."
Ms. Hart and her husband and her two stepchildren and the woman with one leg and
about 25 other people - relatives, neighbors and members of her church - were
eventually taken to safety across the Mississippi River, not unlike Michael's
mythic ferry across the Jordan, though in this case by a Coast Guard crew. And
the group was all still together this week in a shelter near Houston.
Neliska Calloway, a 911 dispatcher with the New Orleans Police Department, said
she has thought of the people she could not help. She worked for 48 hours
straight through the height of the storm, taking call after call from desperate,
frightened people. The call that has stayed in her mind came from a woman who
said she was in labor with twins. She had fled to her attic and the waters were
still rising.
"It was so emotional taking those phone calls, it was scary," Ms. Calloway said.
"You can't imagine what somebody is going through, knowing that they're trapped
in a house, surrounded by water and there's no where to go. I just talked to
them as much as I could."
Ms. Calloway said that emergency workers reached the woman. She said she heard
that one of the twins had died.
In some cases, though, people took command as the crisis descended. Michael
Brown, 24, credited good leadership with getting the 25 members of his extended
family out of New Orleans. Mr. Brown said his uncle, Jesse Brown II, became a
general. Bags were ordered packed in 15 minutes. A rendezvous point was
established in front of the house of Michael Brown's grandmother, Emma Brown.
Everything went according to plan except for one thing, the strapping down of
their luggage on the roof of the car, which did not hold. Several suitcases of
clothing blew off the as they drove out of the city, but there was no time to
stop.
Charles Vigee, 46, was also a handy man to have around as the storm struck his
house in New Orleans. When water started surging up over the porch and in
through the front door, his inspiration was to take the doors off their hinges.
There were four people in the house, said Mr. Vigee, who works in construction,
so his idea was to fashion a raft, one person per door, and lash them together.
The lashing, with a cord ripped from the vacuum cleaner and other lengths of
wire he could find in the watery mess, was wholly inadequate, he said. But the
tipping point, literally, came with his mother-in-law, Carolyn Johnson, started
to teeter on her door just down the street from their flooded home.
"Please Miss Carolyn, please don't fall off the door," Mr. Vigee said he
remembered saying or at least thinking. "But she fell off the door."
Mr. Vigee, sitting in a Baton Rouge shelter surrounded by about 4,500 other
people rendered homeless and destitute by the hurricane, laughed.
"But I was not laughing then," he said.
Serendipity intervened, he said, in what could have become a crisis. A person
floating by on an air mattress helped pull Ms. Johnson back on her door, and
eventually the family made it to a highway where they were all evacuated by
helicopter.
And Michael Cryer and Elvera Boatner fell in love.
They met, indirectly, because the roof of Mr. Cryer's apartment building in New
Orleans blew off. But they both speak about that now, interviewed sitting on
their side-by-side cots in a downtown Baton Rouge shelter, as a small detail,
even on some level a happy turn of events because of where things led from
there.
Mr. Cryer, 29, a sheetrock worker, said he hid in his closet behind a mattress
when water began coming in through the ceiling.
"When I came out, I was like, dang, the whole ceiling was gone," he said. "I
could see the sky and rain was coming through."
So he went looking for an uncle who lived a mile or so away, who happened to
live in Ms. Boatner's building.
They got out of the city together and have been together since.
"I love him," said Ms. Boatner, who is 24, "and I wouldn't have ever met him."
For
Storm Survivors, a Mosaic of Impressions, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11katrina.html
Duty Binds Officers
Who Have Come to Help
After Storm
September 11, 2005
The New York Times
By AL BAKER
NEW ORLEANS, La., Sept. 10 - On Toulouse and
North Rampart Streets in the French Quarter, a Michigan police car nosed behind
a New York City Police Department truck parked outside the New Orleans Police
Department's First District.
"They're coming from Michigan and New York and everywhere," Aaron Wiltz, a
patrolman with the New Orleans Police Department, said as he surveyed the scene.
" It's just awesome. Just to see them sitting next to each other; if I had a
word for it, I'd tell you, but it's just nice to see."
Almost two weeks after the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, a
hodgepodge army of law enforcement officers from around the country have
converged on this city to help its besieged police force restore order. About
10,000 local, state and federal officers - from close-in locations in like
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas and Georgia, and as far away as
Illinois, New Mexico and California - are now patrolling the streets and helping
the search-and-rescue efforts.
"The men and women who are here know their jobs and do it very well," said Capt.
Marlon A. Defillo, a spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department. "A robbery
in New Orleans is the same as a robbery in Los Angeles. All you are doing is
changing the name of the locale."
For days after Hurricane Katrina blew in and tore the city apart, communications
for Officer Wiltz and his colleagues came undone. Cellular antennas bent like
bows or fell, causing cellphones to sputter and to go silent; and the roots of
upended trees tore out underground wires, essentially reducing officers' police
radios to hunks of plastic.
Some in the city exploited the breakdowns by forming gangs that spread violence.
New Orleans experienced a crime wave, with reports of looting, rapes, assaults
and the theft of entire inventories from gun and ammunition shops.
The New Orleans police force can normally muster 1,500 officers. But scores of
them were off duty or cut off by the storm and flood waters. Police officials
also said that a number of officers resigned or simply walked off their posts in
the days after the storm. Last weekend, two officers committed suicide.
Offers of help from other law enforcement agencies came within hours of the
storm, but it took days in some cases for the waters to recede enough to allow
the reinforcements to reach the city.
Visiting officers set up makeshift camps and emergency operations centers in the
parishes around New Orleans and beyond.
The 303-member contingent from New York City, which includes an assistant chief
of police and three inspectors, have based their operations in an abandoned
nursing home in Harahan, La., about 10 miles west of New Orleans.
On Wednesday, 25 vanloads of New York officers drove from Harahan into New
Orleans and took up patrolling the French Quarter.
They joined a law enforcement contingent that not only includes the New Orleans
police, officers from other in-state jurisdictions like Baton Rouge and
thousands of out-of-state officers, but members of the National Guard.
The Guard has had an increasingly heavy presence in the city, said Captain
Defillo, the spokesman for the New Orleans Police Department. At night, the
troops walk in small groups in the Garden District or the French Quarter,
dressed in camouflage, carrying weapons, or driving Humvees, giving the feel of
a militarized zone.
Sgt. Mark G. Mix, a spokesman for the Louisiana State Police, said that about
4,000 troops from Louisiana and Arkansas were doing search and rescue and "a lot
of police work."
There is a natural camaraderie between the officers. "That also holds true for
the military," New York City's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in a
telephone interview Thursday.
When their beats cross, police officers and soldiers usually communicate with a
wave, a smile or a quick greeting, as when a police cruiser passes a military
checkpoint and the officers will say: "Stay safe," or "Good evening, gents."
But bringing separate police agencies into a single city under a unified command
is not without its difficulties, several officials said. Early on, the task was
like trying to join bits of naturally repelling mercury.
The officers' radio frequencies were incompatible. Their jargon was different,
their cultures apart and the landscape foreign.
Ron Hernandez, a New York officer who usually works in Manhattan, said he was
taken aback when he first arrived in Harahan to see that so many civilians with
guns causally strapped to their hips.
But slowly, small groups of officers linked up and traded information. Sheriffs
joined with sheriffs. State police officers gravitated toward one another and
fire department officials joined other fire officials, said Sergeant Mix of the
Louisiana State Police.
To help coordinate, Officer Jim Byrne, of the New York police department's
communications division, brought hundreds of the department's radios to
Louisiana. Within hours of arriving, he and his crew had linked an antenna to a
mast on their temporary headquarters, a Winnebago-like truck, and mounted
another antenna from a building in nearby Westwego to expand the coverage area.
Phone lines from a vacant pizzeria were commandeered. A Harahan police radio was
placed inside the truck to get dispatches from the local officers.
The patchwork of agencies is being held together by New Orleans police
commanders at Harrah's Casino, which has been turned into a temporary command
post. The casino houses the top officials from several agencies who meet each
morning to deploy people.
"All the key individuals are in the room," said Captain Defillo, including
Michael Holt, the special agent in charge of immigration, customs and
enforcement for the federal Department of Homeland Security. "The left hand
knows what the right hand knows."
Going forward, it is difficult to say how long each of the agencies will remain
here, or whether others will arrive.
Police officials in New Orleans said the law enforcement agencies would have to
make individual choices about long to stay and whether to rotate their officers
in and out. But Captain Defillo said it appeared the agencies were here for an
indefinite stay.
"We have got no word on them leaving, none," he said. "Everyone we have spoken
with is prepared for the long haul."
Duty
Binds Officers Who Have Come to Help After Storm, NYT, 11.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11police.html
Water recedes in New Orleans;
death toll
rises
Sat Sep 10, 2005
11:03 PM ET
Reuters
By Kieran Murray and Jason Webb
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - As pumps slowly
emptied New Orleans of the flood waters that turned it into a ghost town, the
death count from Hurricane Katrina grew on Saturday, although to nowhere near
what worried officials had feared.
In careful, time-consuming searches by boat and on foot, firefighters, soldiers
and trained mortuary workers pried open doors and cut their way through walls
across a nearly empty city where 450,000 people once lived.
They found bodies and, incredibly, survivors still clinging to life where they
had been trapped since the storm came ashore on August 29, eventually breaking
the levees that had held back Lake Pontchartrain.
President George W. Bush was to make his third and longest visit to the
devastated region on Sunday, a two-day stay, the White House said. His
administration's initial disaster response efforts have been criticized as too
slow and narrow.
Louisiana officials raised the state's official death toll to 154. In
Mississippi 211 were confirmed killed and there were scattered fatalities in
Alabama and Florida. There had been fears Katrina killed thousands in New
Orleans alone, especially in poor areas whose residents had no way to escape.
"I thought there would be thousands of dead but it seems it's a lot less," said
Staff Sgt. Jason Geranen of the 82nd Airborne Division.
"We keep going because we are still finding some survivors. There was one
yesterday, another one today," said Perry Peake, who heads a search and rescue
team. "You can't just leave people behind."
With 74 pumps sucking water poisoned with chemicals, gasoline and sewage out of
the historic below-sea level city, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Saturday
said the draining should be completed by October 18, 40 days in all compared to
the Corps' original estimates of 80 days.
Officials also announced that the New Orleans Louis Armstrong International
Airport would reopen on September 13.
MAYOR MOVES FAMILY AWAY
But the extent of the long-term disruption the city faces was underscored by a
New Orleans Times Picayune report that Mayor Ray Nagin had bought a house in
Dallas and moved his family there. Nagin said he would return to New Orleans and
make occasional visits to his family as he could.
Some still defied orders to evacuate, and police and soldiers were in general
taking pains not to force the issue. Police have said forcible evictions would
be a last resort.
On the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Bush urged Americans
to recall the spirit that rallied the country four years earlier.
"This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from
the fury of water and wind," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "America
will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it."
A Newsweek poll published on Saturday found Bush's approval rating at a
lowest-ever 38 percent. The survey found 53 percent of Americans no longer
trusted him to make correct decisions in a foreign or domestic crisis, against
45 percent who did.
The New York Times reported on its Web site that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency dispatched only seven of its 28 urban search and rescue teams
to the area before the storm hit, despite an extraordinary warning from the
National Hurricane Center that Katrina could cause "human suffering incredible
by modern standards."
'HECK OF A JOB'
The Bush administration on Friday recalled FEMA head Michael Brown, handing his
role in coordinating rescue and recovery to Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of
staff of the U.S. Coast Guard. Just a week ago, the president publicly told
Brown he was doing a "heck of a job."
Allen met with local officials and told reporters he had discussed naming a
single coordinator to harmonize recovery efforts by the many organizations
involved.
"The water is receding. We are being helped by the pumps coming back on line,"
he said, but added many were still not functioning.
Vice President Dick Cheney visited an emergency management center in Austin,
Texas, and said the government was finally gaining control of the situation. "I
think we are in fact on our way to getting on top of the whole Katrina exercise.
We've got a lot of work ahead of us," he said.
There were more signs of recovery around New Orleans. Authorities said they
would lift the mandatory evacuation order on Sunday for part of Plaquemines
Parish, which covers territory in the Mississippi Delta south of the city.
Entergy Corp. said it had restored power to two thirds of its 1.1 million
customers in Mississippi and Louisiana but said it may take months to restore
power to all of New Orleans.
Some federal officials have put Katrina's cost at between $100 billion and $200
billion. Congress has approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by
Bush, who said further requests will come.
There has been an outpouring of private donations, from across the United States
and abroad. The American Red Cross, which has 36,000 volunteers in the field,
said it had launched a drive to recruit 40,000 more volunteers.
Water
recedes in New Orleans; death toll rises, R, 11.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?
type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-11T030236Z_01_KNE077648_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Red Cross says
needs 40,000 Katrina
volunteers
Sat Sep 10, 2005
7:22 PM ET
Reuters
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - The
American Red Cross said on Saturday it needs 40,000 additional volunteers in the
next few weeks to replace worn-out relief workers helping Hurricane Katrina
victims.
"This is a disaster of such scope and such significance that it is not going to
go away in a few weeks or a few months," said Ken Degnan, public affairs
specialist for the Red Cross. "We need more people."
The relief agency is sheltering 160,000 survivors, has provided 6 million meals
and is operating 675 shelters in 23 U.S. states, an unprecedented effort that is
taxing the 114-year-old organization, Degnan said.
The 36,000 Red Cross volunteers currently working the disaster will start
rotating back to their homes beginning next week, so replacements are needed, he
said.
The agency is asking recruits to contact their local Red Cross, which will
provide training in such fields as shelter management, public health and working
through government bureaucracies set up to assist disaster victims.
"It may seem like pretty simple to come into a shelter and help out," Degnan
said. "But when you are dealing with large numbers of people in a congregate
living facility you need to be trained."
Red
Cross says needs 40,000 Katrina volunteers, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T232114Z_01_KNE082590_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-VOLUNTEERS-DC.XML
In Storm's Ruins,
a Rush to Rebuild
and
Reopen for Business
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - Private
contractors, guided by two former directors of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and other well-connected lobbyists and consultants, are rushing to cash
in on the unprecedented sums to be spent on Hurricane Katrina relief and
reconstruction.
From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and
Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private
sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic
rebuilding effort ever undertaken.
Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help
people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and
billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come.
Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is
projected to cost well over $100 billion.
Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a
bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the
contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered
in post-war Iraq.
"They are throwing money out, they are shoveling it out the door," said James
Albertine, a Washington lobbyist and past president of the American League of
Lobbyists. "I'm sure every lobbyist's phone in Washington is ringing off the
hook from his clients. Sixty-two billion dollars is a lot of money - and it's
only a down payment."
Joe M. Allbaugh, a close friend of President Bush, the president's 2000 campaign
manager and the FEMA director from 2001 to 2003, and James Lee Witt, an Arkansan
close to former President Bill Clinton and a former FEMA director, are now
high-priced consultants, and they have been offering their services to companies
seeking or holding federal contracts in the post-hurricane gold rush.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was helping private companies, including his clients,
cut through federal red tape to speed provision of services and supplies to the
storm-wracked region. Two of his major clients, Kellogg Brown & Root, a
subsidiary of Halliburton, and The Shaw Group, already are at work on disaster
response efforts.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he had played no role in helping Shaw or Kellogg get the
work, insisting that help with federal contracts is not a service he offers to
clients.
"A lot of people want to connect the dots, but the dots don't exist," he said in
a telephone interview from Texas. "I don't do federal contracts, end of story."
However, one of the first things Shaw did after the storm was to invite Mr.
Allbaugh to Louisiana, where he helped the company assemble its disaster team,
giving advice on how to match the company's efforts to those of the government
agencies it serves. He later helped other companies provide assistance.
Mr. Allbaugh said that he was not paid for these efforts and that he did not
sign up any new clients in Louisiana. He did acknowledge that he suggested to
UltraStrip Systems Inc., a client that markets water filtration products through
a subsidiary, that it send representatives to Louisiana.
"Given the situation in the hospitals and nursing homes, I called them up," he
said. "I said, 'You've got to get your unit down there, I'm sure they can put it
to use.' "
Clients of Mr. Witt, who is advising Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana
on managing the crisis, are also in position to profit. Among the clients are
Nextel Communications, Whelen Engineering, a manufacturer of warning systems,
and the Harris Corporation, a telecommunications equipment company.
Mr. Witt said in a brief interview here on Thursday that it is critical to move
quickly after a disaster to restore basic services and that rather than speed
such efforts, government often gets in the way.
"Time is of the essence here and we have to make sure it's fast and smooth and
works well," he said at the Louisiana emergency operations center here. He said
that FEMA had been bureaucratically and financially hobbled since it was
absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Witt's company, James Lee Witt Associates, also employs Wesley Clark, the
former NATO commander and Democratic presidential candidate, and Rodney Slater,
a secretary of transportation in the Clinton administration. The firm's Web site
says it provides "advice, counsel and assistance with strategic introductions
primarily in the area of homeland security."
Mr. Witt did not respond to a request to comment specifically on the role of his
clients in reconstruction.
One of the most immediate tasks after Hurricane Katrina hit was repair of the
breaches in the New Orleans levees. Three companies - the Shaw Group, Kellogg
Brown & Root and Boh Brothers Construction of New Orleans - have been awarded
no-bid contracts by the Army Corps of Engineers to perform the restoration.
"After a disaster, we have certain authorities to execute contracts faster than
we ordinarily would," Gene Pawlik, a Corps of Engineers spokesman in Baton
Rouge, said on Friday. "There is a pot of money that Congress gives us that lets
us respond quickly to an emergency."
The Shaw Group, based in Baton Rouge, is a $3 billion-a-year construction and
engineering firm. It announced this week that it had received two contracts of
up to $100 million each, one from FEMA, the other from the Corps of Engineers,
to work on levees, pump water out of New Orleans and provide assistance with
housing.
Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root's parent company, has a $500 million,
five-year contract with the Navy to provide emergency repairs at military
installations damaged in the hurricane. Under terms of the contract, Halliburton
draws down on the money as it performs services for the military.
Halliburton is doing repair work at three Mississippi naval facilities, as well
as at the Stennis Space Center. The company will also assess pump and
infrastructure damage in New Orleans and construct a facility to support
recovery efforts, it said.
To provide immediate housing in the region, FEMA says it suspended normal
bidding rules in awarding contracts to the Shaw group and CH2MHill, based in
Denver. Fluor, of Aliso Viejo, Calif.; Bechtel National Inc., of San Francisco;
and Dewberry Technologies, of Fairfax, Va.; are doing similar work under
longstanding FEMA contracts that allow the agency to turn to them during
disasters.
John Corsi, a spokesman for CH2MHill, said that the contract could be the first
of several and that it was awarded on a no-bid basis "because of unusual and
compelling situation."
The sheer volume of the contracts and the speed in which they are being issued
troubles some. The government is drawing down on Hurricane Katrina relief money
at a rate of more than $500 million a day.
Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit
government spending watchdog group, said Katrina, like Iraq before it, would
bring the greedy and the self-interested out of the woodwork.
"This is very painful," Ms. Brian said. "You are likely to see the equivalent of
war profiteering - disaster profiteering."
Fluor already has identified some sites, including in Slidell, La., where the
first 400 new homes will be installed, each of which can handle about five
people, Mr. Tashjan said.
Bechtel, with $17.4 billion in annual revenues globally, is working under an
informal agreement with no set payment terms, scope of work or designated total
value. The company's zone is Mississippi, where it has started to install the
first homes.
The company has 100 employees assigned to the task and it does not know how many
will ultimately be working on it, said Howard Menaker, a Bechtel spokesman. It
is also looking for subcontractors that can deliver portable water treatment,
sewage and power plants, as well as mess halls, showers, even helicopters to
move supplies.
Bechtel has a long pedigree in emergency response work, including helping to
remove the remains of the twin towers in New York, building refugee camps in
Kosovo in 1999 and doing safety assessment after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
in San Francisco. It is performing reconstruction work in Iraq under a large
federal contract.
"Political contributions are not a factor," Mr. Menaker said. "It is the fact
that we could get the job done."
Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., for this article,
Raymond Hernandez and Glen Justice from Washington, andLeslie Wayne and Ron
Nixon from New York.
In
Storm's Ruins, a Rush to Rebuild and Reopen for Business, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10contracts.html
Rescuers collect dead,
New Orleans slowly
recovers
Sat Sep 10, 2005
12:54 PM ET
Reuters
By Jason Webb
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Emergency workers
collected the dead of New Orleans on Saturday and the official death toll rose
slowly, boosting hopes Hurricane Katrina would claim far fewer lives than the
thousands once feared.
As police and soldiers started to remove the bodies -- many in homes marked with
paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high -- President George
W. Bush invoked the spirit that united the nation after the September 11
attacks.
"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and
loss of life. This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil
men, but from the fury of water and wind," Bush said in his weekly radio
address.
"America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it," he said on
the eve of the fourth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington that
killed some 2,700 people.
The Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals raised the official hurricane death
toll for the state to 154. In Mississippi, 211 people were confirmed dead. There
was no updated official figure from Alabama, which also sustained considerable
damage in the August 29 storm.
Some officials had warned of a death toll as high as 10,000 in the first chaotic
days after the hurricane, which displaced around a million people.
Police and rescue teams, seeing corpses floating in New Orleans' flooded
streets, feared many more would be discovered trapped in houses when the waters
receded.
"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps. ... The numbers (of dead) so
far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," Col.
Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans, said on Friday.
"MISERABLE FAILURE"
Bush, who successfully rallied the nation after the September 11 attacks, has
faced criticism for the federal government's performance -- described as slow
and inadequate -- following the hurricane.
Bush's job approval ratings have hit all-time lows and a Mississippi Democrat
criticized the White House for failing to follow through on its promise after
the New York attacks to ensure the country was prepared for a catastrophe.
"Like that day four Septembers ago, we once again find ourselves asking, 'How
could this have happened?"' said Rep. Bennie Thompson. "The answer is painful,
but it must be acknowledged: 'We simply were unprepared'.
"Mothers and grandmothers should not drown in nursing homes because help never
arrived," he said.
Former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer, a member of the bipartisan commission that
investigated the attacks, characterized the government's performance this time
as "chaos and dysfunction. ... We have had our first post 9/11 test and we have
miserably failed," he said on CNN.
Roemer said several key recommendations made by the commission to better prepare
the country to handle major disasters, whether natural or man-made, had not been
implemented.
The Bush administration on Friday recalled Federal Emergency Management Agency
head Michael Brown to Washington, handing his role in coordinating rescue and
recovery to Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Just a week ago, the president publicly told Brown he was doing a "heck of a
job."
The White House continued its string of up-close looks at the disaster area.
Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to visit survivors in Texas on
Saturday, and Bush was to travel to the region for a third time on Sunday.
SIGNS OF RECOVERY
There were more signs of recovery around New Orleans. Plaquemines Parish, which
covers territory in the Mississippi Delta south of the city, said it would lift
the mandatory evacuation order for part of the parish on Sunday.
President Benny Rousselle, in a message on the Parish's official Internet site,
said residents returning should bring their own food and medicine. "Electricity
is sporadic. You may or may not have electricity," the notice said.
Entergy Corp. reported it has restored power to two thirds of its 1.1 million
customers in Mississippi and Louisiana but warned it might take months to bring
power back to all of New Orleans, parts of which remained under several feet of
fetid, polluted water.
The Environmental Protection Agency posted the results of tests on New Orleans
flood waters conducted earlier this week showing dangerous and unhealthy levels
of E. coli.
Looting and violence, which erupted in the days after the storm, were also under
control.
"The security situation has stabilized in about the last 72 hours and has gotten
better every day, said Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National
Guard."
A Louisiana policeman said crime at this point was "nil."
City business leaders were trying to organize a comeback. Executives aimed to
reopen the French Quarter tourist mecca within 90 days and hold a scaled-down
Mardi Gras carnival in late February.
Organizers of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival pledged to stage
the 10-day event next spring either in its traditional fairgrounds location or
"as close to New Orleans as possible," the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.
By Saturday, Norfolk Southern Railroad expected to complete repairs on its rail
bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect New Orleans from the east for the
first time since August 29, the U.S. Transportation Department said.
Some federal officials have put the cost of the storm at between $100 billion
and $200 billion.
Congress has now approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by Bush, who
warned further requests will come.
Rescuers collect dead, New Orleans slowly recovers, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T165313Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
Post-Katrina hand-wringing
echoes earlier
criticism
Sat Sep 10, 2005
7:46 AM ET
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Withering criticism in
the United States over the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina may seem
unprecedented, but much of the same hand-wringing has been seen before.
President George W. Bush, as well as local and state authorities, have been
under attack for a week for being too slow to help people hit by the storm that
swamped New Orleans and other parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Similar questions over the speed and effectiveness of relief efforts followed
Hurricane Andrew in August 1992, a storm that flattened parts of the Miami area
and, until Katrina, was the costliest hurricane to strike the country.
"Where in the hell is the cavalry?" That plea from local emergency official Kate
Hale days after Andrew hit land became emblematic of a sense that then-President
George Bush, the current president's father, and his government had been slow to
send in people and supplies.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin echoed that with a "desperate SOS" on September 1,
three days after Katrina slammed ashore and two days after it was evident that
his city was flooded out and thousands of people were stranded in danger and
squalor.
A report by the U.S. General Accounting Office to the U.S. Congress, on
"Improving the Nation's Response to Catastrophic Disasters" and issued the year
after Andrew, raised many of the questions that have been heard again this week
and probably will be for months to come.
DOUBTS OVER FEMA HEARD BEFORE
"The response to Hurricane Andrew raised doubts about whether FEMA is capable of
responding to catastrophic disasters and whether it had learned any lessons from
its responses to Hurricane Hugo and the Loma Prieta earthquake," it said,
referring to a hurricane and earthquake in 1989.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and its director, Michael Brown, were
under attack again this week, with critics of the Bush administration saying the
agency had improved for a time but lost teeth when it was placed under the
control of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security after the September 11,
2001, attacks on the United States.
On Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff pulled Brown off
on-the-ground relief operations.
Bush, while saying last week that the results of relief efforts were
unacceptable, has called for a moratorium on the "blame game." But with layers
of local, state and federal government involved in storm preparations and
relief, fingers can be pointed in many different directions.
If some people wondered why Bush did not rush in troops to help stranded victims
of Katrina, others say Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco could have been faster to
order up her state's National Guard -- part-time soldiers who serve under state
governors -- or question whether Nagin prepared the city well enough before the
hurricane hit. Or they wonder why leaders at all levels were not on the same
page.
The GAO report of 1993 found it was not clear who was responsible for what in
dealing with Andrew.
"The response in South Florida suffered from miscommunication and confusion of
roles and responsibilities at all levels of government -- which slowed the
delivery of services vital to disaster victims."
The report also called for a strong presidential lead in times of disaster,
saying "presidential leadership creates a powerful, meaningful perception that
the federal government recognizes an event is catastrophic, is in control and is
going to use every means necessary to meet the immediate mass care needs of
disaster victims."
The current Bush White House has been criticized for appearing slow to grasp the
magnitude of Katrina's impact. A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of
Americans believed Bush could have done more to speed up relief efforts, and
just 28 percent believed he did all he could.
Post-Katrina hand-wringing echoes earlier criticism, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T114513Z_01_DIT042316_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CRITICISM-DC.XML
Bush seeks
to rekindle national unity on
Katrina
Sat Sep 10, 2005
10:25 AM ET
Reuters
By Jason Webb
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Emergency workers
collected the dead of New Orleans on Saturday, as hopes rose that the toll from
Hurricane Katrina would fall short of the calamity once feared.
As police and soldiers prepared to remove the bodies -- many in homes marked
with paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high -- President
George W. Bush invoked the spirit that united the nation after the September 11
attacks in the face of this latest crisis.
"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and
loss of life. This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil
men, but from the fury of water and wind," Bush said in his weekly radio
address.
"America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it," he said on
the eve of the fourth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington that
killed some 2,700 people.
Bush, who successfully rallied the nation after those attacks, has faced
criticism for the federal government's performance -- described as slow and
inadequate -- following the August 29 hurricane.
"Chaos and dysfunction," said former Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer, a member of the
bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks.
"We have had our first post 9/11 test and we have miserably failed," Roemer said
on CNN. He said several key recommendations made by the commission to better
prepare the country to handle major disasters, whether natural or man-made, had
not been implemented.
The Bush administration on Friday recalled Federal Emergency Management Agency
head Michael Brown to Washington, handing his role in coordinating rescue and
recovery to Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Brown was widely criticized for FEMA's response to Katrina and faced new
accusations of padding his resume. Critics charged he only got the job because
he was a friend of a friend of Bush. Just a week ago, the president publicly
told Brown he was doing a "heck of a job."
SEARCH FOR THE DEAD
The first week after the storm, rescue teams searched by boat and in military
vehicles along New Orleans' flooded streets for the thousands of people who were
reluctant or unwilling to leave the once vibrant city.
On Friday, New Orleans officials said rescuing the stranded and the helpless had
ended and efforts were now turned entirely to finding bodies.
Until that is completed, they said, there was no hurry to oust those who have
refused to quit the city despite an evacuation order and health concerns over
the toxic waters surrounding them.
More than 300 deaths have been confirmed in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana,
though much higher totals have been feared. About a million people were
displaced by the destruction.
"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps. ... The numbers (of dead) so
far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," said
Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans.
Thousands of evacuees who have called the Houston Astrodome home for the past
week were expected to get apartments in Houston and other cities across the
country soon.
More than 2,000 of the New Orleans refugees who fled the destruction caused by
Hurricane Katrina have already been placed in apartment complexes throughout
Houston, and another 2,000 will be moving to new accommodations next week, said
Guy Rankin, head of the Katrina Housing Task Force.
Some people who had refused to leave the city changed their minds once they were
told they could take their pets with them. Rescue workers said they had
retrieved hundreds of cats and dogs and reunited some with their owners.
Jean Brad Lacy left the city but came back. Sweeping leaves and dried sewage
from the pavement outside a one-room home that had been knee-deep in water, he
said he changed his mind when National Guard troops tried to put him on an
airplane.
"I can't stand no heights," he said. "I love this place, this is my home."
SCALED-DOWN MARDI GRAS
City business leaders were trying to organize a comeback. Executives aimed to
reopen the French Quarter tourist mecca within 90 days and hold a scaled-down
Mardi Gras carnival in late February.
Organizers of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival pledged to stage
the 10-day event next spring either in its traditional fairgrounds location or
"as close to New Orleans as possible," the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.
By Saturday, Norfolk Southern Railroad expected to complete repairs on its rail
bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect New Orleans from the east for the
first time since August 29, the U.S. Transportation Department said.
Some federal officials have put the cost of the storm at between $100 billion
and $200 billion.
Risk Management Solutions, a California company that assesses disasters for more
than 400 insurance firms, trading companies and financial institutions, has
raised its estimate of total hurricane damages to $125 billion and said it
expects insured losses of $40 billion to $60 billion.
Congress has now approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by Bush, who
warned further requests will come.
The White House continued its string of up-close looks at the disaster area.
Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to visit survivors in Texas on
Saturday, and Bush was to travel to the region for a third time on Sunday.
Bush
seeks to rekindle national unity on Katrina, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T142452Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
Remembering September 11 attacks,
Bush
cites Katrina
Sat Sep 10, 2005
10:09 AM ET
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George
W. Bush vowed on Saturday Americans will overcome the ordeal presented by
Hurricane Katrina as a weekend of September 11, 2001, remembrances was
overshadowed by the U.S. Gulf Coast crisis.
Bush used his weekly radio address to remember the fourth anniversary of the
September 11 attacks, saying Americans were pulling together to help Katrina
victims just as they did the victims of the hijacked-plane attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and
loss of life. This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil
men, but from the fury of water and wind," Bush said.
"America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it," he said.
In the Katrina crisis Bush has been unable to recapture the same spirit of
bipartisan unity he championed in the weeks and months after the September 11
attacks, a period in which he gained great credit for his leadership and his job
approval ratings soared.
"Four years later, Americans remember the fears and uncertainty and confusion of
that terrible morning," Bush said. "But above all, we remember the resolve of
our nation to defend our freedom, rebuild a wounded city, and care for our
neighbors in need."
While Democrats had rallied to help him after September 11, this time they have
raised pointed questions about the slow federal response to the hurricane,
demanded an independent investigation and criticized his handling of the crisis.
Many Republicans have joined in criticisms of the response.
The Iraq war, fought over weapons of mass destruction that were never found, and
Bush's attempts to link it to the overall war on terrorism begun after September
11 have contributed to a partisan split in Washington.
"As we approach the fourth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush should admit that
he wrongly invoked the tragedy of 9/11 to justify war with Iraq. The war has
made terrorists even more determined to attack our country, and has made America
less safe," said Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy in a statement on
Friday.
He added, "Four years after 9/11, as the administration's bungled response to
Hurricane Katrina makes clear, we're obviously not adequately prepared to deal
with another devastating attack."
Remembering September 11 attacks, Bush cites Katrina, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-09-10T140827Z_01_DIT050908_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-BUSH-DC.XML
New Orleans recovers its dead,
looks to
rebuilding
Sat Sep 10, 2005 7:06 AM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The dead of New
Orleans, uncounted and uncollected while the ruined city fought to save
Hurricane Katrina's survivors, were the top concern on Saturday amid hope that
their numbers may be fewer than once feared.
As police and soldiers prepared to resume removing the bodies -- many in homes
marked with paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high -- the
political storm in Katrina's wake swept from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Washington.
After unrelenting criticism that U.S. President George W. Bush and his team had
failed to respond quickly and adequately to the disaster, Federal Emergency
Management Agency head Michael Brown was recalled to Washington on Friday. His
role overseeing Katrina recovery efforts was handed to Vice Admiral Thad Allen,
chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The White House continued its string of up-close looks at the disaster area.
Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to visit survivors in Texas on
Saturday, and Bush was to travel to the region for a third time on Sunday.
New Orleans officials said rescuing the stranded and the helpless, an effort
that began after the August 29 storm breached the city's levees, had ended and
efforts were now turned entirely to finding bodies. Until that is completed,
they said, there was no hurry to oust those who have refused to quit the city
despite an evacuation order.
More than 300 deaths have been confirmed in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana,
though much higher totals have been feared. About a million people were
displaced by the destruction.
"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps. ... The numbers (of dead) so
far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," said
Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans.
"The search for living individuals across the city has been conducted," he said
on Friday. "What we are starting today ... is a recovery operation, a recovery
operation to search by street, by grid, for the remains of any individuals who
have passed away."
HOLDOUTS
It appeared that some people who had refused to leave the city -- once thought
to number in the thousands -- were now more willing to depart. Provisions to
take pets along may have changed some minds. Rescue workers said they had
retrieved hundreds of cats and dogs and reunited some with their owners.
But there were holdouts.
On Bourbon Street, the general manager of Big Daddy's strip club was trying to
reopen, as soon as water, electricity and dancers are available.
Manager Saint James said finding dancers "shouldn't be too hard. Everyone's
going to come back in town and want to work."
Jean Brad Lacy left the city but came back. Sweeping leaves and dried sewage
from the pavement outside a one-room home that had been knee-deep in water, he
said he changed his mind when National Guard troops tried to put him on an
airplane.
"I can't stand no heights," he said. "I love this place, this is my home."
City business leaders were trying to organize a comeback, The New York Times
reported on Saturday. It said executives aimed to reopen the French Quarter
tourist mecca within 90 days and hold a scaled-down Mardi Gras carnival in late
February.
Organizers of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival pledged to stage
the 10-day event next spring either in its traditional fairgrounds location or
"as close to New Orleans as possible," the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported.
City attorney Sherry Landry said on Friday while there was power in the central
business district, it was not able to support all buildings.
"It is our goal to restore power to the CBD (central business district) and
clear all streets of debris and glass within the next seven days. After that we
will establish a process for businesses to return to the city," Landry said.
By Saturday, Norfolk Southern Railroad expected to complete repairs on its rail
bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect New Orleans from the east for the
first time since August 29, the U.S. Transportation Department said.
But most of the ghostly city, which once boasted 450,000 residents, remains in
tatters.
"Over in the western areas you don't see the standing water, you see the mud.
It's every bit as nasty as the water, and it's going to take a long time to
clean up but at least the water is gone," said chief warrant officer Robert
Osborn, a pilot with the U.S. 1st Cavalry.
"Today we're seeing cars that are able to drive around. The causeway is open.
Folks are out trying to put plastic on their roofs," he said.
The U.S. Postal Service resumed limited mail service in the three states
affected by the storm.
COST SOARS
In the nearby town of Slidell survivors were numbed by the devastation.
Robert Quick, 41, rode out the storm with his wife and two small children but
wound up retreating to the attic of their home as a tree crashed into the roof
and his children watched their toys float away. He had no flood insurance.
"I rolled the dice. Everybody goes to the casino, I decided to roll it on flood
insurance, you know, 1,200 bucks a year, this neighborhood never flooded," he
said.
Some federal officials have put the cost of the storm at between $100 billion
and $200 billion.
Risk Management Solutions, a California company that assesses disasters for more
than 400 insurance firms, trading companies and financial institutions, has
raised its estimate of total hurricane damages to $125 billion and said it
expects insured losses of $40 billion to $60 billion.
Congress has now approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by Bush, who
warned further requests will come.
The political fall-out over the response in the days after the storm was likely
to continue.
In the U.S. Senate, four top Democrats urged Bush to fire Brown, amid new
questions over his qualifications.
Whoever runs the agency, they said, "must inspire confidence and be able to
coordinate hundreds of federal, state and local resources. Mr. Brown simply
doesn't have the ability or the experience to oversee a coordinated federal
response of this magnitude."
Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican who lost his Mississippi home in the storm, said
Brown "has been acting like a private, instead of a general."
ABC News cited source as saying Brown was expected to be out of his post as head
of the disaster agency soon.
The House Government Reform Committee is to hold a hearing on the widely
criticized response to the disaster would begin on Thursday. The Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will open a similar hearing on
Wednesday.
New
Orleans recovers its dead, looks to rebuilding, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T110600Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
Katrina Astrodome evacuees
to get new homes
Sat Sep 10, 2005
7:58 AM ET
Reuters
HOUSTON (Reuters) - The thousands of evacuees
who have called the Houston Astrodome home for the past week are expected to get
their own apartments in Houston and other cities across the country soon.
More than 2,000 of the New Orleans refugees who fled the destruction caused by
Hurricane Katrina have already been placed in apartment complexes throughout
Houston, and another 2,000 will be moving to new accommodations next week, said
Guy Rankin, head of the Katrina Housing Task Force.
Another 8,000 apartments are being readied for the more than 8,000 people still
in the temporary Houston shelter, but the Task Force said emptying the stadium
by the September 18 target date may not be possible.
"It's a tremendous chance and opportunity. That doesn't mean we're getting
everyone out by next weekend," John Walsh, deputy chief of staff for Houston
Mayor Bill White, told Reuters.
Offers of apartments have flowed in from Colorado, Florida, New York and
Massachusetts, and Continental Airlines has said it would fly evacuees to their
new homes, Rankin said.
The Task Force will pay the rent in the apartments for up to six months, and
Houston's CenterPoint Energy is distributing vouchers to cover electricity bills
for that period.
The Task Force is partially funded by city, county and state governments, but
will also rely heavily on private donations sent to the Houston Katrina Relief
Fund, Rankin said.
Most of the evacuees who have received apartments so far have been people over
the age of 55 without medical disabilities, and the task force is now securing
spots in assisted care facilities for those who need care.
"If you're 55 or better and by yourself, then you're out of the dome. They have
homes tonight," Rankin said.
Rankin said most of the evacuees from devastated New Orleans seeking the
apartments would likely become permanent residents in Houston.
That likelihood was echoed by many of the people who inhabited the Astrodome and
Reliant Center complex on Friday.
"We're planning on staying out here," said Michael Williams, 49, a chef who was
evacuated from New Orleans' Superdome last week.
The Task Force was also helping the evacuees to prepare to find employment to
enable them to take over rent payments after the six months of paid rent runs
out.
"The long-term goal is to give these people the life of their choice. We provide
the platform," Walsh said.
Katrina Astrodome evacuees to get new homes, R, 10.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T115722Z_01_DIT043070_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-EVACUEES-DC.XML
Casualty of Firestorm:
Outrage, Bush and FEMA Chief
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - To Democrats,
Republicans, local officials and Hurricane Katrina's victims, the question was
not why, but what took so long?
Republicans had been pressing the White House for days to fire "Brownie,"
Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who had
stunned many television viewers in admitting that he did not know until 24 hours
after the first news reports that there was a swelling crowd of 25,000 people
desperate for food and water at the New Orleans convention center.
Mr. Brown, who was removed from his Gulf Coast duties on Friday, though not from
his post as FEMA's chief, is the first casualty of the political furor generated
by the government's faltering response to the hurricane. With Democrats and
Republicans caustically criticizing the performance of his agency, and with the
White House under increasing attack for populating FEMA's top ranks with
politically connected officials who lack disaster relief experience, Mr. Brown
had become a symbol of President Bush's own hesitant response.
The president, long reluctant to fire subordinates, came to a belated
recognition that his administration was in trouble for the way it had dealt with
the disaster, many of his supporters say. One moment of realization occurred on
Thursday of last week when an aide carried a news agency report from New Orleans
into the Oval Office for him to see.
The report was about the evacuees at the convention center, some dying and some
already dead. Mr. Bush had been briefed that morning by his homeland security
secretary, Michael Chertoff, who was getting much of his information from Mr.
Brown and was not aware of what was occurring there. The news account was the
first that the president and his top advisers had heard not only of the
conditions at the convention center but even that there were people there at
all.
"He's not a screamer," a senior aide said of the president. But Mr. Bush, angry,
directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what
was going on.
"The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information,"
said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing
inner workings of the White House. "Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans
was very difficult."
If Mr. Bush was upset with Mr. Brown at that point, he did not show it. When he
traveled to the Gulf Coast the next day, he stood with him and, before the
cameras, cheerfully said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
But the political pressures on Mr. Bush, and the anxiety at the White House,
were only growing. Behind the president's public embrace of Mr. Brown was the
realization within the administration that the director's ignorance about the
evacuees had further inflamed the rage of the storm's poor, black victims and
created an impression of a White House that did not care about their lives.
One prominent African-American supporter of Mr. Bush who is close to Karl Rove,
the White House political chief, said the president did not go into the heart of
New Orleans and meet with black victims on his first trip there, last Friday,
because he knew that White House officials were "scared to death" of the
reaction.
"If I'm Karl, do I want the visual of black people hollering at the president as
if we're living in Rwanda?" said the supporter, who spoke only anonymously
because he did not want to antagonize Mr. Rove.
At the same time, news reports quickly appeared about Mr. Brown's qualifications
for the job: he was a former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse
Association and for 30 years a friend of Joe M. Allbaugh, who managed Mr. Bush's
2000 presidential campaign and was the administration's first FEMA director. Mr.
Brown's credentials came to roost at the White House, where Mr. Bush faced angry
accusations that the director's hiring had amounted to nothing more than
cronyism.
Members of Congress quickly weighed in. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, a Louisiana
Democrat who was in New Orleans or Baton Rouge for more than a week after the
hurricane swept ashore, said of Mr. Brown last Friday that "I have been telling
him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation" and "I just
have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the
task before us."
Members of Mr. Bush's party also were angry. Last week House Republicans pressed
the White House to fire Mr. Brown. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi pulled the
president aside for a private meeting on Monday in Poplarville, Miss., to ask
him to intervene personally to untangle FEMA red tape. Mr. Lott, exasperated,
told Mr. Bush that he needed to press the agency to send the state 46,000
trailers, promised for days as temporary housing for hurricane victims.
For a time, Mr. Lott did not directly criticize Mr. Brown or the federal
response in public. "My mama didn't raise no idiot," he joked on Capitol Hill
last week. "I ain't going to bite the hand that's trying to save me."
But on Friday, with Mr. Brown's tenure in the relief role at an end, the senator
issued a statement that made clear his views, and those of many others.
"Something needed to happen," Mr. Lott's statement said. "Michael Brown has been
acting like a private instead of a general. When you're in the middle of a
disaster, you can't stop to check the legal niceties or to review FEMA
regulations before deciding to help Mississippians knocked flat on their backs."
Mr. Bush, characteristically, did not officially dismiss Mr. Brown, instead
calling him back to Washington to run FEMA while a crisis-tested Coast Guard
commander, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, was given oversight of the relief effort.
The take-charge Admiral Allen, who commanded the Coast Guard's response up and
down the Atlantic Seaboard after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, immediately
appeared on television as the public face of the administration's response.
In Baton Rouge, Mr. Brown appeared briefly at Mr. Chertoff's side before heading
back to the capital, where, the secretary said, the director was needed for
potential disasters.
"We've got tropical storms and hurricanes brewing in the ocean," Mr. Chertoff
said.
Casualty of Firestorm: Outrage, Bush and FEMA Chief, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10crisis.html
Director of FEMA
Stripped of Role as Relief
Leader
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
and ANNE E. KORNBLUT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Under intense pressure
to improve its response to Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration on Friday
abruptly removed the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D.
Brown, from oversight of the post-storm relief effort, and replaced him with
Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard.
Mr. Brown, who was hailed by President Bush last week for doing "a heck of a
job" in responding to the disaster, was stripped of his duties after days in
which the White House was pressed by lawmakers in both parties to dismiss him
for poor performance.
The action also came hours after a report on Time magazine's Web site that Mr.
Brown had inflated his résumé set off a new round of questions about his
qualifications. Newsday also reported inconsistencies in his résumé.
Admiral Allen, a career Coast Guard officer who had helped manage the emergency
response to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, had been appointed on Monday to be
Mr. Brown's special deputy for hurricane relief. In his new role, he will be
what Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, described as "the
principal federal official overseeing the Hurricane Katrina response and
recovery effort in the field."
Shortly before Mr. Chertoff spoke, officials in New Orleans reported that an
initial sweep of the city had found far fewer bodies than many had expected in
the wake of the devastating storm. Although the officials gave no estimate of
the final toll, the first widespread search for bodies raised hopes that the
final count could be much lower than the 10,000 the mayor and others have
predicted.
The decision to remove Mr. Brown came as the entire federal government continued
to have widespread and persistent trouble with its efforts to provide aid to
evacuees and begin the cleanup in earnest. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees,
now safe from immediate danger, faced a second wave of frustration over
prolonged delays in finding assistance and navigating a maze of federal and
local programs.
In Houston, local officials complained that FEMA's computer system kept
crashing. In Ocean Springs, Miss., officials started turning people away from a
FEMA disaster recovery center three hours before closing time, saying they were
overwhelmed.
"There is so much chaos and dysfunction going on with the federal government
that Dallas can't wait any longer for federal help," said Mayor Laura Miller of
Dallas.
Mr. Chertoff, with Mr. Brown standing gamely if uncomfortably at his side at a
news conference in Baton Rouge, portrayed the shift as his decision and one
driven by the start of a new phase of the recovery. Mr. Brown, he said, had
"done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this
unprecedented challenge," and would retain his job as director of the agency.
But the move left little doubt that Mr. Bush, who is usually loath to resort to
public dismissals of administration staff members, wanted a change in leadership
as he sought to erase the widespread impression that his administration had
failed to respond quickly and aggressively enough to a crisis of immense
proportions. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Bush backed
the decision.
The White House said on Friday that Mr. Bush would travel to Mississippi and
Louisiana on Sunday and Monday, his third trip to the region since the storm. In
Washington on Friday, Mr. Bush cited the fourth anniversary on Sunday of the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in describing the heroism of police,
firefighters and other first responders in other disasters, like Hurricane
Katrina.
"In these difficult days, we have again seen the great strength and character
and resolve of America," Mr. Bush said at a ceremony on the South Lawn of the
White House honoring first responders who were killed on Sept. 11. "And we will
continue to work to help the people who are struggling."
A senior administration official, who would speak only on the condition of
anonymity, said Mr. Chertoff, whose department includes FEMA, told Mr. Bush on
Wednesday that he was thinking of moving Mr. Brown aside and replacing him with
Admiral Allen.
The official said Mr. Chertoff informed Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House
chief of staff, on Thursday evening that he had decided to make the change and
that Mr. Card then informed the president.
A Republican with close ties to the White House, also speaking on the condition
of anonymity, said Mr. Bush had made clear that he wanted a change, a view
reinforced by Vice President Dick Cheney's fact-finding trip to Mississippi and
Louisiana on Thursday. Mr. Cheney, the Republican said, came back with a
progress report that was critical of Mr. Brown's management.
Admiral Allen told reporters in Baton Rouge that he had been informed of his new
role by Mr. Chertoff at 10 a.m. He said that search and rescue operations
remained the priority, but that he would be spending more time on how to begin
reconstituting communities decimated and dispersed by the storm.
FEMA said Mr. Brown would not respond to a request for an interview. But Mr.
Brown told The Associated Press:
"I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good
Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep. And then I'm going
to go right back to FEMA and continue to do all I can to help these victims."
FEMA's relief operations have been under fire for more than a week, bearing the
brunt of the blame for leaving thousands of people stranded in New Orleans
without food, water, security or medical help.
The problems led to considerable frustration on Friday as evacuees and state and
local officials struggled to cope.
In Mississippi, some victims of the storm said they had called FEMA's disaster
assistance line but were told to check the Internet or wait for postal service,
which is not operating.
"I couldn't imagine people in Louisiana climbing down from a roof, finding a
phone and being told to get on the Internet," said a 41-year-old schoolteacher
from Ocean Springs who declined to give her name.
In Houston, Mayor Bill White sought local expertise to set up satellite trucks
with FEMA specifications to improve the agency's capacity to operate its
computers in the area. FEMA representatives said they welcomed the offer and
assured Houston officials that costs associated with the assistance would be
federally reimbursed.
Mayor Miller said Dallas would start its own relief fund to help finance the
removal of 1,500 evacuees from downtown shelters into apartments over the next
10 days.
"Where is FEMA national?" she said. "We keep being told that help is coming and
so far we're not getting the help. So we will do what the government can't do.
We will take the 1,500 people sleeping on cots and air mattresses and move them
into apartments with beds and furniture and sheets and towels."
In Washington, lawmakers continued to debate new reconstruction measures of
their own. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, called for a
Tennessee Valley Authority-style entity to oversee the reconstruction of the
Gulf Coast.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Carl
Hulse in Washington; Ralph Blumenthal and Bill Dawson in Houston; Michael Cooper
in Gulfport, Miss.; Michael Luo in Baton Rouge, La.; Motoko Rich in New York;
and Campbell Robertson in Ocean Springs, Miss.
Director of FEMA Stripped of Role as Relief Leader, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10capital.html
Commander Accustomed
to Scrutiny and Crises
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen,
who has been put in charge of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, is
known as a steady Coast Guard commander already tested by major crises,
including some that drew intense public scrutiny.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he commanded the Coast Guard
response up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, moving ships and personnel to patrol
the waters and secure the ports.
Even before that national crisis, Admiral Allen was no stranger to the bright
light of public attention. In November 1999, his Thanksgiving Day was
interrupted by a phone call to his headquarters in Miami that reported that a
raft had been found a few miles offshore. Twelve people escaping from Cuba on
the raft had drowned, but a 5-year-old, Elián González, was clinging to an inner
tube and to life.
The González case set into motion a clash between Cuban-Americans and the United
States government over the boy's fate.
The admiral's skills at the nexus of government and public opinion had been
tested before, when he helped resolve confrontations with Cuban-Americans in
southern Florida after Coast Guard petty officers used a fire hose and pepper
spray to subdue uncooperative Cuban who had fled Cuba by boat and were trying to
come ashore in the United States.
"What he brings to the new position is an attribute you're going to see more and
more out of the Coast Guard, an ability to operate at the interagency level,"
said Rear Adm. Joseph L. Nimmich, director of the Coast Guard Maritime Domain
Awareness Program, which tracks commercial and recreational vessels.
"He will focus on that unity of effort from all the players," said Admiral
Nimmich, who has worked with Admiral Allen for 18 years. "He is a communicator.
You're going to see him out speaking with all the local communities in the area
of this natural disaster."
Since 2002, Admiral Allen has been chief of staff of the Coast Guard, an agency
that daily brings military-style assets to support the civilian population and
domestic security in activities like search and rescue, environmental cleanups,
maritime safety and law enforcement.
All those duties now will come into play, as Admiral Allen was promoted from
deputy for federal hurricane relief to senior officer responsible for the Gulf
Coast mission.
He takes over from Michael D. Brown, who returns to Washington retaining his
title of director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but stripped of
on-the-spot hurricane duties after widespread criticism of the federal effort.
Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who heads the Senate's homeland
security panel, praised the decision to replace Mr. Brown with Admiral Allen.
"Vice Adm. Thad Allen is a strong choice," Ms. Collins. said. "He is a highly
respected leader who should be very effective in improving the coordination of
assistance for the hundreds of thousands of individuals and their families who
were affected by the hurricane."
Lt. Cmdr. Dana Reid, flag aide to Admiral Allen from June 2000 to June 2001,
described her former boss as "a steady force in turbulence."
"He is a rock," Commander Reid, the Coast Guard chief in Chincoteague, Va.,
said.
"The core is his personality and his character," she added. "And his emphasis is
all about people and doing the right things just right, He is incredibly
accessible to people at every level of our organization. He can talk to the
seamen and the next minute turn around and talk to an admiral."
Thad William Allen was born on Jan. 16, 1949, in Tucson. More than 30 years ago,
he chose coastal waters as home and office, graduating in 1971 from the Coast
Guard Academy in New London, Conn.
He has a master's in public administration from George Washington University and
an M.S. from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. He and his wife, the
former Pamela A. Hess, an assistant dean at the George Mason University School
of Management, live in Burke, Va. They have three children and two
grandchildren.
Commander Accustomed to Scrutiny and Crises, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10allen.html

Some business leaders want the French
Quarter,
under military patrol Friday, to reopen within 90 days.
Photograph: Chang W. Lee
The New York Time
New Orleans Executives Plan Revival
NYT 10.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10plan.html
New Orleans Executives Plan Revival
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By GARY RIVLIN
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 9 - The New Orleans
business establishment-in-exile has set up a beachhead in a government annex
here, across the street from the state Capitol. From here, organizations like
the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau have begun to plot the rebirth of
the city.
In the cramped offices and hallways of this building, called the Capitol Annex,
and continuing into the evening at bars and restaurants around Baton Rouge, New
Orleans's business leaders and power brokers are concocting big plans, the most
important being reopening the French Quarter within 90 days.
Also under discussion are plans to stage a scaled-down Mardi Gras at the end of
February and to lobby for one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions
and perhaps the next available Super Bowl.
So far, those conversations have been taking place largely without the
participation of one central player: the city. "They're still in emergency mode
and not yet thinking strategically," said J. Stephen Perry, the chief executive
of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. "We're thinking
strategically."
The hurdles are formidable when so much of the city is still flooded and some
are predicting it could be six months to a year before New Orleans is once again
habitable. But the power brokers are not deterred.
For instance, F. Patrick Quinn III, who owns and operates 10 hotels in and
around the French Quarter, has set up shop temporarily at the office of a friend
and business associate in Baton Rouge so he can make frequent trips to his
hotels, where guests - from journalists to employees of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency - are now staying.
Emergency generators have allowed Mr. Quinn to provide limited power to his
guests, and he has bused in workers from Texas and Florida. "We'll be up and
running whenever the city is ready," Mr. Quinn said.
Mr. Perry said, "What people miss, watching the TV and all, is that the core of
the city - the French Quarter, the warehouse district and the central business
district - is dry." Power should be restored to the central city within three
weeks, he said, and the water and sewer systems will be functional not long
after that. Some parts of the city are already getting power.
And, of course, it is the French Quarter and nearby areas that draw virtually
all the visitors to New Orleans, where tourism is king. The industry brings in
some $7 billion to $8 billion a year, according to the convention bureau, with
most of that spent in the French Quarter, the central business district and the
warehouse district - precisely those areas that were least affected by the
flooding.
"We're walking a fine line here," said Bill Hines, the managing partner at Jones
Walker, a leading New Orleans-based corporate law firm that moved more than 100
of its lawyers into a satellite office here.
"People in Baton Rouge are looking at me funny, as if talking about bringing
back music, or Mardi Gras, or the arts or football is frivolous when we're in
the midst of this kind of human tragedy. But I think New Yorkers can relate,"
said Mr. Hines, a native of New Orleans.
"Just as it was important that Broadway not remain in the dark after Sept. 11,
it's important that we start thinking about the future despite all the very
depressing news around us."
Alden J. McDonald Jr., chairman of the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, is more
subdued than some of his business brethren. He is chief executive of the Liberty
Bank and Trust Company, the third-largest black-owned bank in the United States.
Mr. McDonald, who is working out of one of his bank's Baton Rouge branches, said
his customer base, unlike those in the tourist business, was hit hard and at
least half his branches were badly damaged by water.
Yet he, too, is starting to have some of the same conversation. "We're talking
among ourselves, some banking officials, others here in town," he said. "The
idea is we should get on the same page so that we're moving in the same
direction. I suspect that over the next week to 10 days there'll be a lot more
momentum behind these conversations."
Mr. McDonald said that on Monday he would be reopening several of his bank's
branches in Jefferson Parish.
The business community, at first scattered throughout Louisiana and nearby
states in the week after the storm, sorely needed a central command - and they
fell into one, courtesy of the state's lieutenant governor, Mitchell J.
Landrieu, the son of the former mayor, Moon Landrieu, and the brother of Mary L.
Landrieu, a Democrat who represents Louisiana in the United States Senate.
On the morning the hurricane first hit, Mr. Perry headed north and west to his
mother's home in Baton Rouge, with no idea where he would work. Thinking he
would be gone for two days at most, he brought only two dress shirts with him.
By that Thursday, Mr. Landrieu, whom Mr. Perry knew from his days as chief of
staff to a former governor, granted him and his organization a small suite of
offices down the hall from his own, on the top floor of a handsome, five-story,
1930's-era building. Others also took Mr. Landrieu up on his hospitality.
Now, when Mr. Perry needs to talk with his counterpart at the New Orleans hotel
association, he walks downstairs to the third floor. The mayor's office of
economic development is on the second floor. The director of Greater New Orleans
Inc., a private development organization that represents many of the city's
largest corporations, had called a first-floor conference room home base until
moving on Friday to more spacious quarters.
On Thursday night, Mr. Perry dined at Gino's, a popular Italian restaurant here
thick with well-connected lawyers and other movers and shakers who call New
Orleans home.
Such conversations are only preliminary, to be sure. It is only in the last few
days that most within the business establishment had an operating cellphone or
working e-mail address. Besides, more immediate concerns distracted all but the
most focused executives in the first week after the storm, like helping
displaced workers find a home, to resettling their own families.
So it has been just in the last few days that the city's power brokers have
started planning the comeback. Mr. Hines, the lawyer, had been busy helping his
son, a student at Tulane University, apply to other colleges while helping his
wife move to Houston, where his two daughters will attend Catholic school. It
was not until midweek, he said, that he received an e-mail message making the
rounds of top chief executives suggesting a meeting in either Baton Rouge or
Dallas to "start talking about the future."
That meeting will take place this weekend in Dallas, where the mayor has
temporarily set up base. Yesterday, Mr. Hines and other corporate leaders were
making plans to attend.
"Things have really started to turn in the last 24 hours," said Mr. Hines, when
reached by phone at his temporary offices on Thursday.
It is in Baton Rouge, a 90-minute drive from New Orleans, that the New Orleans
operation of Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, a Fortune 500 company, has set up
temporary headquarters. Baton Rouge is where a large portion of New Orleans's
bankers and lawyers have set up shop. And it is where the Marriott Corporation,
which operated the most hotel rooms in New Orleans, has set up a 125-employee
command center to handle everything from tracking down workers to assessing what
needs to be done to reopen its 15 New Orleans-area properties as quickly as
possible.
Fueling the buzz of optimism that has begun to course through Baton Rouge is the
growing awareness that the French Quarter, which drives the New Orleans economy,
survived with only moderate damage. Eight of Mr. Quinn's 10 properties are in
very good shape, he said, and the 2 others suffered only modest damage.
"If the French Quarter had gone down, had it been destroyed from an
infrastructure perspective, then the foundation for an economic recovery would
have been taken out," he said. "Then the people of New Orleans who have gone
through this diaspora almost would have no way to go home. There would have been
no jobs."
Instead, Mr. Perry and others imagine that the French Quarter will be ready for
tourists within 90 days, and the city's convention center will be ready to
welcome conventiongoers within six months.
The French Quarter, he said, could prove "key to the city's rebirth; with jobs,
there'll be money to start rebuilding houses and start rebuilding the
communities."
Gordon Stevens owns three cafes in the French Quarter called Café Beignet. "I
plan on opening up before the first of the year, absolutely," Mr. Stevens said.
Mr. Stevens also operates a pair of riverboats that, for the time being, are
docked in Baton Rouge.
Mr. Perry said he is hearing that same confidence from any number of business
operators that cater to tourists.
"We will actually be up and functioning before the city is able to receive
visitors again," he said. The X factor, Mr. Perry and others said, will be the
status of the water and sewage systems, and more mundane matters like the
availability of worker to do everything from drive cabs to tend bars.
Mark Drennan, the chief executive of Greater New Orleans Inc., and whose
temporary office is in the Capitol Annex, is similarly optimistic. Mr. Drennan
and his 20 staff members - at least those in a position to pitch in - have
started working with the Louisiana Congressional delegation on the outlines of a
business reorganization plan for the city.
"We're looking to raise money to hire the most talented consultants and urban
planning people out there to help us rebuild," Mr. Drennan said.
New
Orleans Executives Plan Revival, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10plan.html

New Orleans Executives Plan Revival
NYT 10.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10plan.html
'But I Just Want to Know,
Where's My Baby?'
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
HOUSTON, Sept. 9 - If she didn't have younger
siblings to watch and three of her own small children depending on her,
Lakerisha Boyd could do what she feels like doing here in an old motel near the
Astrodome.
She could cry for her youngest child, Torry Lee, who is still missing almost two
weeks after the storm.
But even tears are a luxury that Ms. Boyd cannot afford during her grueling
vigil of praying and hoping and waiting. She has worked the Internet, the
telephones and her feet to the point of exhaustion looking for the 16-month-old
who was with his grandmother just before Hurricane Katrina swept into New
Orleans.
On Friday, 11 days after the storm, grandmother and grandchild were still
missing.
"I keep telling myself it's going to be all right," said Ms. Boyd, breathing
deeply to control frayed nerves and turning her face away from her room, where
11 people are sharing two beds. "I can't start crying because of the other
children. I can't break down. I'm all they've got right now. But I just want to
know, where's my baby?"
Ms. Boyd, 23, is certainly not alone in her sorrowful quest. Officials said
there was no way at this point to estimate how many children have been severed
from families, but early figures suggest the tally could be in the thousands.
Scores of children have been found wandering alone in search of lost adults. On
Thursday and Friday alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children received 500 new cases of parents looking for children or vice versa,
bringing the number of reports in its Hurricane Katrina database to 1,500.
Of the center's cases, 258 have been successfully resolved.
Some of the parents have told the group that when they were evacuating the city,
they placed their children on earlier buses in the mistaken belief that when
they got seats on a later bus, the whole family would end up in the same place.
"This is a massive problem and the numbers are growing," said Ernie Allen, the
president of the national center. "We know there will not be a positive ending
in some of these cases. We hope the number is as small as possible. Meanwhile,
we're working under the assumption that these children are out there."
Other charities and news organizations are compiling their own statistics and
creating Web sites to help reunite families.
Louisiana officials urged the dozens of impromptu shelters that have popped up
across the country to register with the state so that officials could begin to
compile a database of all the people in them.
There are some 54,000 people in 240 shelters that are already registered, said
Terri Ricks, undersecretary of the Louisiana Department of Social Services, but
the state still does not have a list of who is in those shelters.
The difficulties of the mission are almost impossible to overstate. In some
cases, the children who have been found are too young to give their names or are
too traumatized to speak, even if they are of age to talk. In other cases,
investigators have no photographs of the children to circulate because they were
left behind in the floods.
The story of how Edwina Foster, 11, and her brother Foster Edward, 9, lost their
mother is typical. Family members were wading through waist-high water in New
Orleans when they noticed trucks passing on an elevated part of Interstate 10.
They raced to an on ramp, and a pickup truck already crammed with 16 people
stopped.
The children's mother, Judy Foster, begged the passengers to make room for
Edwina and Foster. According to a cousin, Carisa Carsice, who was with the
group, Ms. Foster told the people on the truck: "Please watch them until we get
to the Superdome. Please! Take the kids first, and I'll get on the next one."
Edwina said Thursday that when the truck took off, "We were going so fast and I
felt like I wanted to jump off that truck to get back to her. But when we
stopped, I looked down and there was too much water."
Edwina and Foster ended up in Houston, and, in a larger sense, were among the
lucky ones. After a week of searching, the authorities located their mother at a
shelter in Dallas, and plans were made on Friday to reunite the family.
In an area for lost children at the Reliant Center, next to the Astrodome,
Edwina and Foster played with Queneisha White, 14. Queneisha fled rising waters
in downtown New Orleans with a few teenage friends after her grandmother, with
whom she lived, refused to leave her apartment in the Iberville Housing Project.
" I was so scared," Queneisha said. "I said, 'Grandma, lets go!' But she said
she wanted to stay with her house. Well, I was scared and I didn't want to
drown."
The group of friends walked to Algiers Point, on the west bank of the
Mississippi River, and boarded buses to the Astrodome. Meanwhile, Queneisha's
mother was being evacuated to Corpus Christi, Tex. Her grandmother's whereabouts
remain unknown.
Late Thursday, Lee Reed, one of the men who had been working on Queneisha's case
for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children used his own money to
buy her a bus ticket to Corpus Christi.
"I couldn't find a way to get her down there, so I bought her a ticket myself,"
Mr. Reed said. "That's one of our concerns of the moment once we match people,
not having the transportation to connect them. It's tragic."
Since arriving in Houston, Ms. Boyd, the woman searching for 16-month-old Torry
Lee, said she that had received numerous offers for housing in other states, but
that she did not want to leave the area without her whole family.
"We could be in a house right now, but I don't want to leave without my son,"
she said. "He was just a good baby. That's all I can say about him. A good
baby."
'But
I Just Want to Know, Where's My Baby?', NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10children.html
In New Orleans as It Did in New York,
X
Marks the Pain
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY
NEW ORLEANS
A CRUDE symbol has surfaced in New Orleans to
displace for now the fleur-de-lis, the crescent and the string of beads. It is a
large X sprayed with neon-orange paint onto the emptied homes, the violated
stores - even the city buses that litter streets like giant discarded milk
cartons.
The fleur-de-lis reflects the enduring French influence on life here. The
crescent symbolizes the bend in the nurturing Mississippi River. The beads evoke
Mardi Gras, though these days they dangle from trees like gaudy nooses. And now,
scrawled across all of that, a large X the color of Halloween: the
post-catastrophe symbol used by search-and-rescue units to signal that the space
inside has been checked for signs of life or the remains of death.
On Tuesday - was it Tuesday? - a task force from Texas, armed with guns and
spray cans, decorated the Bywater section here with the macabre graffiti. At the
top of the X, the date (9/6); to the left, the unit that conducted the search
(TXTF); to the right, the number of hazards, structural and otherwise, within
(0); and at the bottom, the number of dead (0).
The symbol has haunting resonance for those who walked the gray-powdered streets
of Lower Manhattan in the first days after 9/11. Four years later nearly to the
day, you notice that X on a deserted storefront on St. Claude Avenue here; you
take comfort in seeing zeroes; and in a finger's snap you are back there on
Vesey Street, or Liberty, or Church. What's more, the skies over southern
Louisiana have been a baby blue the last few days, as they were over New York on
that Tuesday morning.
So many images here set off dormant memories. The National Guard encampment in
Audubon Park recalls the National Guard encampment in Battery Park, where a
thunderstorm one night had people imagining another attack. The whiff of rotting
food in a market on St. Charles Avenue brings back the pungency of that dusty
still-life display of food rotting in the Amish Market on Washington Street. The
fear of contaminated water now; the fear of contaminated air then.
A disturbing question comes too quickly to the mind. Which was worse: the
attacks of Sept. 11 or the attack of Hurricane Katrina?
The question reflects our strange desire to quantify disaster. Any time a
jetliner crashes - in Lockerbie, outside Pittsburgh, off the Moriches - the news
media rush to point out its standing in terms of the number killed, as though
measuring its worthiness for some sorrowful hall of fame. Sometimes newspapers
will even publish an accompanying graph: Five Deadliest Plane Crashes.
From the acrid-smelling streets of this fresh horror, near the fourth
anniversary of another horror - still fresh in its own way - such calculus seems
fruitless, inappropriate and akin to comparing a wounded apple to an injured
orange. They are distinct in their own awful ways.
The hurricane was a natural disaster. The disaster of 9/11 was madman-made. The
hurricane exploded across hundreds of miles, devastating cities, towns and
obscure places that many people here barely knew of; Happy Jack, for one. The
jetliners that became bombs on 9/11 devastated a corner of Manhattan, and
brought down two of the most famous buildings in the world.
On and on the distinctions go: 9/11's fire to the hurricane's water; people
dying at work and people drowning at home; congregations mourning in places of
worship and congregations mourning for places of worship that are now
inaccessible, under water, destroyed.
Rather than wasting energy and emotion on that awkward question of which is
worse, those profoundly affected by 9/11 might consider what now forever binds
the New Orleans of 2005 to other American cities: the Johnstown of 1889; the
Galveston of 1900; the San Francisco of 1906; the Oklahoma City of 1995; the New
York of 2001.
THE overwhelming loss of life, of course, and the crippling tolls to the
economy, to the infrastructure, to the community's sense of self. But more than
that: the denial of that basic, sacred need to claim and bury the dead. Four
years have passed, and 1,152 of the 2,749 victims of 9/11 have not been
identified. Two weeks have passed, and who knows how many bodies still bob in
dark waters.
Which is worse? Let the question go.
Just know that emergency telephone numbers and wrenching news updates trickle
across the television screens here, just as they did then. That volunteers from
across the country are here to help out, just as they did then. That people here
vow to rebuild, just as we did then.
One night four years ago, a city sanitation worker started sweeping the debris
of chaos from Church Street. And one afternoon this week, a shopkeeper on
deserted Royal Street did the same.
In
New Orleans as It Did in New York, X Marks the Pain, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/nyregion/10about.html
Death Toll in New Orleans
May Be Lower Than
First Feared
September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
and MICHAEL LUO
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 9 - The first organized
effort to scour the city for its dead has turned up far fewer bodies than
expected, officials said Friday. That raised hopes that the death toll from
Hurricane Katrina might be much lower than the 10,000 that the mayor and others
had predicted.
As the floodwater continued to recede, police officers, National Guard members
and members of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army began to canvass street to
street and house to house in the first phase of a hunt to find, remove and
identify the dead.
"There's some encouragement in what we found in the initial sweeps," Col. Terry
J. Ebbert, the city's director of homeland security, said. "The numbers so far
are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000."
The specter of a five-figure toll was raised this week, and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency ordered 25,000 body bags flown to a temporary morgue
in St. Gabriel. The official state death count stood at 118. Mississippi
reported 211.
Colonel Ebbert, who would not provide figures for New Orleans, said it would
take two weeks before the search for the dead here could yield a reliable
assessment.
As they looked for bodies, the officers and troops began to retrace steps that
they had walked last week and this week as they searched primarily for the
living, to try to persuade them to leave the city. Colonel Ebbert said the
holdouts now numbered fewer than 5,000. About 484,000 people lived in the city
before the hurricane struck.
On Friday, city officials continued to hold off on their threat to use force to
remove people who refused to leave, calling it a last resort.
"We're trying our best to persuasively negotiate, and we are not using force at
this time," City Attorney Sherry Landry said.
In Houston, thousands of displaced New Orleans residents lined up as FEMA
officials began to hand out the $2,000 debit cards that they had promised to
help evacuees with immediate expenses.
"It was tiresome, but it was worth it," said Dwayne Holmes, 20, who said he
waited about two and a half hours outside the shelter complex where he and his
family have been living since they fled the Superdome in New Orleans.
Each household that registered with the agency was allowed one card, which can
be used at A.T.M.'s. Officials of FEMA estimated that 5,000 cards were handed
out in Houston, and said the distribution would continue on Saturday. The
agency's liaison for the Houston area, Tom Costello, said distribution also
began on Friday at shelters in Austin, Dallas and other cities in Texas.
Despite the long lines that snaked inside and outside the Astrodome, people
chatted amiably, and food was provided. There was none of the chaos and
confusion that arose on Thursday, when premature news reports of the
distribution prompted thousands of evacuees to converge on the complex, only to
be locked out by officials for nearly an hour.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans went to Dallas, touring shelters and visiting
family members who had evacuated there. He joined Dallas leaders in announcing a
citywide relief fund and denouncing the federal emergency agency for what they
called its continuing slow response to the crisis.
"It's a doggone shame that these survivors had to wait in the hot sun for FEMA
yesterday, and FEMA didn't arrive," Mr. Nagin said.
Perhaps the most promising development to emerge was the first detailed
timetable for draining New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers said a new
computer model showed that all areas of the city would be pumped dry by Oct. 18,
about 40 days from the estimate.
The corps had previously said only that the work would take 24 to 80 days. And
for the first time since the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, government
and utility officials offered a time frame for restoring electricity to the New
Orleans downtown business district. They said they hoped to have power turned on
and much of the debris cleaned up by the end of next week.
About 350,000 to 400,000 homes remained without power in New Orleans and the
surrounding area, compared with one million just after the hurricane, according
to estimates by Jimmy Field, a member of the state's Public Service Commission,
and Daniel Packer, president of Entergy New Orleans, the major electricity
provider in the city.
In adjacent St. Bernard Parish, which was particularly hard hit, 99 percent of
homes and businesses remained without power, Mr. Field said. In Orleans Parish,
that figure was 89 percent, and in Jefferson Parish, just over 50 percent.
As floodwaters recede north toward Lake Pontchartrain, water levels across the
city have fallen as much as four feet since Monday. Parts of Interstate 10 that
had been flooded are passable, and the city's downtown core is mostly dry.
On Canal Street, a major commercial artery where many news organizations are
working out of recreational vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel fuel, some
hotels prepared to reopen. Businesses, including some clothing stores, sent
employees to inspect their properties.
Yet elsewhere, the city was emptier than it was earlier in the week, with fewer
people sitting on porches or drinking outside bars. Even some residents who had
promised to resist the evacuation orders said they would relent.
Their change of heart was understandable. In the areas where water remained, its
stench has increasingly grown unbearable as corpses rot and human and animal
waste builds up. Abandoned and unfed dogs roam, sometimes in packs, along
lifeless streets.
Even in dry zones, residents have no electricity or drinkable water, and they
face an endless procession of police officers and soldiers telling them that the
city is unlivable and encouraging them to leave, sometimes politely and
sometimes sternly.
Colonel Ebbert said that in their first sweep of the city, the police and
National Guard had persuaded 3,854 residents to leave their homes since Sunday,
including many who had spurned previous evacuation orders.
He said that the new sweep would focus on the dead and that for dignity's sake
the news media would not be allowed to watch.
Officers who locate bodies will notify mortuary teams under the supervision of
FEMA, he added. Those teams will seek to identify the bodies, notify relatives
and feed the information to state health officials, who have started to compile
death statistics.
While Ms. Landry, the city attorney, continued to assert the legal right to
force evacuations and arrest people who refused, she appealed to residents to
leave for their safety and to refrain from trying to return.
"If you come into the city now, the likelihood of you sustaining multiple flat
tires is very high," she said, noting that checkpoints had been set up at all
entrances to the city. "We want to send a message to our citizens who are
concerned about the safeguarding of their property. The city is now fully
secured."
Yet holdouts remained. In the picturesque Garden District, Dean Eftekhar, 42, a
waiter, said he was prepared to leave after soldiers visited him on Wednesday
and urged him to evacuate. Later that day, Mr. Eftekhar said, he watched as
contractors scooped tree limbs and trash into plastic bags. He went downtown to
the Harrah's casino, now a disaster command center, and applied for work helping
with the cleanup.
Thursday was his first day on the job, and he said he was told that he would be
paid once a week, at a rate of $125 a day, in cash.
"Now," he said, "I have a legitimate excuse to stay in town."
Sewell Chan reported from New Orleans for this article, and Michael Luo from
Baton Rouge, La. Alex Berenson contributed reporting from New Orleans, Bill
Dawson from Houston and Laura Griffin from Dallas.
Death
Toll in New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared, NYT, 10.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/nationalspecial/10storm.html
Cingular, Sprint
give Katrina victims bill
breaks
Fri Sep 9, 2005
6:19 PM ET
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cingular Wireless, the
No. 1 U.S. wireless carrier, has said it would give customers in the areas
devastated by Hurricane Katrina discounts on their cell phone bills, including
roaming charges and text messages.
Customers in the New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi, markets will receive a
one-time 50 percent credit on their monthly fee and will not be charged for
roaming, extra minutes, long-distance or text messaging from late August through
September 30, according to a September 8 letter made available on Friday.
Cingular's subscribers in the markets of Mobile, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi,
Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana, will get a one-time 25 percent discount on
their monthly charge as well as unspecified discounts on roaming and text
messages.
The company, a joint venture of BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications Inc. ,
said the expiration date for prepaid customers will be extended to October 31
and will replace any that expired since August 29.
The Federal Communications Commission had expressed concerns that customers
displaced by the hurricane would have their cell phones shut off because they
had not paid their bills since they had been evacuated.
The agency sought details on what carriers were doing.
Cingular told the FCC the carrier would not shut off customers in the affected
areas for 30 days and would stop collection efforts in Alabama, Louisiana, and
Mississippi.
The company declined to say what impact, if any, the policies would have on its
revenue.
Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 carrier, said it was working on a case-by-case basis
with customers, would not cut them off and had stopped bill collections. The
company is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc.
Sprint Nextel, the No. 3 wireless carrier, said it would give a month of free
wireless service to subscribers in the hardest hit areas and would also give
free long-distance, extra minutes, roaming and text messaging.
Sprint also said in its own letter to the FCC that it would not cut off
customers and has stopped trying to collect on unpaid bills. It did not reveal
how long it would do so.
Cingular,
Sprint give Katrina victims bill breaks, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2005-09-09T221928Z_01_KWA980272_RTRIDST_0_TECH-WIRELESS-DISCOUNTS-DC.XML
New Orleans collects dead
Fri Sep 9, 2005
10:54 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Recovering the dead
took priority over coaxing the living out of New Orleans on Friday as the Bush
administration replaced its emergency management chief in a post-Hurricane
Katrina political storm.
There was some cautious hope that the death toll might not be as big as feared,
even as turgid water polluted with bacteria, sewage and chemicals gradually
receded in the near-empty city, once home to 450,000. It left behind an equally
dangerous muck plastering streets and homes.
City officials said the effort to rescue the stranded and the helpless that
began after the August 29 storm breached the city's levees had officially ended
and efforts were now turned entirely to finding bodies. They said they were in
no hurry to oust those who have refused to quit the city despite an evacuation
order.
After days of criticism that President George W. Bush and his team had failed to
respond quickly and adequately to the disaster, Federal Emergency Management
Agency head Michael Brown was recalled to Washington. His role overseeing
recovery efforts on the U.S. Gulf Coast was handed to Vice Admiral Thad Allen,
chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Four top Democratic senators, headed by Minority Leader Harry Reid, wrote to
Bush after the announcement, again asking that Brown be fired.
"It is not enough to remove Mr. Brown from the disaster scene," they wrote. "The
individual in charge of FEMA must inspire confidence and be able to coordinate
hundreds of federal, state and local resources. Mr. Brown simply doesn't have
the ability or the experience to oversee a coordinated federal response of this
magnitude."
Some senior Republicans had also attacked Brown. Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican
whose house in Pascagoula, Mississippi was destroyed by Katrina, said, "Michael
Brown has been acting like a private, instead of a general."
RESUME QUESTIONS
Bush had publicly praised Brown last week for doing a "heck of a job." The last
straw appeared to come Friday with published reports that Brown had padded his
resume, although Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- Brown's boss --
dodged a question on those reports.
The official death count in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana stood at more
than 300, even though much higher totals had been feared. About a million people
were displaced by the destruction.
"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps ... The numbers (of dead) so
far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," said
Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans.
"The search for living individuals across the city has been conducted," Ebbert
said. "What we are starting today ... is a recovery operation, a recovery
operation to search by street, by grid, for the remains of any individuals who
have passed away."
It appeared that those who had refused to leave the city -- at one time thought
to number in the thousands -- were now more willing to depart. Provisions for
allowing for some to take pets along may have changed some minds and rescue
workers said they had retrieved hundreds of cats and dogs, reuniting some with
their owners.
But there were holdouts.
One of them, Jean Brad Lacy, left but came back. Sweeping up leaves and dried
sewage from the pavement outside of a $200-a-month one-room home that had been
knee-deep in water, he said he changed his mind when National Guard troops tried
to put him on airplane.
"I can't stand no heights," he said. "I love this place, this is my home."
U.S. military pilots who have been flying over the city for the past nine days
say it is clear the water is receding.
"Over in the western areas you don't see the standing water, you see the mud.
It's every bit as nasty as the water and it's going to take a long time to clean
up but at least the water is gone," said Chief Warrant Officer Robert Osborn, a
pilot with the U.S. 1st Cavalry.
"Today we're seeing cars that are able to drive around. The causeway is open.
Folks are out trying to put plastic on their roofs. At nighttime we're seeing
lights, power is coming on little by little."
ROOF REPAIRS
Dozens of homeowners have managed to return to their damaged homes across the
shut-down city and outlying parishes. Plastic blue tarps have been stretched
over damaged roofs.
In some areas residents could be seen cleaning up damage but most neighborhoods
were ghostly.
City officials said New Orleans had been "fully secured," with 14,000 troops on
patrol to prevent looting. Workers planned to go house-to-house in search of
bodies, many of which may be in poor, mainly black blue-collar neighborhoods
where many did not have the means to evacuate before the storm hit.
Around New Orleans, evacuees were returning to St. Charles Parish, a suburban
area west of the city and electricity was coming back online in St. Tammany and
Washington Parishes to the north.
At St. Bernard Parish along the Gulf Coast, a Reuters reporter saw streets
coated in a thick layer of oil and sludge from a refinery spill. Dogs ran around
coated in oil, scavenging for garbage. A hazardous materials crew was trying to
deal with the situation.
The U.S. postal service resumed limited mail service in the region but officials
said it had lost contact with hundreds of its employees in the three states.
"We have more than 6,000 employees in the affected areas ... and out of that
number we have heard from maybe a little more than half of them, so we still
have hundreds and hundreds of postal employees we don't know where they are,"
postal spokesman Dave Lewin told reporters in Baton Rouge.
New
Orleans collects dead, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T025433Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
Beseiged FEMA head
removed from Katrina
relief
Fri Sep 9, 2005
5:47 PM ET
Reuters
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Federal
Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown, sharply criticized for a slow
response to Hurricane Katrina, was pulled out of the Gulf Coast operations on
Friday and recalled to Washington amid accusations he exaggerated his experience
in disaster relief.
"I have directed Mike Brown to return to administering FEMA nationally,"
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a news conference in Baton
Rouge, where relief operations are managed.
Chertoff said he was putting Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the U.S.
Coast Guard, in charge of the relief effort on the ground. The catastrophic
storm left hundreds of thousands homeless and so far more than 300 confirmed
dead, when it hit Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana on August 29.
"Mike Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal
response to this unprecedented challenge," Chertoff told reporters. "I
appreciate his work."
With Tropical Storm Ophelia spinning off Florida's Atlantic coast and more
hurricanes a threat, Chertoff said Brown was needed in Washington to run FEMA's
national operations.
A senior Bush administration official said Chertoff made the decision to pull
Brown out of the hurricane zone and that Bush supported it.
The Senate has opened a bipartisan investigation into what went wrong with the
government's initial response following the storm. A House of Representatives
panel may hold a hearing next week and Democrats are demanding an independent
commission investigate the slow response.
Bringing Brown back to Washington was not enough for some Democrats, who wrote
Bush calling for Brown's dismissal.
Last week, as criticism of his response to the disaster swelled, Bush had given
Brown a public vote of confidence, telling him, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of
a job," even though that same day Bush had called the initial relief effort
"unacceptable."
In more recent days the White House had declined to give Brown an overt vote of
confidence, saying when asked that all those involved in the relief effort were
appreciated.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan all but signaled a change in Brown's
status before the announcement on Friday when he said has a "tremendous amount
of trust" in Chertoff as the man in charge of the relief efforts.
When asked where Brown fit into the chain of command, McClellan said: "Well,
there's an organizational chart and I'll be happy to get that to you or DHS
could as well."
Chertoff deflected questions of whether the move was the first step toward
Brown's resignation. Brown did not answer questions at the news conference but
issued a brief statement from Washington.
"FEMA is fully capable of handling multi-storm operations," he said. "I am
returning to Washington, D.C., to resume oversight over operations for the
arrival of Hurricane Ophelia and the immediate response efforts."
Brown was a friend of former Bush campaign director Joe Allbaugh, the previous
FEMA head who was a major Bush fund-raiser. He went to the agency in 2001 and
became its director in 2003.
A Time magazine report said Brown's official biography released by the White
House at the time of his nomination had been exaggerated, which FEMA called
"misleading."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and fellow Democratic Sens. Richard
Durbin of Illinois, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Chuck Schumer of New York
wrote Bush to call for Brown's dismissal.
Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican whose house in Pascagoula, Mississippi, was
destroyed by Katrina, also was critical of Brown, saying that he had been
"acting like a private, instead of a general."
Ophelia weakened into a tropical storm on Friday and began to creep away from
Florida's Atlantic Coast but national hurricane center forecasters said it could
return to the U.S. coast as a hurricane next week.
Beseiged FEMA head removed from Katrina relief, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-09-09T214806Z_01_FOR927615_RTRIDST_0_POLITICS-BROWN-DC.XML
House panel
plans
hearings on Katrina
response
Fri Sep 9, 2005
6:41 PM ET
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A House of
Representatives panel said on Friday it would hold hearings on the government's
response to Hurricane Katrina as plans for a Republican-led joint Senate-House
inquiry stalled.
House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican,
said the first hearing on the widely criticized response to the disaster would
be on Thursday.
"It has become increasingly clear that local, state and federal government
agencies failed to meet the needs of residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and
Alabama," Davis said in a statement. "Now it's our job to figure out why, and to
make sure we are better prepared for the future."
The committee's review of Katrina relief efforts had been thrown into doubt
earlier this week when Republican leaders announced plans for a joint
House-Senate investigation. But Democrats declined to participate, saying the
planned structure of the joint probe would not yield the truth. They demanded an
independent commission review.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi of California repeated calls for an independent commission on Friday in a
letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist of Tennessee.
"The American people deserve answers independent of politics and from
individuals not vested in the outcome," they wrote.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is also
investigating the Katrina response. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
House
panel plans hearings on Katrina response, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-09-09T224146Z_01_SPI981584_RTRIDST_0_POLITICS-CONGRESS-INVESTIGATION-DC.XML
Black refugees
ask if Utah will really
accept them
Fri Sep 9, 2005
7:40 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner
CAMP WILLIAMS, Utah (Reuters) - Asked whether
he would relocate permanently to Utah after being brought here as a refugee from
Hurricane Katrina, Larry Andrew rattled off a series of questions on Friday on
the delicate issue of race.
"How do the adults really feel about us moving in?" he asked at Camp Williams, a
military base 21 miles south of Salt Lake City housing about 400 refugees from
last weeks disaster. "What if I find a Caucasian girl and decide to date her?
"Will I have to deal with whispering behind me and eyeballing me?" asked the
36-year-old black man.
For the mostly poor, black refugees evacuated from New Orleans, few places are
as geographically remote and culturally alien as this corner of Utah, where 0.2
percent of the population in the nearest town is black.
Still, some refugees, especially younger adults, say they are ready to make a
new start in the region even though they did not know they were coming until the
doors shut on the airplane evacuating them from New Orleans.
"I'm planning a whole new life," said Phillip Johnson II, 23, who has already
arranged an apartment in Salt Lake City. "It's an opportunity knocking for me
out here."
He said even though the population of New Orleans was two-thirds black, his
appearance with dreadlocks and a goatee still worked against him. "In New
Orleans, being a young black man, you get harassed a lot, stereotyped a lot," he
said.
Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. said he expected about half of the 600 refugees
who arrived here to remain permanently and said they would do just fine.
"It's different perhaps than many would think who rely on the old stereotype of
Utah being homogeneous," he told Reuters. "We've evolved so rapidly in recent
years."
One of the volunteers at the base, Newton Gborway, who moved to Utah from
Liberia in West Africa five years ago, shared his first-hand impression of life
in an economically prosperous state with a less than 1 percent black population.
"Don't be shocked and surprised if you meet someone who is mean to you or
doesn't want to associate with you because you are black," he told Darisn Evans.
"You don't worry about the negative stuff."
JUST A MATTER OF TIME
"Everything is going to be okay, but it is just a matter of time."
Evans said he would remain in Utah, and would like to work either as a handyman
or as a highway patrolman.
His ex-wife Tanya Andrews, 44, said race played a part in their escape from
flooded New Orleans, an adventure which she said included looting food, a
television and a boat to get to higher land. She said rescuers picked them up
only after a lighter-skinned black woman waved down a helicopter.
So far the local community has welcomed the refugees with open arms, although
they say they face an adjustment to life in Utah, stronghold of the socially
conservative Mormon Church.
"Any time you go in where you are in the minority -- and I'm experienced in this
-- it's going to be more difficult," said Wayne Mortimer, mayor of Bluffdale
next to Camp Williams.
He cited his past missionary work in Canada when he was a relatively rare
Mormon. Mortimer said his town of 6,500, a well-to-do bedroom community of Salt
Lake City, had 20 low-income housing units available for the refugees.
"When you are an affluent community like we have, the greatest blessing we can
have is to lift someone else," he said in an interview.
Larry Andrew's brother Adrian and sister Tanya, despite initial shock about
being sent to Utah, say they will remain in Utah. Even Larry, despite his
doubts, says the state is offering him a unique chance.
"According to what I see, it will be beneficial to me economically, even
socially," he said. "But how would they adapt to me?"
Black
refugees ask if Utah will really accept them, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-09-09T234103Z_01_SPI974148_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-UTAH-DC.XML
Katrina fuels global warming storm
Fri Sep 9, 2005
8:42 AM ET
Reuters
By Alister Doyle,
Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Hurricane Katrina has spurred
debate about global warming worldwide with some environmentalists sniping at
President George W. Bush for pulling out of the main U.N. plan for braking
climate change.
Experts agree it is impossible to say any one storm is caused by rising
temperatures. Numbers of tropical cyclones like hurricanes worldwide are stable
at about 90 a year although recent U.S. research shows they may be becoming more
intense.
Still, the European Commission, the World Bank, some environmentalists,
Australia's Greens and even Sweden's king said the disaster, feared to have
killed thousands of people in the United States, could be a portent of worse to
come.
"As climate change is happening, we know that the frequency of these disasters
will increase as well as the scope," European Commission spokeswoman Barbara
Helfferich said.
"If we let climate change continue like it is continuing, we will have to deal
with disasters like that," she said. She said it was wrong to say Katrina was
caused by global warming widely blamed on emissions from cars, power plants and
factories.
Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf told reporters he was deeply shaken by the damage
and suffering of millions of people.
"It is quite clear that the world's climate is changing and we should take
note," he said. "The hurricane catastrophe in the United States should be a
wake-up call for all of us."
Climate change policies sharply divide Bush from most of his allies which have
signed up for caps on emissions of greenhouse gases under the U.N.'s Kyoto
protocol. Bush pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, saying it was too expensive and
wrongly excluded developing nations from a first round of caps to 2012.
In July this year, Bush launched a six-nation plan to combat climate change with
Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea focused on a shift to cleaner
energy technology. Unlike Kyoto, it stops short of setting caps on emissions.
SEA LEVEL RISE
U.N. studies say a build-up of greenhouse gases is likely to cause more storms,
floods and desertification and could raise sea levels by up to a meter by 2100.
Sea level rise could expose coasts vulnerable to storms because levees would be
swamped more easily. Some scientists dispute the forecasts and the United States
is investing more heavily than any other nation on climate research.
In Australia, the opposition Greens party said Katrina was aggravated by global
warming and criticized Bush for pulling out of Kyoto. The United States, the
world's biggest polluter, and Australia are the only rich nations outside Kyoto.
"It demonstrates the massive economic, as well as environmental and social
penalties, of George Bush's policies," Greens leader Bob Brown told Reuters. He
did not believe Bush would shift to embrace Kyoto-style caps on emissions.
Concerns were also voiced in Germany.
"The U.S. must be more involved," Gerda Hasselfeldt, a leading German candidate
to become environment minister if the conservative opposition wins the September
18 election, told n-tv television.
In the United States, the focus has been far more on tackling the human disaster
than on links to climate change.
"People are still reeling from the tragedy," said Katie Mandes, a director at
the Washington-based Pew Center, a climate change think-tank. "Politically it's
too early to tell what it will mean for Americans' views."
Ian Johnson, the World Bank's top environmental official, said Katrina could
also be a wake-up call for developing nations, many of which are vulnerable.
An opinion survey published this week showed that 79 percent of Americans feel
global warming poses an "important" or "very important" threat to their country
in the next 10 years. Worries among Europeans were even higher.
Taken before Katrina in June, the Transatlantic Trends survey showed that
Americans felt more threatened than Europeans by terrorism, Islamic extremism,
weapons of mass destruction and economic downturn.
Some individual climatic disasters in the past have changed perceptions about
climate change. Steve Sawyer, climate change director at Greenpeace, said that
ice storms in Canada in the late 1990s had dramatically raised public concerns.
Greenpeace called Katrina a "wake-up call about the dangers of continued global
fossil fuel dependency."
Recent research by Kerry Emanuel, a leading U.S. hurricane researcher, shows the
intensity of hurricanes -- the wind speeds and the duration -- seems to have
risen by about 70 percent in the past 30 years.
"Globally a new signal may be emerging in rising intensity," said Tom Knutson, a
research meteorologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Higher water temperatures in future may lead to more storms.
Hurricanes need temperatures of about 26.5 C (80F) to form.
(Additional reporting by Michael Perry in Sydney, Elaine Lies in Tokyo, Jeff
Mason and Paul Taylor in Brussels, Iain Rogers in Berlin, Timothy Gardner in New
York)
Katrina fuels global warming storm, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=
2005-09-09T124313Z_01_MCC945372_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT-DC.XML
Katrina rings alarms on climate change:
World Bank
Fri Sep 9, 2005
12:56 AM ET
Reuters
By Laura MacInnis
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hurricane Katrina may
serve as a wake-up call on climate change for developing nations, many of which
are vulnerable to devastation from global warming, the World Bank's top
environmental official said on Thursday.
Ian Johnson, the World Bank's vice president for environmentally and socially
sustainable development, told Reuters the storm's heavy damage in the southern
United States would have important implications for poorer countries.
"Just think of the catastrophic impact it's had in a country that's pretty well
organized, pretty rich. Transfer that to a country that isn't and may not have
the same level of capacity to deal with these sorts of things," Johnson said in
an interview.
"Katrina is a terrible tragedy, but maybe it is a wake-up call to all of us to
begin understanding what catastrophic events, what damage can occur," he added.
In addition to fostering talks on emissions and promoting clean energy products,
Johnson said the World Bank is working with private industry to find ways to
protect poor nations from the expected environmental shifts linked to global
warming.
"There is a real sense that the train has left the station, and that there is
going to be a pretty significant impact of climate change," Johnson said, adding
the devastation in New Orleans had increased public sensitivity to these risks.
"Certainly in the press, it seems to have raised questions of the extent to
which this is part of a global warming world," he said. "I do think that public
opinion is thinking a lot about these issues."
In order to protect vulnerable regions, such as low-lying areas and those
subject to landslides, Johnson said the World Bank was seeking to spur
investment in flood controls and levees and to encourage stricter building
standards.
Other ideas include greater reliance on water-resistant or drought-resistant
crops to maintain agricultural productivity should weather patterns change, he
said, adding new insurance products could also help those who would otherwise
lose everything in a disaster.
While poor people in the New Orleans area were among the most affected in
Katrina's wake, Johnson said it was not the World Bank's role to lend assistance
to the United States or other wealthy developed economies facing environmental
risks.
Still, he said it was important to draw lessons from the United States'
experience with the storm and its aftermath.
"It is the poor who suffer disproportionately in these events because they tend
to be the least capable of resisting, they're not as resilient, they are
typically located and live in the areas that are most vulnerable," he said.
"One hopes there will be positive lessons from this that we can apply, because
it has been an awful, awful tragedy."
Katrina rings alarms on climate change: World Bank, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=reutersEdge&storyID=2005-09-09T045643Z_01_SPI882638_RTRIDST_0_PICKS-ECONOMY-WORLDBANK-CLIMATE-DC.XML
Announcement Follows
Barrage of Criticism;
New Chief Is
Named
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:54 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal Emergency
Management Agency Director Michael Brown is being relieved of his command of the
Bush administration's Hurricane Katrina onsite relief efforts, Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Friday.
He will be replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing
New Orleans relief and rescue efforts, Chertoff said.
Earlier, Brown confirmed the switch. Asked if he was being made a scapegoat for
a federal relief effort that has drawn widespread and sharp criticism, Brown
told The Associated Press after a long pause: ''By the press, yes. By the
president, No.''
''Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal
response to this unprecedented challenge,'' Chertoff told reporters in Baton
Rouge, La. Chertoff sidestepped a question on whether the move was the first
step toward Brown's leaving FEMA.
But a source close to Brown, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FEMA
director had been considering leaving after the hurricane season ended in
November and that Friday's action virtually assures his departure.
Brown has been under fire because of the administration's slow response to the
magnitude of the hurricane. On Thursday, questions were raised about whether he
padded his resume to exaggerate his previous emergency management background.
Less than an hour before Brown's removal came to light, White House press
secretary Scott McClellan said Brown had not resigned and the president had not
asked for his resignation.
Chertoff suggested the shift came as the Gulf Coast efforts were entering ''a
new phase of the recovery operation.'' He said Brown would return to Washington
to oversee the government's response to other potential disasters.
''I appreciate his work, as does everybody here,'' Chertoff said.
''I'm anxious to get back to D.C. to correct all the inaccuracies and lies that
are being said,'' Brown said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Asked if the move was a demotion, Brown said: ''No. No. I'm still the director
of FEMA.''
He said Chertoff made the decision to move him out of Louisiana. It was not his
own decision, Brown said.
''I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife and, maybe get a good
Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep. And then I'm going
to go right back to FEMA and continue to do all I can to help these victims,''
Brown said. ''This story's not about me. This story's about the worst disaster
of the history of our country that stretched every government to its limit and
now we have to help these victims.''
Amid escalating calls for Brown's ouster, the White House had insisted publicly
for days that Bush retained confidence in his FEMA chief. But there was no
question that Brown's star was fading in the administration. In the storm's
early days, Brown was the president's primary briefer on its path and the
response effort, but by the weekend those duties had been taken over by Brown's
boss -- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Also, while Brown was very visibly by the president's side during Bush's first
on-the-ground visit to the hurricane zone last week, he remained behind the
scenes -- with Chertoff out front.
Even before Chertoff's announcement, the beleaguered Brown was facing questions
Friday about his resume.
A 2001 press release on the White House Web site says Brown worked for the city
of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 ''overseeing emergency services divisions.''
Brown's official biography on the FEMA Web site says that his background in
state and local government also includes serving as ''an assistant city manager
with emergency services oversight'' and as a city councilman.
But a former mayor of Edmond, Randel Shadid, told The Associated Press on Friday
that Brown had been an assistant to the city manager. Shadid said Brown was
never assistant city manager.
''I think there's a difference between the two positions,'' said Shadid. ''I
would think that is a discrepancy.'' Asked later about the White House news
release that said Brown oversaw Edmond's emergency services divisions, Shadid
said, ''I don't think that's a total stretch.''
Time magazine first reported the discrepancy.
Separately, Newsday reported another discrepancy regarding Brown's background.
The official White House announcement of Brown's nomination to head FEMA in
January 2003 lists his previous experience as ''the Executive Director of the
Independent Electrical Contractors,'' a trade group based in Alexandria, Va.
Two officials of the group told Newsday this week that Brown never was the
national head of the group but did serve as the executive director of a regional
chapter, based in Colorado.
A longtime acquaintance, Carl Reherman, said Brown was very involved in helping
set up an emergency operations center in Edmond and assisting in the creation of
an emergency contingency plan in the 1970s. At the time, Reherman was a city
councilman, and later became mayor.
''From my experience with Mike, he not only worked very hard on everything he
did, he had very high standards,'' said Reherman, who also knew Brown when he
was a student taking classes from Reherman, who was a professor of political
science at Central State University.
Nicol Andrews, deputy strategic director in FEMA's office of public affairs,
told Time that while Brown began as an intern, he became an ''assistant city
manager'' with a distinguished record of service.
''According to Mike Brown,'' Andrews told Time, a large portion of points raised
by the magazine are ''very inaccurate.''
Associated Press writers Ron Fournier, Pete Yost and
Ted Bridis in Washington
and Richard Green in Oklahoma City contributed to this
story.
Announcement Follows Barrage of Criticism; New Chief Is Named, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-Brown.html
Search and Rescue Effort in New Orleans
Is Formally
Ended
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 9 - New Orleans officials
said today that the search and rescue phase of the Hurricane Katrina response
had ended, and that police officers would now go to every home in the city to
search for dead bodies.
As officials continued to try to convince holdouts to leave the flooded city,
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that the director of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, would return to Washington
from the Gulf Coast, where he had been overseeing the federal government's
response to the hurricane. Mr. Brown has been criticized for his agency's
response to relief efforts, and for lacking substantial experience in responding
to disasters.
Mr. Chertoff said that Mr. Brown had done everything he could to respond to the
storm but that he was needed in Washington to superintend FEMA operations.
Earlier today, the director of homeland security for the city of New Orleans,
Col. Terry Ebbert, said the number of dead in the city might be smaller than the
10,000 that had been frequently estimated in recent days."There's some
encouragement in what we found on initial sweeps," Colonel Ebbert said. "The
numbers have been relatively minor." He declined to provide a casualty estimate.
While the efforts of the city have so far been focused on rescuing trapped
residents, securing the city against looters, and cajoling holdouts to leave,
Colonel Ebbert said efforts will now shift to recovering the dead.
"To the best of our abilities, we have thoroughly searched the city and now we
are in a recovery operation for remains," said Colonel Ebbert. The search will
start in heavily flooded neighborhoods where "there is the greatest possibility
that someone perished," he said. While insisting that a mandatory evacuation
order remained in effect, city officials said today that no one had been removed
from their homes against their will, and that the city had no timetable for
doing so.
"We're trying our best to persuasively negotiate," with the city's remaining
residents, said City Attorney Sherry Landry. "We are not using force at this
time. I can not speak to the future." She added, "If we find it necessary to do
so in the interest of safety, we will do so."
The city has set up checkpoints at all major entry points to keep residents from
returning. Ms. Landry said the city is now "fully secured," with some 14,000
troops and police officers "actively patrolling all parts of the city."
Kristen Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health and
Hospitals, said during a telephone interview today that disease seems to be in
check.
"At this time we have not had anything beyond mild gastrointestinal illnesses,
and we haven't seen a whole lot of that," she said. Fecal matter in the
floodwaters from sewer overflow appears to be the cause of those illness, said
Ms. Meyer.
She said one area of concern was Hepatitis A, which can be caught from fecal
matter and has an incubation period of 30 days. She added, however, that
Hepatitis A had not been prevalent prior to the storm, and that officials are
hopeful it would not be a major concern in the future.
This morning, President Bush thanked foreign governments for their support of
the hurricane relief effort, comparing it to the international response to the
Sept. 11, terrorist attacks.
"In this time of struggle, the American people need to know we're not struggling
alone," he said. "I want to thank the world community for its prayers and for
the offers of assistance that have come from all around the world."
President Bush noted that Air Canada had helped in evacuating residents, that
Afghanistan had offered to send $100,000 to aid victims, and that Kuwait had
volunteered to provide $400 million in oil and $100 million in humanitarian aid.
In Brussels, NATO commanders agreed in an emergency meeting today to provide
ships and planes to help deliver aid to the victims in the United States. The
planes are expected to arrive in the next few days but the ships could take
nearly two weeks.
The aid was requested by the United States on Thursday. Agreeing to provide it
"was a very quick and very easy decision," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer told reporters.
The White House said today that Mr. Bush would return to Mississippi and
Louisiana on Sunday, his third visit to the area since Hurricane Katrina hit
land on Aug. 29. He will travel there after participating in a ceremony marking
the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his spokesman, Scott
McClellan, said this morning.
On Thursday, Mr. Bush urged the nearly one million people displaced by the storm
to contact federal agencies to apply for immediate aid. He praised the
outpouring of private charity to the displaced, but said the costs of restoring
lives would affect all Americans, as would the horror of the storm's carnage.
"The responsibility of caring for hundreds of thousands of citizens who no
longer have homes is going to place many demands on our nation," the president
said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "We have many difficult days
ahead, especially as we recover those who did not survive the storm."
As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney was touring Mississippi and
Louisiana, in part as an answer to the critics who have said that the
administration responded too slowly and timidly to the epic disaster. At a stop
in Gulfport, Miss., a heckler shouted an obscenity at the vice president. Mr.
Cheney shrugged it off, saying it was the first such abuse he had heard.
Also on Thursday, Congress approved a $51.8 billion package of storm aid,
bringing the total to more than $62 billion in a week. The government is now
spending $2 billion dollars a day to respond to the disaster.
The confirmed death toll in Louisiana remained at 83 on Thursday. Efforts to
recover corpses are beginning, although only a handful of bodies have been
recovered so far. Official estimates of the death toll in New Orleans are still
vague, but 10,000 remains a common figure.
Mississippi officials said they had confirmed 196 dead as of Thursday, including
143 in coastal areas, although Gov. Haley Barbour said he expected the toll to
rise.
"It would just be a guess, but the 200 or just over 300 we think is a credible
and reliable figure," the governor said on NBC's "Today" show.
He also said electricity would be restored by Sunday to most homes and
businesses in the state that could receive it.
The water continued to recede slowly in the city 10 days after Hurricane Katrina
swept ashore and levees failed at several points, inundating the basin New
Orleans sits in.
The Army Corps of Engineers has restored to operation 37 of the city's 174
permanent pumps, allowing them to drain 11,000 cubic feet of water per second
from the basin. When all the pumps are working, they can remove 81,000 cubic
feet of water per second, said Dan Hitchings of the engineering corps.
It will be months before the breadth of the devastation from the storm is known.
But a report by the Louisiana fisheries department calculated the economic loss
to the state's important seafood industry at as much as $1.6 billion over the
next 12 months.
Louisiana's insurance commissioner, J. Robert Wooley, said the state had barred
insurance companies from canceling any homeowner's insurance policies in the
days immediately before the storm hit and afterward.
"All cancellations will be voided," Mr. Wooley said.
Across New Orleans, active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and local law
enforcement agencies from across the country continued door-to-door searches by
patrol car, Humvee, helicopter and boat, urging remaining residents to leave.
Maj. Gen. James Ron Mason of the Kansas National Guard, who commands about
25,000 Guard troops in and around New Orleans, said his forces had rescued 687
residents by helicopter, boat and high-wheeled truck in the past 24 hours.
The superintendent of New Orleans police, P. Edwin Compass III, said that after
a week of near anarchy in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed
to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. "Only law enforcement
are allowed to have weapons," he said.
That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom
businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property.
The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like
Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.
Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had
no plans to make them give up their weapons.
Sewell Chan reported from New Orleans for this article and Timothy Williams
from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alex Berensonfrom New Orleans;
Jeremy Alford, Shaila Dewan and John M. Broder from Baton Rouge, La.; Ralph
Blumenthal from Houston, and Marek Fuchs from New York.
Search and Rescue Effort in New Orleans Is Formally Ended, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09cnd-storm.html
New rescue chief named,
New Orleans
collects dead
Fri Sep 9, 2005
2:42 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The Bush
administration moved to quell a political storm on Friday by replacing the
embattled head of emergency operations along the U.S. Gulf Coast, as rescue
workers in New Orleans ended recovery efforts and began collecting the dead
victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced he was appointing Vice
Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard, to take charge of
recovery operations in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and recalling Federal
Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown to Washington to coordinate the
response to other possible disasters.
"We have to have seamless interaction with military forces," Chertoff told a
news conference in Baton Rouge. "Mike Brown has done everything he possibly
could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge. I
appreciate his work, as does everybody here."
Brown had been the target of furious bipartisan criticism for the government's
slow initial response to the hurricane and some of both political parties have
called for his firing.
But President George W. Bush publicly praised Brown last week for doing a "heck
of a job." The last straw appeared to come Friday with published reports that
Brown had padded his resume, although Chertoff refused to acknowledge a question
on these reports.
SEARCH FOR THE DEAD
In New Orleans, hopes rose that the number of dead might not be as catastrophic
as predicted. Rescuers were only now beginning a methodical house-by-house
search of the city for victims' bodies.
Thousands had been feared trapped in the poor, blue-collar neighborhoods, where
people had no means to evacuate ahead of the August 29 storm.
"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps. ... The numbers (of dead) so
far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," Col.
Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for the city of New Orleans said at
a news conference with other city officials.
Flood waters were receding and city officials said New Orleans was now "fully
secured," with 14,000 troops on patrol to prevent looting. Some neighboring
areas were showing signs of recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said that contrary to earlier reports nobody
was being forcibly removed from the city. Thousands of people were still
believed to be holding out, some in neighborhoods still awash in a fetid soup of
debris, bacteria, decomposed bodies, chemicals and oil, with no electricity and
no running water.
FROM RESCUE TO RECOVERY
"The search for living individuals across the city has been conducted," Ebbert
said. "What we are starting today ... is a recovery operation, a recovery
operation to search by street, by grid, for the remains of any individuals who
have passed away."
So far the official toll in Louisiana is 118 confirmed dead, and more than 300,
including Mississippi and Alabama. Residents of Louisiana, Mississippi and
Alabama have dispersed across the country with nearly 250,000 housed in
shelters.
Around New Orleans, evacuees were returning to St. Charles Parish, a suburban
area west of the city. Electricity was coming back online in St. Tammany and
Washington Parishes to the north.
At St. Bernard Parish along the Gulf Coast, a Reuters reporter saw streets
coated in a thick layer of oil and sludge from a refinery spill. Wild dogs were
running around coated in oil, scavenging for garbage. A hazardous materials crew
was on hand, trying to deal with the situation.
Reuters reporter Jason Webb, reporting from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain
north of the city, said a two-mile stretch of high-priced waterfront homes built
on jetties was almost totally destroyed.
"It just looks like a nuclear bomb hit," said Ted Modica, 49, as he picked
through the ruins of his $295,000 home for personal items that might have
survived the onslaught. The two-story house once stood 13 feet above the water.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said engineers were trying to remap shipping
lanes, seeing what debris needed to be removed from the ocean floor, so that
ports could reopen.
BIGGEST CRISIS
Bush, facing his biggest crisis since the attacks of September 11, 2001, vowed
to overcome the disaster.
"America is a strong and resilient nation. Our people have the spirit, the
resources and the determination to overcome any challenge," he said at a State
Department ceremony before Brown was called back to Washington.
Even as he spoke, Bush faced renewed criticism for packing FEMA with political
cronies and saw his approval rating fall to 40 percent, down four points since
July to the lowest point the Pew Research Center has recorded.
The Washington Post reported that five of the top eight FEMA officials had
little experience in handling disasters and owed their jobs to their Republican
political ties to Bush.
Brown is a friend of former Bush campaign director Joe Allbaugh, the previous
FEMA head who was a major Bush fund-raiser. Last week, as criticism of his
response to the disaster swelled, Bush gave him a public vote of confidence,
saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Bush administration officials were busy rushing fresh aid to the region while
also trying to blunt the political fallout over the federal response to what, at
an estimated $100 billion to $200 billion, could be the costliest natural
disaster in U.S. history.
Republican House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay told a news
conference at the Houston Astrodome he "vehemently" disagreed with any proposal
to set up an independent commission to look at botched aid effort.
New
rescue chief named, New Orleans collects dead, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T184258Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
Katrina changes the rules
but not the
building norms
Fri Sep 9, 2005
2:09 PM ET
Reuters
By Crispian Balmer
GULFPORT, Mississippi (Reuters) - Hurricane
Katrina has set a new benchmark for storm devastation on the Mississippi coast,
but the widespread destruction is not about to make the survivors re-build their
homes any stronger.
Katrina touched down on the U.S. shore with sustained winds of 150 mph and
brought with it a storm surge that wrecked scores of communities, turning
beachfront residential areas into little more than piles of kindling.
"This hurricane re-writes our folklore. It shows you can't predict anything and
can't build to protect," said Bob Anderson, a power technician for Con Edison
who has witnessed the aftermath of numerous killer storms.
"You have to respect the force of nature, not challenge it," he said, standing
on Gulfport's razed sea front where barely a single building is left standing.
Long-time residents used to maintain that the 1969 Hurricane Camille was the
mother of all storms, and technically speaking it is still the strongest to have
made landfall in U.S. record.
However, it didn't pack the same punch as Katrina because it did not generate
the same massive flooding.
Many of those who rode out Katrina rather than escape in-land, said they decided
to stay because they knew their neighborhoods had survived Camille, not to
mention a long list of subsequent storms such as Elena, George and Frederick
(pls check spelling of this last).
"You can blame a lot of the deaths here on Camille, not on Katrina. Folk thought
Camille was the worst it could get and they was wrong," said Greg Verges, who
owns a bait shop in Ocean Springs.
He built the shop 13.1 ft up the shore because he knew the Camille flood only
got to 13 ft. Katrina came in at 20.6 ft in Ocean Springs, and even higher
further west heading toward Gulfport and on to New Orleans.
"Katrina's changed the rules," Verges said, standing next to his foul-smelling,
sea-ruined freezers.
TIMBER HOMES
It might have changed some rules, but that does mean it will make people change
the way they re-build their new houses.
Many of the destroyed homes were primarily made of timber, meaning they were
relatively cheap and easy to put up. Public buildings and hotels made of
reinforced concrete appeared to withstand the storm much better.
After Hurricane Andrew destroyed about 53,000 homes in Florida in 1992,
authorities there introduced a stricter building code to make new houses more
rugged.
Locals along the Mississippi coast said many of those norms were already in
place here and doubted there would be a further tightening of the screw because
ordinary people could not afford to put up super resilient homes on the
off-chance of another Katrina.
"I don't think we'll build stronger," said Bob Wright, a semi-retired engineer,
evacuated to an Ocean Springs hotel after his house suffered severe flooding in
the hurricane.
"There is no point in building something to withstand a storm like Katrina, It
would be too expensive. You'd be better off getting insurance and rebuilding if
you lose your house again."
Some residents who lost everything are contemplating leaving the coast and
finding a safer place to set up home. But if they leave, they are likely to find
a queue of buyers for their land - people anxious to swap the chill of the
American north for the tropical heat of southern Mississippi.
"You'll get northerners moving down here saying What's a hurricane? All they'll
see is the sand and the sea and they won't know. You have to live it to believe
it," said Wright.
Katrina changes the rules but not the building norms, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T180936Z_01_MCC965262_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BENCHMARK-DC.XML
Bush faces new questions on relief
Fri Sep 9, 2005
12:44 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Rescue crews prepared
to speed up the retrieval of the dead from Hurricane Katrina on Friday amid
reports that President George W. Bush chose unqualified political supporters
rather than disaster experts to head the agency leading the relief effort.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired a private firm to coordinate
the recovery of bodies in and around New Orleans. The official death toll from
the monster storm that hit Louisiana and Mississippi has exceeded 300 but is
expected to climb much higher. Officials have 25,000 body bags on hand.
Water levels were slowly falling in a city still flooded with a toxic brew of
dark-brown water poisoned by bacteria, gasoline, oil, chemicals, debris and
submerged bodies. A fifth of the city's 75 major drainage pumps were back in
operation draining fetid water from the city, the New Orleans Times-Picayune
reported on Friday.
Rescuers were still going door-to-door in New Orleans neighborhoods, trying to
persuade reluctant stragglers to evacuate and were soon expected to begin
removing people by force. Thousands of people were still believed to be holding
out in the city.
Officials said there were fewer fires than in recent days, with 11 on Thursday,
the Times-Picayune reported.
POLITICAL TIES TO BUSH
The Washington Post reported that five of the top eight FEMA officials had
little experience in handling disasters and owed their jobs to their political
ties to Bush.
As political operatives took the top jobs, professionals and experts in
hurricanes and disasters left the agency, the newspaper said.
FEMA director Michael Brown, already under fire for his performance as the
disaster unfolded, came under further pressure when Time magazine reported that
his official biography released by the White House at the time of his nomination
exaggerated his experience in disaster relief.
Brown was a friend of former Bush campaign director Joe Allbaugh, the previous
FEMA head. Brown had also headed an Arabian horse association. Last week, as
criticism of his response to the disaster swelled, Bush gave him a public vote
of confidence, saying, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
Brown's biography on the FEMA Web site said he had once served as an "assistant
city manager with emergency services oversight," but Time quoted an official in
Edmond, Oklahoma, as saying the job was actually "assistant to the city
manager," with little responsibility. The magazine also said Brown padded his
academic accomplishments.
"The assistant is more like an intern," city spokeswoman Claudia Deakins told
the magazine. "Department heads did not report to him."
In response to the report on Time's Web site, FEMA issued a statement that took
issue with elements related to an unofficial biography, and described his job in
Edmond as "assistant to the city manager."
Bush administration officials were busy rushing fresh aid to the region while
also trying to blunt the political fallout over the federal response to what, at
an estimated $100 billion to $200 billion, could be the costliest natural
disaster in U.S. history.
A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of Americans thought Bush could have
done more to speed up relief efforts, and just 28 percent believed he did all he
could. The president's approval rating fell to 40 percent, down four points
since July to the lowest point Pew has recorded.
Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state and a possible leader for
Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, criticized the disaster response by all
levels of government in an interview to be broadcast on Friday.
'ENOUGH WARNING'
"There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans.
Not enough was done. I don't think advantage was taken of the time that was
available to us, and I just don't know why," Powell said in excerpts of the
"20/20" program interview posted to the ABC Web site.
The task of retrieving and identifying bodies promised to be grim and difficult.
Many were feared to be trapped in the poor, blue-collar subdivisions of the
city, where people had no means to evacuate ahead of the storm.
Many corpses have decomposed. Poor people may not have dental records useful in
identification. And family members of the dead have scattered across the entire
country.
The president sent Vice President Dick Cheney to Mississippi and Louisiana on
Thursday to help untangle bureaucratic red tape that had triggered complaints
from some of the 1 million people displaced by the storm.
Cheney rode through the streets of downtown New Orleans in a Humvee, the
highest-ranking Bush administration official to visit the shattered city center.
Asked about bureaucratic problems, Cheney said: "I think the progress we're
making is significant. I think the performance in general at least in terms of
the information I've received from locals is definitely very impressive."
Congress on Thursday pushed through approval for $51.8 billion in new aid, after
an earlier $10.5 billion was exhausted in the first days since the storm hit on
August 29.
Bush immediately signed the measure. "More resources will be needed as we work
to help people get back on their feet," he said.
Bush also issued an executive order on Thursday allowing federal contractors
rebuilding in the aftermath of the hurricane to pay below the prevailing wage,
drawing rebukes from two congressional Democrats who said stricken families need
good wages to rebuild their lives.
Bush
faces new questions on relief, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T164434Z_01_MCC956417_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML
New Orleans now secure - city attorney
Fri Sep 9, 2005
12:41 PM ET
Reuters
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans is fully
secure and officials hope to restore power to the city's central business
district within seven days, city attorney Sherry Landry said on Friday.
"The city is now fully secured. The city is now fully secured," Landry said at a
news conference.
"Fourteen thousand troops are in Orleans Parish. At present they are actively
patrolling all areas of the city and running nightly reconnaissance to prevent
further looting."
She said while there was power in the central business district on Friday, it
was not able to support all buildings.
"It is our goal to restore power to the CBD (central business district) and
clear all streets of debris and glass withing the next seven days. After that we
will establish a process for businesses to return to the city," Landry said.
New
Orleans now secure - city attorney, R, 9.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T164208Z_01_MCC959829_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RECOVERY-DC.XML
Holdouts on Dry Ground Say,
'Why Leave
Now?'
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Ten days ago, the water
rose to the front steps of their house. Four days ago, it began falling. But
only now is the city demanding that Richie Kay and Emily Harris get out.
They cannot understand why. They live on high ground in the Bywater
neighborhood, and their house escaped structural damage. They are healthy and
have enough food and water to last almost a year.
They have a dog to protect them, a car with a full tank of gasoline should they
need to leave quickly and a canoe as a last resort. They said they used it last
week to rescue 100 people.
"We're not the people they need to be taking out," Mr. Kay said. "We're the
people they need to be coordinating with."
Scattered throughout the dry neighborhoods of New Orleans, which are growing
larger each day as pumps push water out of the city, are people like Mr. Kay and
Ms. Harris. They are defying Mayor C. Ray Nagin's orders to leave, contending
that he will violate their constitutional rights if he forces them out of the
homes they own or rent.
"We have food, we have water, we have antibiotics," said Kenneth Charles Kinler,
who is living with four other men on Marais Street, which was covered with
almost four feet of water last week but is now dry. "We're more or less watching
the area for looters."
Mr. Nagin has said the city is not safe for civilians because of the risk of
fire and water-borne diseases. There was no official word on Thursday about when
the police would start to evict residents forcibly, but officers have been
knocking on doors to plead with people to leave on their own.
"Unless you have enough food or water for three weeks, you're a walking dead
man," Sgt. George Jackson told holdouts on the northern edge of the city on
Thursday afternoon.
To reduce the risk of violent confrontation, the police began confiscating
firearms on Thursday, even those legally owned.
To be sure, many of the thousands of people remaining in New Orleans want to
leave, especially in neighborhoods where the water continues to stand several
feet deep. Hundreds of people a day are being ferried to the convention center
by National Guard troops in five-ton trucks and then bused outside the city.
Some holdouts may change their minds as their food and water run out. Some
appear mentally incompetent or have houses in severely flooded neighborhoods and
are staying in the city in the mistaken hope that they will be able to go home
in a few days.
But thousands more do not fall in any of those categories. They are sitting on
dry ground with all their belongings and plenty of provisions. They say they
want to stay to help rebuild their city and maybe earn some money doing it,
because they have animals they are afraid to leave behind, or to protect their
property or simply because they have always lived here and see no reason to move
their lives to a motel room in Houston or San Antonio.
Billie Moore, who lives in an undamaged 3,000-square-foot house on the city's
southwestern flank that also stayed dry, said she did not want to lose her job
as a pediatric nurse at the Ochsner Clinic in Jefferson Parish, which continues
to function.
"Who's going to take care of the patients if all the nurses go away?" Ms. Moore
asked.
When police officers arrived at her house to warn of the health risks of
remaining, she showed them her hospital identification card.
"I guess you know the health risks then," the officer said.
Ms. Moore and her husband, Richard Robinson, have been using an old gas stove to
cook pasta and rice, dumping cans of peas on top for flavor.
"We try to be normal and sit down and eat," Ms. Moore, 52, said. "I think that
how we'll stay healthy is if I keep the house clean."
Power remains out in most of the city, and even where the tap water is flowing,
it is not drinkable. Bathing and using the toilet are daily challenges. Many
residents are siphoning water from swimming pools and fountains.
Some holdouts seem intent on keeping alive the distinct and wild spirit of this
city. In the French Quarter, Addie Hall and Zackery Bowen found a unusual way to
make sure that police officers regularly patrolled their house. Ms. Hall, 28, a
bartender, flashed her breasts at the police vehicles that passed by, ensuring a
regular flow of traffic.
On Thursday morning on St. Claude Avenue, a commercial strip in Bywater, east of
downtown, about 12 people congregated inside and in front of Kajun's Pub,
drinking and smoking. Inside, the bar looked dank, but a fan swirled air
overhead and a television set in the corner showed local news, both fired by the
bar's portable generator.
"New Orleans has been my home for 20 years," said Kenny Dobbs, who celebrated
his 35th birthday at the bar after the flood. "I've been on my own since I was
14."
Like other people, Mr. Dobbs said, he believed that the city had exaggerated the
health risks of staying, as a scare tactic. The city simply wants to force
people out so that its reconstruction will go more smoothly, he said.
"Why do you think they're evacuating people?" he asked. "So they don't have as
much to deal with."
The police and federal law enforcement officials have depicted many of those
staying as looters waiting to pounce, though the holdouts said that they were
actually protecting their neighborhoods from crime and that their steady
presence is a greater deterrent than the occasional police patrol.
While residents and some legal experts question the constitutionality of forced
evacuations, those staying have no functioning courthouse in the city to hear
their complaints, and no state or federal authorities have stepped in to stop
the plan.
In general, residents say the active-duty soldiers and National Guard troops had
treated them well. Local police officers, many of them working for almost two
weeks straight and having lost families or possessions, have been much more
aggressive, Mr. Dobbs said.
Two New Orleans police officers stole $50 and a bottle of whiskey from him last
week after finding him on the street after dark, he said.
With police officers and federal law enforcement agents ratcheting up the
pressure on residents to leave, the holdouts worry that it is just a matter of
time before they are forced out.
Ms. Harris said she did not want to leave. "I haven't even run out of weed yet,"
she said.
But she knows that fighting with police officers is futile.
"I'll probably bitch and moan, but I'm not going to hole up," she said.
And by Thursday afternoon, Kajun's Pub had closed, and the vehicles previously
parked outside were gone.
There was no indication whether Mr. Dobbs and the other people who had been
drinking and joking six hours earlier had been evacuated or simply disappeared
into the city.
Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting for this article.
Holdouts on Dry Ground Say, 'Why Leave Now?', NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09holdouts.html
Cost of Recovery Surges,
as Do Bids to Join
in Effort
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
and CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - With Congress primed to
spend billions of dollars on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, lawmakers and
industry groups are lining up to bring home their share of the cascade of money
for rebuilding and relief.
White House officials and Congressional budget experts now assume that federal
costs for the hurricane will shoot past $100 billion, which itself is more than
twice the entire annual federal budget for domestic security. Congress on
Thursday approved $51.8 billion in spending, bringing the total so far to more
than $62 billion.
The demand for money comes from many directions. Louisiana lawmakers plan to
push for billions of dollars to upgrade the levees around New Orleans, rebuild
highways, lure back business and shore up the city's sinking foundation. The
devastated areas of Mississippi and Alabama will need similar infusions of cash.
Communities will want compensation for taking in evacuees. And there will be
future costs of health care, debris removal, temporary housing, clothing,
vehicle replacement. Farmers from the Midwest, meanwhile, are beginning to press
for emergency relief as a result of their difficulties in shipping grain through
the Port of New Orleans.
Other ideas circulating through Congress that could entail significant costs
include these notions:
¶Turning New Orleans and other cities affected by the storm into big new
tax-free zones.
¶Providing reconstruction money for tens of thousands of homeowners and small
businesses that did not have federal flood insurance on their houses or
buildings.
¶Making most hurricane victims eligible for health care under Medicaid and
having the federal government pay the full cost rather than the current practice
of splitting costs with states.
The torrent of money - more than $2 billion a day over the weekend, and expected
to remain above $500 million a day for the foreseeable future - prompted several
lawmakers to warn about the perils of an open checkbook.
"We are reaching a perfect political storm," said Senator Jeff Sessions,
Republican of Alabama. "We have all the earmarks of a rush to spend money that
is very dangerous."
Mr. Sessions called on President Bush to appoint a person with significant
business experience to oversee the spending. Contained within the spending
measure approved Thursday is a provision that directs an extra $15 million to
the inspector general's office in the Department of Homeland Security. The
agency is also ordered to provide at least weekly reports to Congress on the use
of the money.
Those safeguards, along with a decision by the administration to waive the
federal law requiring that prevailing wages be paid on construction projects
underwritten by federal dollars, were critical to persuading Congressional
conservatives to vote for the money. It passed the House on 410-to-11 vote, with
the only opposition coming from Republicans. The Senate vote was 97 to 0.
But fiscal conservatives who supported the legislation on Thursday threatened to
oppose future installments of money unless Congress and the administration begin
to find ways to offset the spending so it is not just piled on top of the
federal deficit.
"Congress must ensure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe
of debt for our children and grandchildren," said Representative Mike Pence,
Republican of Indiana and a conservative leader in the House.
"There is no sacrifice on the part of Congress," said Senator Tom Coburn,
Republican of Oklahoma, who said the decision to not cut spending elsewhere was
a failure of leadership.
The emergency spending plan also drew scrutiny from some lawmakers who contended
that it raised the risk of fraud by increasing the spending limit on about
250,000 credit cards issued to government workers from $15,000 to $250,000. "The
use of government credit cards has a track record, and it is not a good one,"
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote in a letter urging
Congressional leaders to delete the provision.
But Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader and typically an
opponent of increased spending for social programs, argued that Congress had no
choice but to provide the financial assistance as quickly as possible.
"I know the American people, some of them are worrying about all this money,"
Mr. DeLay said. "Ladies and gentlemen, five million people, five million
Americans, deserve us finding a way to make them whole."
House Democrats complained that they were prevented Thursday from offering a
proposal to sever the Federal Emergency Management Agency from the Department of
Homeland Security and making other changes before turning over so much to the
agency, which has come under withering fire for its storm response. Republicans
said they did not want to impede the aid by getting caught up in a legislative
fight, and they said Democrats would have opportunities later to offer the FEMA
changes.
Administration officials said the government spent about $2 billion a day last
weekend, and the additional $51.8 billion would merely cover costs for "the next
few weeks."
Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director, said the spending rate last
weekend stemmed in part from signing big contracts for debris removal and
temporary housing. The government has already bought 100,000 trailers for
temporary housing and is trying to buy 200,000 more.
Of the new money, $23.2 billion is designated for temporary housing and other
financial assistance to individuals. Another $11 billion is broadly aimed at
"mission assignments" by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will
hire other agencies and companies for jobs like debris removal.
FEMA will receive about $4.65 billion to pay for logistical needs, supplies and
search-and-rescue operations. The Army Corps of Engineers will get $3 billion,
essentially to pay for repairing the broken levees in New Orleans.
But the relief money is not expected to cover any of the real reconstruction
costs that lie ahead: repair of highways, bridges and other infrastructure and
new projects that seek to prevent a repeat of the New Orleans disaster. Nor will
it even help pay for expanded availability of food stamps and poverty programs
to cover hurricane victims.
"I'm fearful that this will open the floodgates for money," said Chris Edwards,
a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, a research group that supports reduced
government spending. "If they spend $1 billion a day for relief, that's fine.
But down the road, state and local governments traditionally issue bonds for
infrastructure when they need to build."
Shortly before the House voted to approve Mr. Bush's request for $51.8 billion,
it approved a separate bill to let hurricane victims get more access to the
federal welfare assistance for low-income families.
Democratic lawmakers proposed a raft of their own proposals. Senator Max Baucus
of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, called for
giving hurricane victims immediate access to Medicaid, the federal health
program for low-income people, and letting victims collect unemployment payments
for as long as one year.
Cost
of Recovery Surges, as Do Bids to Join in Effort, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09costs.html
Cost of Recovery Surges,
as Do Bids to Join in Effort
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
and CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - With Congress primed to
spend billions of dollars on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, lawmakers and
industry groups are lining up to bring home their share of the cascade of money
for rebuilding and relief.
White House officials and Congressional budget experts now assume that federal
costs for the hurricane will shoot past $100 billion, which itself is more than
twice the entire annual federal budget for domestic security. Congress on
Thursday approved $51.8 billion in spending, bringing the total so far to more
than $62 billion.
The demand for money comes from many directions. Louisiana lawmakers plan to
push for billions of dollars to upgrade the levees around New Orleans, rebuild
highways, lure back business and shore up the city's sinking foundation. The
devastated areas of Mississippi and Alabama will need similar infusions of cash.
Communities will want compensation for taking in evacuees. And there will be
future costs of health care, debris removal, temporary housing, clothing,
vehicle replacement. Farmers from the Midwest, meanwhile, are beginning to press
for emergency relief as a result of their difficulties in shipping grain through
the Port of New Orleans.
Other ideas circulating through Congress that could entail significant costs
include these notions:
¶Turning New Orleans and other cities affected by the storm into big new
tax-free zones.
¶Providing reconstruction money for tens of thousands of homeowners and small
businesses that did not have federal flood insurance on their houses or
buildings.
¶Making most hurricane victims eligible for health care under Medicaid and
having the federal government pay the full cost rather than the current practice
of splitting costs with states.
The torrent of money - more than $2 billion a day over the weekend, and expected
to remain above $500 million a day for the foreseeable future - prompted several
lawmakers to warn about the perils of an open checkbook.
"We are reaching a perfect political storm," said Senator Jeff Sessions,
Republican of Alabama. "We have all the earmarks of a rush to spend money that
is very dangerous."
Mr. Sessions called on President Bush to appoint a person with significant
business experience to oversee the spending. Contained within the spending
measure approved Thursday is a provision that directs an extra $15 million to
the inspector general's office in the Department of Homeland Security. The
agency is also ordered to provide at least weekly reports to Congress on the use
of the money.
Those safeguards, along with a decision by the administration to waive the
federal law requiring that prevailing wages be paid on construction projects
underwritten by federal dollars, were critical to persuading Congressional
conservatives to vote for the money. It passed the House on 410-to-11 vote, with
the only opposition coming from Republicans. The Senate vote was 97 to 0.
But fiscal conservatives who supported the legislation on Thursday threatened to
oppose future installments of money unless Congress and the administration begin
to find ways to offset the spending so it is not just piled on top of the
federal deficit.
"Congress must ensure that a catastrophe of nature does not become a catastrophe
of debt for our children and grandchildren," said Representative Mike Pence,
Republican of Indiana and a conservative leader in the House.
"There is no sacrifice on the part of Congress," said Senator Tom Coburn,
Republican of Oklahoma, who said the decision to not cut spending elsewhere was
a failure of leadership.
The emergency spending plan also drew scrutiny from some lawmakers who contended
that it raised the risk of fraud by increasing the spending limit on about
250,000 credit cards issued to government workers from $15,000 to $250,000. "The
use of government credit cards has a track record, and it is not a good one,"
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, wrote in a letter urging
Congressional leaders to delete the provision.
But Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader and typically an
opponent of increased spending for social programs, argued that Congress had no
choice but to provide the financial assistance as quickly as possible.
"I know the American people, some of them are worrying about all this money,"
Mr. DeLay said. "Ladies and gentlemen, five million people, five million
Americans, deserve us finding a way to make them whole."
House Democrats complained that they were prevented Thursday from offering a
proposal to sever the Federal Emergency Management Agency from the Department of
Homeland Security and making other changes before turning over so much to the
agency, which has come under withering fire for its storm response. Republicans
said they did not want to impede the aid by getting caught up in a legislative
fight, and they said Democrats would have opportunities later to offer the FEMA
changes.
Administration officials said the government spent about $2 billion a day last
weekend, and the additional $51.8 billion would merely cover costs for "the next
few weeks."
Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director, said the spending rate last
weekend stemmed in part from signing big contracts for debris removal and
temporary housing. The government has already bought 100,000 trailers for
temporary housing and is trying to buy 200,000 more.
Of the new money, $23.2 billion is designated for temporary housing and other
financial assistance to individuals. Another $11 billion is broadly aimed at
"mission assignments" by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will
hire other agencies and companies for jobs like debris removal.
FEMA will receive about $4.65 billion to pay for logistical needs, supplies and
search-and-rescue operations. The Army Corps of Engineers will get $3 billion,
essentially to pay for repairing the broken levees in New Orleans.
But the relief money is not expected to cover any of the real reconstruction
costs that lie ahead: repair of highways, bridges and other infrastructure and
new projects that seek to prevent a repeat of the New Orleans disaster. Nor will
it even help pay for expanded availability of food stamps and poverty programs
to cover hurricane victims.
"I'm fearful that this will open the floodgates for money," said Chris Edwards,
a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, a research group that supports reduced
government spending. "If they spend $1 billion a day for relief, that's fine.
But down the road, state and local governments traditionally issue bonds for
infrastructure when they need to build."
Shortly before the House voted to approve Mr. Bush's request for $51.8 billion,
it approved a separate bill to let hurricane victims get more access to the
federal welfare assistance for low-income families.
Democratic lawmakers proposed a raft of their own proposals. Senator Max Baucus
of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, called for
giving hurricane victims immediate access to Medicaid, the federal health
program for low-income people, and letting victims collect unemployment payments
for as long as one year.
Cost
of Recovery Surges, as Do Bids to Join in Effort, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09costs.html
A Legal System in Shambles
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
and JONATHAN D. GLATER
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 8 - At Rapides Parish
Detention Center 3 in Alexandria, which normally holds convicted felons, there
are now 200 new inmates who arrived hot, hungry and exhausted on buses this week
after being evacuated from flooded jails in New Orleans.
They have no paperwork indicating whether they are charged with having too much
to drink or attempted murder. There is no judge to hear their cases, no
courthouse designated to hear them in and no lawyer to represent them. If
lawyers can be found, there is no mechanism for paying them. The prisoners have
had no contact with their families for days and do not know whether they are
alive or dead, if their homes do or do not exist.
"It's like taking a jail and shaking it up in a fruit-basket turnover, so no one
has any idea who these people are or why they're here," said Phyllis Mann, one
of several local lawyers who were at the detention center until 11 p.m.
Wednesday, trying to collect basic information on the inmates. "There is no
system of any kind for taking care of these people at this point."
Along with the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and lives, Hurricane Katrina
decimated the legal system of the New Orleans region.
More than a third of the state's lawyers have lost their offices, some for good.
Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever.
Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files,
records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to
corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when
proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious - if not insurmountable -
obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence.
It is an implosion of the legal network not seen since disasters like the
Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, events in times so
much simpler as to be useless in making much sense of this one.
"There aren't too many catastrophes that have just wiped out entire cities,"
said Robert Gordon, a professor at Yale Law School who teaches legal history.
The effects on individual lawyers vary, from large firms that have already been
able to find space, contact clients and resume working on cases, to individual
lawyers who fear they may never be able to put their practices back together.
But the storm has left even prominent lawyers wondering whether they will have
anything to go back to.
William Rittenberg, former president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers and a lawyer for 35 years in New Orleans, said he had spent the
time since the storm living like a gypsy with his wife and two dogs, moving from
Columbus, Miss., to Houston to San Antonio. Mr. Rittenberg said that his firm's
main client had been the teachers union for the New Orleans schools, but that
there is no way to know when or if school will resume this year.
"I really don't know if I have a law practice anymore," he said.
Some logistical issues are being addressed as the courts scramble to find new
places to set up shop. The Louisiana Supreme Court is moving its operations from
New Orleans to a circuit court in Baton Rouge. The United States Court of
Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is moving to Houston, and electronic technology
has allowed lawyers and courts to save files and documents in a way that would
have been impossible in the past.
But the biggest immediate problem is with criminal courts in southern Louisiana,
with thousands of detainees awaiting hearings and trials who have been thrust
into a legal limbo without courts, trials, or lawyers.
So in Alexandria, a city in central Louisiana, in a scene repeated at prisons
and jails throughout the state, Ms. Mann said she and other lawyers had
interviewed all 200 inmates, and the criminal defense lawyers' organization was
painstakingly trying to compile a registry of prisoners and lawyers. The goal is
to put them together, though many of the prisoners do not yet have lawyers and
many of the lawyers are scattered across the country.
Ms. Mann said that some prisoners, no doubt, were accused of serious crimes, but
that most had been arrested on misdemeanor charges like drunkenness that
typically fill local lockups. Most were either awaiting hearings or had not been
able to make bond and were awaiting trial, which, for many, had been set for the
day the hurricane hit.
"I talked to one guy who was arrested for reading a tarot card without a
permit," she said. "These are mostly poor people. They haven't been in contact
with their family. They have no word at all. A lot of them are pretty
devastated. You had a lot of grown men breaking down and boohooing when you
talked to them. The warden said they hadn't had food or water for two or three
days. So a lot of them were just grateful to be out of the sun, in an
air-conditioned place where they could find food and a shower and a mattress."
In addition to the logistical problems of setting up courts, finding a place to
meet, and getting judges, lawyers and evidence, a major question looms about how
to pay for the defense of indigent detainees. Louisiana has been in a low-grade
crisis for years over the issue, and currently two-thirds of the money to defend
those too poor to afford lawyers comes from court costs for traffic and parking
offenses.
But with the evacuation of New Orleans and its environs, none of that money will
be available.
Legal officials say that without a quick resolution of the problem the state may
be forced to apportion cases to public defenders on a level that makes adequate
representation impossible or to free prisoners rather than violate their
constitutional right to a speedy trial.
More than a week after the storm, not all the news is bad. Some law firms,
particularly larger ones with offices outside New Orleans, have reorganized with
remarkable speed, saving records electronically, finding new space and housing
for lawyers in Baton Rouge Lafayette, Houston, or other areas.
Lawyers at McGlinchey Stafford, a firm of about 200 lawyers based in New Orleans
and with offices in Baton Rouge and other cities, were among the lucky ones. The
lawyers, support staff and their families left New Orleans in advance of the
storm as partners in its Baton Rouge office worked to find them housing and
office space, said Rudy Aguilar, managing partner of the firm.
After the storm, Mr. Aguilar said, the firm put two college students whose
parents worked for the firm on a plane to Chicago to buy computers for the new
office space. The students rented a truck and drove the computers back to Baton
Rouge for the new office, which by Labor Day was up and running, he said.
Within days, Rick Stanley of Stanley, Flanagan & Reuter, an 11-lawyer litigation
firm had people working in borrowed space in offices in Baton Rouge and
Lafayette and at homes in Jackson, Miss., and Amarillo, Tex. On Labor Day, Mr.
Stanley signed a lease for new space in Baton Rouge on the hood of his car in a
Home Depot parking lot.
"The Monday of the storm," he said, "I was in a state of shock, realizing the
whole way of life we knew had passed away, and Tuesday I just said we need to
get back up and running, and we did."
And some say, with the perverse logic of the law, Hurricane Katrina - months
from now, when people return home - will spawn an unimaginable flood of legal
issues. Beth Abramson who is organizing pro bono efforts for the state bar
anticipates a torrent of legal issues having to do with ruined property,
insurance, environmental issues and countless other concerns.
Michelle Ghetti, a law professor at the Southern University Law Center in Baton
Rouge said some courts and lawyers moved faster than she could have imagined to
shift operations and resume business. On the other hand, the legal issues posed
by the storm multiply almost daily.
"Someone just mentioned child molesters," Ms. Ghetti said. "There's a registry
in which people are supposed to be notified where they are. But for all we know,
they're in shelters or being taken into people's homes.
"New things come up every day. I think this storm is going to produce more legal
issues and complications than anyone has ever imagined."
Peter Applebome reported from Baton Rouge for this article
and Jonathan D.
Glater from New York.
A
Legal System in Shambles, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09legal.html
Bush Thanks Nations
for Storm Recovery Aid
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 9 - President Bush thanked
foreign governments this morning for their support of the victims of Hurricane
Katrina, comparing it to the international response to the Sept. 11, terrorist
attacks.
"In this time of struggle, the American people need to know we're not struggling
alone," he said. "I want to thank the world community for its prayers and for
the offers of assistance that have come from all around the world."
President Bush noted that Air Canada had helped in evacuating residents, that
Afghanistan had offered to send $100,000 to aid victims, and that Kuwait had
volunteered to provide $400 million in oil and $100 million in humanitarian aid.
In Brussels, NATO commanders agreed in an emergency meeting today to provide
ships and planes to help deliver aid to the victims in the United States,
Reuters reported. The planes are expected to arrive in the next few days but the
ships could take nearly two weeks.
The aid was requested by the United States on Thursday. Agreeing to provide it
"was a very quick and very easy decision," Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer said, according to Reuters.
In New Orleans, police officers and federal law enforcement agents continued to
scour the city seeking residents who have holed up to avoid forcible eviction,
as well as those who are still considering evacuating voluntarily to escape the
city's putrid waters.
"Individuals are at risk of dying," P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of
the New Orleans police, said Thursday. "There's nothing more important than the
preservation of human life."
Police said Thursday that the search for residents willing to leave voluntarily
was about 80 percent finished, and that afterward they would begin enforcing
Mayor C. Ray Nagin's order to remove people by force.
But this morning, confusion remained how widespread the forced evacuations would
be, or when they would begin.
Mitch Landrieu, the lieutenant governor of Louisiana, told CNN this morning that
those remaining in their homes were not yet being forcibly removed as a matter
of state policy. Any removal by force that has taken place, he said, was
"probably the exception rather than the rule." Mr. Landrieu added that the issue
of forcible removal is still under consideration.
The White House said today that Mr. Bush would return to Mississippi and
Louisiana on Sunday, his third visit to the area since Hurricane Katrina hit
land on Aug. 29. He will travel there after participating in a ceremony marking
the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his spokesman, Scott
McClellan, said this morning.
On Thursday, Mr. Bush urged the nearly one million people displaced by the storm
to contact federal agencies to apply for immediate aid. He praised the
outpouring of private charity to the displaced, but said the costs of restoring
lives would affect all Americans, as would the horror of the storm's carnage.
"The responsibility of caring for hundreds of thousands of citizens who no
longer have homes is going to place many demands on our nation," the president
said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "We have many difficult days
ahead, especially as we recover those who did not survive the storm."
As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney was touring Mississippi and
Louisiana, in part as an answer to the critics who have said that the
administration responded too slowly and timidly to the epic disaster. At a stop
in Gulfport, Miss., a heckler shouted an obscenity at the vice president. Mr.
Cheney shrugged it off, saying it was the first such abuse he had heard.
Also on Thursday, Congress approved a $51.8 billion package of storm aid,
bringing the total to more than $62 billion in a week. The government is now
spending $2 billion dollars a day to respond to the disaster.
The confirmed death toll in Louisiana remained at 83 on Thursday. Efforts to
recover corpses are beginning, although only a handful of bodies have been
recovered so far. Official estimates of the death toll in New Orleans are still
vague, but 10,000 remains a common figure.
Mississippi officials said they had confirmed 196 dead as of Thursday, including
143 in coastal areas, although Gov. Haley Barbour said he expected the toll to
rise.
"It would just be a guess, but the 200 or just over 300 we think is a credible
and reliable figure," the governor said on NBC's "Today" show.
He also said electricity would be restored by Sunday to most homes and
businesses in the state that could receive it.
No one would venture a prediction about when the lights would come back on in
New Orleans.
The water continued to recede slowly in the city 10 days after Hurricane Katrina
swept ashore and levees failed at several points, inundating the basin New
Orleans sits in.
The Army Corps of Engineers has restored to operation 37 of the city's 174
permanent pumps, allowing them to drain 11,000 cubic feet of water per second
from the basin. When all the pumps are working, they can remove 81,000 cubic
feet of water per second, said Dan Hitchings of the engineering corps.
It will be months before the breadth of the devastation from the storm is known.
But a report by the Louisiana fisheries department calculated the economic loss
to the state's important seafood industry at as much as $1.6 billion over the
next 12 months.
Louisiana's insurance commissioner, J. Robert Wooley, said the state had barred
insurance companies from canceling any homeowner's insurance policies in the
days immediately before the storm hit and afterward.
"All cancellations will be voided," Mr. Wooley said.
Across New Orleans, active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and local law
enforcement agencies from across the country continued door-to-door searches by
patrol car, Humvee, helicopter and boat, urging remaining residents to leave.
Maj. Gen. James Ron Mason of the Kansas National Guard, who commands about
25,000 Guard troops in and around New Orleans, said his forces had rescued 687
residents by helicopter, boat and high-wheeled truck in the past 24 hours.
General Mason said Guard troops, although carrying M-16 rifles, would not use
force to evict recalcitrant citizens. That, he said, was a job for the police,
not members of the Guard.
"I don't believe that you will see National Guard soldiers actually physically
forcing people to leave," General Mason said.
Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy
in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols,
shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. "Only law enforcement are allowed to
have weapons," he said.
That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom
businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property.
The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like
Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.
Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had
no plans to make them give up their weapons.
New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local,
state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops
and active-duty soldiers. While armed looters roamed unchecked last week, the
city is now calm.
The city's slow recovery is continuing on other fronts as well, local officials
said at a late morning news conference. Pumping stations are now operating
across much of the city, and many taps and fire hydrants have water pressure.
Tests have shown no evidence of cholera or other dangerous diseases in flooded
areas.
With pumps running and the weather here remaining hot and dry, water has visibly
receded across much of the city. Formerly flooded streets are now passable,
although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.
Still, many neighborhoods in the northern half of New Orleans remain under 10
feet of water, and Mr. Compass said Thursday that the city's plans for a forced
evacuation remained in effect because of the danger of disease and fires.
Mr. Compass said he could not disclose when residents might be forced to leave
en masse. The city's police department and federal law enforcement officers from
agencies like United States Marshals Service will lead the evacuation, he said.
Officers will search houses in both dry and flooded neighborhoods, and no one
will be allowed to stay, he said.
Many of the residents still in the city said they did not understand why the
city remained intent on forcing them out.
Alex Berenson reported from New Orleans for this article and Timothy
Williams from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Sewell Chan from New
Orleans; Jeremy Alford, Shaila Dewan and John M. Broder from Baton Rouge, La.;
Ralph Blumenthal from Houston, and Marek Fuchs from New York.
Bush
Thanks Nations for Storm Recovery Aid, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09cnd-storm.html
From Falluja
to the Shores of Louisiana
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By JOHN KIFNER
SLIDELL, La., Sept. 8 - In November, the First
Battalion, Eighth Marines, fought the most pitched battle of the Iraq war,
attacking insurgents dug into mosques and narrow streets until the city of
Falluja was virtually leveled.
Today, many of the same marines are helping this hurricane-battered city inch
toward recovery, shoveling stinking mud from a church and roaming the streets in
a borrowed pickup delivering food, water and ice to needy families.
"These are the guys who fought the battle of Falluja," said Maj. Lew Vogler, the
battalion's executive officer. "Now we're taking care of Slidell, La., with the
same professionalism. We've got the muscle and the manpower to get it done."
At the First Baptist Church, First Lt. Paul Steketee and Cpl. Edwin Maldonado
were getting makeshift waders made from black plastic garbage bags wrapped
around their legs with duct tape by Lance Cpl. Nicholas Aikman as they prepared
to clean out the church's putrid kitchen. Some 500 pounds of meat, milk and
cheese rotted when the power went out.
"Oh, it's ugly back there," said Bruce Efferson, 56, a minister at the
1,300-member church.
Other marines were shoveling mud from the floors, stripping ruined wallpaper and
lugging textbooks to the higher shelves of the church's school, which serves 400
students.
"These boys have humped," Mr. Efferson said of the marine work crew. "And I'm
ex-Navy; I'm used to making fun of marines."
Outside the church, the aid from volunteers swelled. A dozen volunteers in
yellow T-shirts from the Noonday Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., presided over
relief supplies stretched along the driveway: generators, chain saws,
wheelbarrows, bottled water, canned food, rice, Kool-Aid, clothes, soap and
shampoo.
Mr. Efferson, who said he ran bars and nightclubs before becoming a Christian,
observed the scene and said, "God's still alive."
Some of the marines roamed the area in Mr. Efferson's white Dodge pickup with a
city map and a bullhorn. Riding in the bed of the truck with the supplies of
food, water and ice were three lance corporals who are usually scout-snipers,
one of the deadliest specialties in the Marines.
As they drove past houses that had been reduced to heaps of wood and that had
been crushed by boats from a canal, they found a family of six who were grateful
for the meals-ready-to-eat that the marines were delivering. "I'm glad you like
them," Lieutenant Steketee said dryly.
From
Falluja to the Shores of Louisiana, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09marines.html
Political Issues
Snarled Plans for Troop
Aid
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON, ERIC SCHMITT
and THOM SHANKER
This article was reported and written
by Eric
Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and
Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers
debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by
seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.
For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department
and Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take
command of the effort.
Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of
National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen
Babineaux Blanco's control. The debate was triggered as officials began to
realize that Hurricane Katrina exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster
response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the
administration's senior homeland security officials, the hurricane showed the
failure of their plan to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel
might be incapacitated and unable to act quickly until reinforcements arrive on
the scene.
As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most
pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to
restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and
Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with
questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military
logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.
To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the
Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command
active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But
decision makers in Washington felt certain that Governor Blanco would have
resisted surrendering control of the military relief mission as Bush
Administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty
combat forces before law and order had been re-established. While troops can
conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act,
Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been
sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting
law-and-order challenges.
But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that
would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party
from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and
Justice Department officials.
"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United
States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another
party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made
it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command
authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior
administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were
confidential.
Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control
over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send
large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were
desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers.
"I need everything you have got," Governor Blanco said she told Mr. Bush last
Tuesday, when New Orleans flooded. In an interview, she acknowledged that she
did not specify what sorts of soldiers. "Nobody told me that I had to request
that. I thought that I had requested everything they had," she said. "We were
living in a war zone by then."
The governor illustrated her stance when, overnight Friday, she rejected a more
modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and
active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star
general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana Guard.
Also at issue was whether active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger
numbers than National Guard soldiers.
By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a
brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours - could not arrive any faster
than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially trained and equipped for
civilian law enforcement duties. In the end, the flow of thousands of National
Guard soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states.
"I was there. I saw what needed to be done," Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of
the National Guard Bureau, said in an interview. "They were the fastest,
best-capable, most appropriate force to get there in the time allowed. And
that's what it's all about."
But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty troops were
not summoned sooner, saying that 82nd Airborne troops were ready to move out
from Fort Bragg in North Carolina on Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.
But the call never came, in part because military officials believed National
Guard troops would get there faster and because administration civilians were
worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to
shoot looters, administration officials said.
Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the director of operations for the military's Joint
Staff, said that the Pentagon in August streamlined a rigid, decades-old system
of deployment orders to allow the Northern Command to dispatch liaisons to work
with local officials in advance of an approaching hurricane.
The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time the hurricane reached full
strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later when Mr. Bush ordered
7,200 active-duty soldiers and Marines to the scene.
After the hurricane passed New Orleans and the levees broke, flooding the city,
it became increasingly evident that disaster response efforts were badly bogged
down.
Justice Department lawyers, who were receiving harrowing reports from the area,
considered whether active-duty military units could be brought into relief
operations even if state authorities gave their consent - or even if they
refused.
The issue of federalizing the response was one of a number of legal issues
considered in a flurry of meetings at the Justice Department, the White House
and other agencies, administration officials said.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice lawyers to interpret the
federal law creatively to assist local authorities. For example, federal
prosecutors prepared to expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like
anti-carjacking laws that can be prosecuted by either state or federal
authorities.
On the issue of whether the military could be deployed without the invitation of
state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit within the Justice
Department that provides legal advice to federal agencies, concluded that the
federal government did possess authority to move in even over the objection of
local officials.
This act was last invoked in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots, but at the request
of Gov. Pete Wilson of California, and has not been invoked over a governor's
objections since the civil rights era - and before that, to the time of the
Civil War, according to administration officials. Bush administration, Pentagon
and senior military officials warned that such an extreme measure would have
serious legal and political implications.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that deployment of National Guard
soldiers to Iraq, including a brigade from Louisiana, did not affect the relief
mission, but Governor Blanco said her state troops were missed. "Over the last
year we have had about 5,000 out, at one time," Governor Blanco said. "They are
on active duty, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That certainly is a factor."
By Friday, National Guard reinforcements had arrived, and a truck convoy of
1,000 Guard soldiers brought relief supplies - and order - to the convention
center area.
Homeland Security officials say that the experience with Katrina has
demonstrated flaws in the nation's plans to handle disaster.
"This event has exposed, perhaps ultimately to our benefit, a deficiency in
terms of replacing first responders who tragically may be the first casualties,"
Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, said.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, has suggested the
active-duty troops be trained and equipped to intervene if front-line emergency
personnel are stricken. But the Pentagon's leadership remains unconvinced that
this plan is sound, suggesting instead that the national emergency response
plans should be revised to draw reinforcements initially from civilian police,
firefighters, medical personnel and hazardous-waste experts in other states not
affected by a disaster.
The federal government rewrote its national emergency response plan after the
Sept. 11 attacks, but it relied on local officials to manage any crisis in its
opening days. But Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed local "first responders,"
including civilian police and the National Guard.
At a news conference Saturday, Mr. Chertoff said: "The unusual set of challenges
of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood,
requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model, one
for what you might call kind of an ultra-catastrophe. And that's one in which we
are using the military, still within the framework of the law, to come in and
really handle the evacuation, handle all of the associated elements. And that,
of course, frees the National Guard up to do a security mission."
Mr. McHale, while agreeing with the problem, offered different remedies. "It is
foreseeable to envision a catastrophic explosion that would kill virtually every
police officer within miles of the attack," he said. "Therefore we are going to
have to reexamine our ability to back-fill first responder capabilities that may
be degraded or destroyed during the initial event."
He continued, "What we now have to look toward is perhaps a regional capability,
probably within the civilian sector, that can be deployed to a city when that
city's infrastructure and first responder capability has been destroyed by the
event itself."
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Eric Lipton from
Baton Rouge, La., for this article. David Johnston contributed reporting.
Political Issues Snarled Plans for Troop Aid, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09military.html
Storm Leaves Legal System a Shambles
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
and JONATHAN D. GLATER
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 8 - At Rapides Parish
Detention Center 3 in Alexandria, which normally holds convicted felons, there
are now 200 new inmates who arrived hot, hungry and exhausted on buses this week
after being evacuated from flooded jails in New Orleans.
They have no paperwork indicating whether they are charged with having too much
to drink or attempted murder. There is no judge to hear their cases, no
courthouse designated to hear them in and no lawyer to represent them. If
lawyers can be found, there is no mechanism for paying them. The prisoners have
had no contact with their families for days and do not know whether they are
alive or dead, if their homes do or do not exist.
"It's like taking a jail and shaking it up in a fruit-basket turnover, so no one
has any idea who these people are or why they're here," said Phyllis Mann, one
of several local lawyers who were at the detention center until 11 p.m.
Wednesday, trying to collect basic information on the inmates. "There is no
system of any kind for taking care of these people at this point."
Along with the destruction of homes, neighborhoods and lives, Hurricane Katrina
decimated the legal system of the New Orleans region.
More than a third of the state's lawyers have lost their offices, some for good.
Most computer records will be saved. Many other records will be lost forever.
Some local courthouses have been flooded, imperiling a vast universe of files,
records and documents. Court proceedings from divorces to murder trials, to
corporate litigation, to custody cases will be indefinitely halted and when
proceedings resume lawyers will face prodigious - if not insurmountable -
obstacles in finding witnesses and principals and in recovering evidence.
It is an implosion of the legal network not seen since disasters like the
Chicago fire of 1871 or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, events in times so
much simpler as to be useless in making much sense of this one.
"There aren't too many catastrophes that have just wiped out entire cities,"
said Robert Gordon, a professor at Yale Law School who teaches legal history.
The effects on individual lawyers vary, from large firms that have already been
able to find space, contact clients and resume working on cases, to individual
lawyers who fear they may never be able to put their practices back together.
But the storm has left even prominent lawyers wondering whether they will have
anything to go back to.
William Rittenberg, former president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers and a lawyer for 35 years in New Orleans, said he had spent the
time since the storm living like a gypsy with his wife and two dogs, moving from
Columbus, Miss., to Houston to San Antonio. Mr. Rittenberg said that his firm's
main client had been the teachers union for the New Orleans schools, but that
there is no way to know when or if school will resume this year.
"I really don't know if I have a law practice anymore," he said.
Some logistical issues are being addressed as the courts scramble to find new
places to set up shop. The Louisiana Supreme Court is moving its operations from
New Orleans to a circuit court in Baton Rouge. The United States Court of
Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is moving to Houston, and electronic technology
has allowed lawyers and courts to save files and documents in a way that would
have been impossible in the past.
But the biggest immediate problem is with criminal courts in southern Louisiana,
with thousands of detainees awaiting hearings and trials who have been thrust
into a legal limbo without courts, trials, or lawyers.
So in Alexandria, a city in central Louisiana, in a scene repeated at prisons
and jails throughout the state, Ms. Mann said she and other lawyers had
interviewed all 200 inmates, and the criminal defense lawyers' organization was
painstakingly trying to compile a registry of prisoners and lawyers. The goal is
to put them together, though many of the prisoners do not yet have lawyers and
many of the lawyers are scattered across the country.
Ms. Mann said that some prisoners, no doubt, were accused of serious crimes, but
that most had been arrested on misdemeanor charges like drunkenness that
typically fill local lockups. Most were either awaiting hearings or had not been
able to make bond and were awaiting trial, which, for many, had been set for the
day the hurricane hit.
"I talked to one guy who was arrested for reading a tarot card without a
permit," she said. "These are mostly poor people. They haven't been in contact
with their family. They have no word at all. A lot of them are pretty
devastated. You had a lot of grown men breaking down and boohooing when you
talked to them. The warden said they hadn't had food or water for two or three
days. So a lot of them were just grateful to be out of the sun, in an
air-conditioned place where they could find food and a shower and a mattress."
In addition to the logistical problems of setting up courts, finding a place to
meet, and getting judges, lawyers and evidence, a major question looms about how
to pay for the defense of indigent detainees. Louisiana has been in a low-grade
crisis for years over the issue, and currently two-thirds of the money to defend
those too poor to afford lawyers comes from court costs for traffic and parking
offenses.
But with the evacuation of New Orleans and its environs, none of that money will
be available.
Legal officials say that without a quick resolution of the problem the state may
be forced to apportion cases to public defenders on a level that makes adequate
representation impossible or to free prisoners rather than violate their
constitutional right to a speedy trial.
More than a week after the storm, not all the news is bad. Some law firms,
particularly larger ones with offices outside New Orleans, have reorganized with
remarkable speed, saving records electronically, finding new space and housing
for lawyers in Baton Rouge Lafayette, Houston, or other areas.
Lawyers at McGlinchey Stafford, a firm of about 200 lawyers based in New Orleans
and with offices in Baton Rouge and other cities, were among the lucky ones. The
lawyers, support staff and their families left New Orleans in advance of the
storm as partners in its Baton Rouge office worked to find them housing and
office space, said Rudy Aguilar, managing partner of the firm.
After the storm, Mr. Aguilar said, the firm put two college students whose
parents worked for the firm on a plane to Chicago to buy computers for the new
office space. The students rented a truck and drove the computers back to Baton
Rouge for the new office, which by Labor Day was up and running, he said.
Within days, Rick Stanley of Stanley, Flanagan & Reuter, an 11-lawyer litigation
firm had people working in borrowed space in offices in Baton Rouge and
Lafayette and at homes in Jackson, Miss., and Amarillo, Tex. On Labor Day, Mr.
Stanley signed a lease for new space in Baton Rouge on the hood of his car in a
Home Depot parking lot.
"The Monday of the storm," he said, "I was in a state of shock, realizing the
whole way of life we knew had passed away, and Tuesday I just said we need to
get back up and running, and we did."
And some say, with the perverse logic of the law, Hurricane Katrina - months
from now, when people return home - will spawn an unimaginable flood of legal
issues. Beth Abramson who is organizing pro bono efforts for the state bar
anticipates a torrent of legal issues having to do with ruined property,
insurance, environmental issues and countless other concerns.
Michelle Ghetti, a law professor at the Southern University Law Center in Baton
Rouge said some courts and lawyers moved faster than she could have imagined to
shift operations and resume business. On the other hand, the legal issues posed
by the storm multiply almost daily.
"Someone just mentioned child molesters," Ms. Ghetti said. "There's a registry
in which people are supposed to be notified where they are. But for all we know,
they're in shelters or being taken into people's homes.
"New things come up every day. I think this storm is going to produce more legal
issues and complications than anyone has ever imagined."
Peter Applebome reported from Baton Rouge for this
article and Jonathan D. Glater from New York.
Storm
Leaves Legal System a Shambles, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09legal.html
Holdouts on Dry Ground Say,
'Why Leave
Now?'
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Ten days ago, the water
rose to the front steps of their house. Four days ago, it began falling. But
only now is the city demanding that Richie Kay and Emily Harris get out.
They cannot understand why. They live on high ground in the Bywater
neighborhood, and their house escaped structural damage. They are healthy and
have enough food and water to last almost a year.
They have a dog to protect them, a car with a full tank of gasoline should they
need to leave quickly and a canoe as a last resort. They said they used it last
week to rescue 100 people.
"We're not the people they need to be taking out," Mr. Kay said. "We're the
people they need to be coordinating with."
Scattered throughout the dry neighborhoods of New Orleans, which are growing
larger each day as pumps push water out of the city, are people like Mr. Kay and
Ms. Harris. They are defying Mayor C. Ray Nagin's orders to leave, contending
that he will violate their constitutional rights if he forces them out of the
homes they own or rent.
"We have food, we have water, we have antibiotics," said Kenneth Charles Kinler,
who is living with four other men on Marais Street, which was covered with
almost four feet of water last week but is now dry. "We're more or less watching
the area for looters."
Mr. Nagin has said the city is not safe for civilians because of the risk of
fire and water-borne diseases. There was no official word on Thursday about when
the police would start to evict residents forcibly, but officers have been
knocking on doors to plead with people to leave on their own.
"Unless you have enough food or water for three weeks, you're a walking dead
man," Sgt. George Jackson told holdouts on the northern edge of the city on
Thursday afternoon.
To reduce the risk of violent confrontation, the police began confiscating
firearms on Thursday, even those legally owned.
To be sure, many of the thousands of people remaining in New Orleans want to
leave, especially in neighborhoods where the water continues to stand several
feet deep. Hundreds of people a day are being ferried to the convention center
by National Guard troops in five-ton trucks and then bused outside the city.
Some holdouts may change their minds as their food and water run out. Some
appear mentally incompetent or have houses in severely flooded neighborhoods and
are staying in the city in the mistaken hope that they will be able to go home
in a few days.
But thousands more do not fall in any of those categories. They are sitting on
dry ground with all their belongings and plenty of provisions. They say they
want to stay to help rebuild their city and maybe earn some money doing it,
because they have animals they are afraid to leave behind, or to protect their
property or simply because they have always lived here and see no reason to move
their lives to a motel room in Houston or San Antonio.
Billie Moore, who lives in an undamaged 3,000-square-foot house on the city's
southwestern flank that also stayed dry, said she did not want to lose her job
as a pediatric nurse at the Ochsner Clinic in Jefferson Parish, which continues
to function.
"Who's going to take care of the patients if all the nurses go away?" Ms. Moore
asked.
When police officers arrived at her house to warn of the health risks of
remaining, she showed them her hospital identification card.
"I guess you know the health risks then," the officer said.
Ms. Moore and her husband, Richard Robinson, have been using an old gas stove to
cook pasta and rice, dumping cans of peas on top for flavor.
"We try to be normal and sit down and eat," Ms. Moore, 52, said. "I think that
how we'll stay healthy is if I keep the house clean."
Power remains out in most of the city, and even where the tap water is flowing,
it is not drinkable. Bathing and using the toilet are daily challenges. Many
residents are siphoning water from swimming pools and fountains.
Some holdouts seem intent on keeping alive the distinct and wild spirit of this
city. In the French Quarter, Addie Hall and Zackery Bowen found a unusual way to
make sure that police officers regularly patrolled their house. Ms. Hall, 28, a
bartender, flashed her breasts at the police vehicles that passed by, ensuring a
regular flow of traffic.
On Thursday morning on St. Claude Avenue, a commercial strip in Bywater, east of
downtown, about 12 people congregated inside and in front of Kajun's Pub,
drinking and smoking. Inside, the bar looked dank, but a fan swirled air
overhead and a television set in the corner showed local news, both fired by the
bar's portable generator.
"New Orleans has been my home for 20 years," said Kenny Dobbs, who celebrated
his 35th birthday at the bar after the flood. "I've been on my own since I was
14."
Like other people, Mr. Dobbs said, he believed that the city had exaggerated the
health risks of staying, as a scare tactic. The city simply wants to force
people out so that its reconstruction will go more smoothly, he said.
"Why do you think they're evacuating people?" he asked. "So they don't have as
much to deal with."
The police and federal law enforcement officials have depicted many of those
staying as looters waiting to pounce, though the holdouts said that they were
actually protecting their neighborhoods from crime and that their steady
presence is a greater deterrent than the occasional police patrol.
While residents and some legal experts question the constitutionality of forced
evacuations, those staying have no functioning courthouse in the city to hear
their complaints, and no state or federal authorities have stepped in to stop
the plan.
In general, residents say the active-duty soldiers and National Guard troops had
treated them well. Local police officers, many of them working for almost two
weeks straight and having lost families or possessions, have been much more
aggressive, Mr. Dobbs said.
Two New Orleans police officers stole $50 and a bottle of whiskey from him last
week after finding him on the street after dark, he said.
With police officers and federal law enforcement agents ratcheting up the
pressure on residents to leave, the holdouts worry that it is just a matter of
time before they are forced out.
Ms. Harris said she did not want to leave. "I haven't even run out of weed yet,"
she said.
But she but knows that fighting with police officers is futile.
"I'll probably bitch and moan, but I'm not going to hole up," she said.
And by Thursday afternoon, Kajun's Pub had closed, and the vehicles previously
parked outside were gone.
There was no indication whether Mr. Dobbs and the other people who had been
drinking and joking six hours earlier had been evacuated or simply disappeared
into the city.
Jodi Wilgoren contributed reporting for this article.
Holdouts on Dry Ground Say, 'Why Leave Now?', NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09holdouts.html
Police Begin Seizing Guns of Civilians
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
and JOHN M. BRODER
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Local police officers
began confiscating weapons from civilians in preparation for a forced evacuation
of the last holdouts still living here, as President Bush steeled the nation for
the grisly scenes of recovering the dead that will unfold in coming days.
Police officers and federal law enforcement agents scoured the city carrying
assault rifles seeking residents who have holed up to avoid forcible eviction,
as well as those who are still considering evacuating voluntarily to escape the
city's putrid waters.
"Individuals are at risk of dying," said P. Edwin Compass III, the
superintendent of the New Orleans police. "There's nothing more important than
the preservation of human life."
Although it appeared Wednesday night that forced evacuations were beginning, on
Thursday the authorities were still looking for those willing to leave
voluntarily. The police said that the search was about 80 percent done, and that
afterward they would begin enforcing Mayor C. Ray Nagin's order to remove
residents by force.
Mr. Bush, in Washington, urged the nearly one million people displaced by the
storm to contact federal agencies to apply for immediate aid. He praised the
outpouring of private charity to the displaced, but said the costs of restoring
lives would affect all Americans, as would the horror of the storm's carnage.
"The responsibility of caring for hundreds of thousands of citizens who no
longer have homes is going to place many demands on our nation," the president
said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "We have many difficult days
ahead, especially as we recover those who did not survive the storm."
As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney was touring Mississippi and
Louisiana, in part as an answer to the critics who have said that the
administration responded too slowly and timidly to the epic disaster. At a stop
in Gulfport, Miss., a heckler shouted an obscenity at the vice president. Mr.
Cheney shrugged it off, saying it was the first such abuse he had heard.
Also on Thursday, Congress approved a $51.8 billion package of storm aid,
bringing the total to more than $62 billion in a week. The government is now
spending $2 billion dollars a day to respond to the disaster.
The confirmed death toll in Louisiana remained at 83 on Thursday. Efforts to
recover corpses are beginning, although only a handful of bodies have been
recovered so far. Official estimates of the death toll in New Orleans are still
vague, but 10,000 remains a common figure.
Mississippi officials said they had confirmed 196 dead as of Thursday, including
143 in coastal areas, although Gov. Haley Barbour said he expected the toll to
rise.
"It would just be a guess, but the 200 or just over 300 we think is a credible
and reliable figure," the governor said on NBC's "Today" show.
He also said electricity would be restored by Sunday to most homes and
businesses in the state that could receive it.
No one would venture a prediction about when the lights would come back on in
New Orleans.
The water continued to recede slowly in the city 10 days after Hurricane Katrina
swept ashore and levees failed at several points, inundating the basin New
Orleans sits in.
The Army Corps of Engineers has restored to operation 37 of the city's 174
permanent pumps, allowing them to drain 11,000 cubic feet of water per second
from the basin. When all the pumps are working, they can remove 81,000 cubic
feet of water per second, said Dan Hitchings of the engineering corps.
It will be months before the breadth of the devastation from the storm is known.
But a report by the Louisiana fisheries department calculated the economic loss
to the state's important seafood industry at as much as $1.6 billion over the
next 12 months.
Louisiana's insurance commissioner, J. Robert Wooley, said the state had barred
insurance companies from canceling any homeowner's insurance policies in the
days immediately before the storm hit and afterward.
"All cancellations will be voided," Mr. Wooley said.
Across New Orleans, active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and local law
enforcement agencies from across the country continued door-to-door searches by
patrol car, Humvee, helicopter and boat, urging remaining residents to leave.
Maj. Gen. James Ron Mason of the Kansas National Guard, who commands about
25,000 Guard troops in and around New Orleans, said his forces had rescued 687
residents by helicopter, boat and high-wheeled truck in the past 24 hours.
General Mason said Guard troops, although carrying M-16 rifles, would not use
force to evict recalcitrant citizens. That, he said, was a job for the police,
not members of the Guard.
"I don't believe that you will see National Guard soldiers actually physically
forcing people to leave," General Mason said.
Mr. Compass, the police superintendent, said that after a week of near anarchy
in the city, no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols,
shotguns, or other firearms of any kind. "Only law enforcement are allowed to
have weapons," he said.
That order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom
businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property.
The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like
Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles.
Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards but that the police had
no plans to make them give up their weapons.
New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local,
state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops
and active-duty soldiers. While armed looters roamed unchecked last week, the
city is now calm.
The city's slow recovery is continuing on other fronts as well, local officials
said at a late morning news conference. Pumping stations are now operating
across much of the city, and many taps and fire hydrants have water pressure.
Tests have shown no evidence of cholera or other dangerous diseases in flooded
areas.
With pumps running and the weather here remaining hot and dry, water has visibly
receded across much of the city. Formerly flooded streets are now passable,
although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.
Still, many neighborhoods in the northern half of New Orleans remain under 10
feet of water, and Mr. Compass said Thursday that the city's plans for a forced
evacuation remained in effect because of the danger of disease and fires.
Mr. Compass said he could not disclose when residents might be forced to leave
en masse. The city's police department and federal law enforcement officers from
agencies like United States Marshals Service will lead the evacuation, he said.
Officers will search houses in both dry and flooded neighborhoods, and no one
will be allowed to stay, he said.
Many of the residents still in the city said they did not understand why the
city remained intent on forcing them out.
Alex Berensonreported from New Orleans for this
article, and John M. Broder from Baton Rouge, La. Reporting was contributed by
Sewell Chan from New Orleans, Jeremy Alford and Shaila Dewan from Baton Rouge
and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.
Police Begin Seizing Guns of Civilians, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09storm.html
Leader Who Rose in 9/11
Slips in Wake of Storm
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - Nine days after the
United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush stood before a
joint session of Congress and rallied the nation to a new mission.
On Thursday, nine days after it became apparent that New Orleans and much of the
Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Bush stood in an
auditorium across the street from the White House and directed storm victims to
a Web site and a toll-free telephone number.
"We have 3,000 people working around the clock to take the calls," he said.
There are obvious differences between the situations. But while the first showed
Mr. Bush capable of commanding the nation's attention, transcending partisanship
and clearly articulating a set of goals, the second has left him groping to find
his voice and set out a vision of how the government and the American people
should respond.
He still has opportunities to exhibit the leadership and strategic vision that
his critics - and even some supporters - say has been missing from his response
to the storm. He will no doubt return to the region in coming days, and once the
gruesome task of recovering bodies is complete, the White House is sure to begin
offering proposals for rebuilding.
But as Thursday's performance made clear, he has remained small bore in
addressing the crisis, casting himself more as a manager than a leader. And as
someone who regularly cites the virtues of limited government, he has been
somewhat out of character in unleashing rather than reining in the kinds of
social welfare programs he urged the storm's victims to sign up for on Thursday.
To some degree, Mr. Bush is a victim of the standard he set after Sept. 11 in
defining a problem and directing the full power of the government to address it.
While the results are open to debate, he put the nation on a path and stuck to
it.
In this case, there is no easily definable enemy, his own government's failures
are under attack in a way they were not immediately after the terrorist attacks,
the country is even more politically polarized than it was four years ago and
Mr. Bush himself appears tentative.
"What are we going to do in this one, blame God?" said Michael K. Deaver, who as
President Ronald Reagan's communications adviser was an acknowledged master of
employing presidential imagery.
"Having said all that," Mr. Deaver said, "I still think the president needs to
address the American people, not through an event but directly through a 'My
fellow Americans' speech. It would be good to have a leader to tell us how we're
going to do this."
Mr. Bush's public appearances since the storm have frequently been off key. He
has praised the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for
instance, and he has recalled his days of carousing in New Orleans. As he spoke
to the cameras on Thursday, he reached for a few high notes. He declared Sept.
16 a national day of prayer, asking that Americans pray "with confidence in his
purpose, with hope for a brighter future."
But most of the rest of his speech was a guide to government assistance
programs, including Medicaid, assistance for needy families, food stamps,
housing and job training, many of which he has tried to trim in the name of
leaner government.
"The real irony is that after five years of seeking cuts in just about all these
programs, he's now acknowledging their necessity as a safety net," said
Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the
House Budget Committee.
It did not help that one aspect of the main initiative laid out by Mr. Bush on
Thursday, a plan to put $2,000 in the hands of every household that needs it
because of the storm, quickly became a source of confusion. A FEMA spokesman in
Baton Rouge said the agency was canceling a program under which it was providing
the $2,000 to families at the Astrodome in the form of debit cards, saying it
would instead try to distribute the money through checks and direct deposit.
Later, that official was contradicted by another FEMA official, in Washington.
Mr. Bush's effort to strike a compassionate tone were also complicated by his
decision to waive a requirement that employers who receive federal government
contracts related to the relief effort pay their workers the prevailing wages
for that kind of work in the area it is being done. The White House said the
change was made to save the government money. John J. Sweeney, the president of
the A.F.L.-C.I.O, called it "unbelievable and outrageous."
This is a White House that disdains reacting to the political climate of the
moment and prides itself on not panicking when the president's poll numbers
drop. Mr. Bush, fortified by a well-tended conservative base that has stuck by
him through thick and thin, has slogged through the bad times until he reaches
friendlier ground.
Still, the president faces clear dangers and political challenges in reversing
the impression that he, along with state and local officials, mishandled the
crisis. In a poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan
polling organization, two-thirds of respondents said Mr. Bush could have done
more to speed relief efforts, and the number of respondents who said they
disapproved of his performance jumped to 52 percent, from 48 percent in July and
43 percent in January.
His overall approval rating, by comparison, was 40 percent, down 10 percentage
points since January and 4 percentage points since July; it even dropped sharply
among his base, including those who identified themselves as Republicans (to 79
percent from 88 percent in July) and among those who identified themselves as
conservative Republicans (to 84 percent from 91 percent). But the Pew poll found
a sharp racial divide in perceptions of the catastrophe: 66 percent of blacks
said the government's response would have been quicker had the victims been
mostly white; 77 percent of whites disagreed. The poll of 1,000 Americans was
taken Sept. 6 and Sept. 7 and had a margin of sampling error of 3.5 percentage
points.
"His image as a strong leader has been undercut dramatically," said Mark
Mellman, a Democratic strategist.
"I don't think he's a tremendously effective communicator," Mr. Mellman said,
"but he inspires trust as a regular guy. But people have to trust in something.
When he's not offering anything other than Web sites and phone numbers, there's
nothing in which to trust."
Some Republicans said that the criticism of Mr. Bush had been overblown and that
he had properly been focusing first on rescue and relief operations.
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said the president showed
"solid and steady leadership" on Thursday.
"I think the president is finding his voice," Mr. King said.
Raymond Hernandez contributed reporting for this
article.
Leader Who Rose in 9/11 Slips in Wake of Storm, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09bush.html
'Going to Get It Done,'
Cheney Vows on Gulf Tour
September 9, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - For this disaster
President Bush needed his second in command to be a visible presence, not a
force operating from a secure undisclosed location. So Vice President Dick
Cheney on Thursday joined the blitz of administration officials tromping through
the havoc the hurricane left, declaring, "We're making significant progress."
He walked a once-well-to-do block of Gulfport, Miss., where homes had been
pulverized into piles of planks. He stood on a foul-smelling bridge here
overlooking the sandbag-filled breach in the 17th Street Canal levee. And he
defended the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other
federal officials who have come under fire, while promising that the government
could wage war in Iraq and recover from the hurricane without a tax increase.
"If there's a place on the face of the earth that has the resources to deal with
these problems it's the United States of America, and we're going to get it
done," Mr. Cheney said here in one of two rare question-and-answer sessions with
reporters. "There's no question there were problems with respect to the
evacuation in New Orleans. We've gotten around that problem now, and I think
everyone's focused on the future."
In creased khakis and a crisp blue button-down shirt, his laminated schedule and
a silver pen in his breast pocket, Mr. Cheney struck a sharply different pose
than he did during the last national catastrophe, the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, when his leadership was considered so crucial that he was kept separate
from President Bush and largely out of sight for weeks at a time.
He said he would return to the region on Saturday, most likely to the eye of the
disaster-diaspora in Texas. Mr. Bush has visited the Gulf Coast twice in the
past week, the secretaries of state and defense have made tours, and an array of
cabinet officers is expected Friday.
Mr. Cheney expressed little emotion at what he had witnessed, instead taking the
pragmatic problem-solver tack. Among the long-term issues he said he was
concerned about were whether people without flood insurance would be covered
under their homeowners' policies since the waters stemmed from a hurricane, how
displaced people would receive their Social Security, unemployment and other
government benefits, and long-term housing for evacuees.
In Gulfport, a block off the ocean on Second Street, in a neighborhood so
devastated that residents needed permits to visit their destroyed properties and
had to be out by dark, a heckler in an orange shirt hurled profanities twice to
disrupt Mr. Cheney's remarks, but the vice president just smiled his lopsided
smile and, when asked, said it was the first time he had heard such guff.
He got a better reception at the home of Becky Dubuisson, 51, an administrator
at NASA, where a picket fence was washed up in the yard and the storm surge had
come up to the first floor.
"You're out here sweating and sweating, putting on bug spray, and the vice
president shows up - it lifts your spirits," said Dan Younghouse, Ms.
Dubuisson's brother-in-law, who had come from Albertville, Ala., to help her
clean. "With the magnitude of it all, where do you start? As far as I'm
concerned, this is as good as could be expected."
In New Orleans, at the 17th Street Canal on the soaked border with suburban
Metairie, Mr. Cheney leaned over to touch the 7,000-pound sandbags that Chinook
helicopters had deposited into the levee breaches that let the floodwaters flow.
Then he shook hands with about a hundred Coast Guard members who had spent more
than a week rescuing stranded residents, and looked over the levee, where homes
remained under water up to their second-story windows, and little more than the
steeple was showing of the Pontchartrain Baptist Church.
A huge pipe pumped sludge-filled water the color of Army fatigues from the
street back into the lake, a fire burned at one submerged house, and the toxic
blend filled the air with a sulfurlike stench.
"You've got to recognize the severity of what Mother Nature did to us here," Mr.
Cheney said when asked what had gone wrong in the hurricane's aftermath. He
endorsed the notion of a Congressional committee's examining the response, but
fretted at the politicization of the issue, saying the hurricane survivors he
had met were not playing the blame game consuming much of Washington and Baton
Rouge.
"Not one of them asks us those questions," he said. "They're not looking
backwards. They're not worried about whether someone is a Republican or a
Democrat. They're focused on the task at hand."
Asked in Mississippi whether FEMA should be headed by political appointees like
its current director, Michael D. Brown, rather than career disaster
professionals, Mr. Cheney said, "You got to have people at the top who respond
to and are selected by presidents."
Mr. Cheney was traveling with his wife, Lynne; Attorney General Alberto R.
Gonzales - who made a side trip to the makeshift jail at a Greyhound station -
and Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security. He was also joined
here by Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat, and Senator
David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana.
Governor Blanco, who had been critical of the administration's initial handling
of the hurricane's aftermath, said after the visit, "I think the federal
response is going to be more than adequate from here on out.
"We need them for the long haul by our side," she said as Mr. Cheney left for
Baton Rouge, where he was debriefed at the state Emergency Operations Center. "I
can walk with confidence that the federal government will stay by our side for
many, many months to come."
Indeed, Mr. Cheney said he expected the rebuilding of New Orleans to "last a
good long time," vowing to "bring it back better than ever, but that will take
several years."
Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from
Gulfport, Miss., for this article.
'Going to Get It Done,' Cheney Vows on Gulf Tour, NYT, 9.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/national/nationalspecial/09cheney.html
Bush pledges help amid complaints
Thu Sep 8, 2005 11:35 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao and Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS, Sept 8 - President George W. Bush
promised on Thursday to speed up relief to hundreds of thousands displaced by
Hurricane Katrina, as some frustrated survivors complained there was still
confusion over government aid and the official death toll rose.
Bush, whose administration has been on the defensive over its lagging response,
vowed to "cut through the red tape" and get federal aid as fast as possible to
survivors of the August 29 storm.
With his approval ratings at a new low, Bush pledged to be there for "the long
haul."
The official death toll surpassed 300 in the two hardest hit states when
Louisiana officials said they had confirmed 118 deaths, on top of 201 in
neighboring Mississippi. Thousands more may still be missing.
The U.S. Congress overwhelmingly approved $51.8 billion in new hurricane relief
and Bush signed the measure into law. The government has used up $10.5 billion
passed by Congress shortly after the storm hit.
Addressing the nation, Bush said special relief payments and government programs
would be made as easy as possible. But refugees among the thousands housed at
the Astrodome in Houston complained that the federal response was still
hamstrung by bureaucracy that meant hours of waiting for no real help.
"Basically you spend all day going from line to line to get the assistance you
need," said David Williams, who spent four days on his rooftop in New Orleans
before being rescued. "Then you get only two to three hours sleep before you get
on line again."
Some refugees will have to wait longer for the $2,000 payments the government
has promised to every affected family.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said only evacuees at the Astrodome were
being offered the money in the form of debit cards. Others have to wait for
checks to be mailed to their temporary addresses or electronically deposited in
bank accounts.
NEW ORLEANS HOLD-OUTS
In New Orleans, once home to 450,000 people, there were hints of rebellion as
rescue teams hunted for perhaps 10,000 people who cannot or will not leave,
despite an evacuation order and floodwaters poisoned by bacteria, gasoline, oil,
chemicals and submerged bodies.
"I think our government officials are assuming that everyone in New Orleans are
idiots," said Tom Richards, 50, who stayed behind in a solid house with
electricity from a generator and supplies of food and water.
"My opinion is you should have the option to stay ... with the stipulation that
if you decide to stay, you are on your own."
New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass told reporters no one would be evicted
until all rescues are completed, and even then only minimal force would be used.
"I cannot use my resources to force people out when I have people who want to
voluntarily leave," he said. "We're going to make this city safe and strong
again. We have to get people out before we can start the rebuilding process."
CNN reported that shrimp fishermen had found 14 bodies inside an abandoned
hospital in the eastern side of the city and 30 corpses were found inside a
nursing home.
Officials have 25,000 body bags for the gruesome clean-up operation. While some
have speculated the toll could be in the thousands no one knows how many lives
were lost.
Louisiana state Sen. Walter Boasso, who represents St. Bernard Parish near New
Orleans, parts of which are still under 8 feet of water, said: "I am thinking we
are better off than we thought we'd be."
In the bohemian neighborhood of Bywater, which escaped relatively unscathed,
troops stepped up the pressure on residents to abandon the city.
"Certain people are hiding out and are not going to leave. They've got pets, and
they ain't leaving them behind," said Adrian Tate, a carpenter who had to leave
his pit bull when he was ordered to evacuate.
ANIMAL RESCUES SEEN
Police gave permits to animal rescue groups to search houses for pets and there
were more than 3,500 requests from people looking for lost animals, according to
the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the Coast Guard chief of staff named this week to take
over the federal response in New Orleans, said authorities would comb the city
block-by-block, knocking on doors to find stragglers.
About a million people were forced to abandon their homes along the Gulf Coast.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
Vice President Dick Cheney, touring the devastation in Gulfport, Miss., voiced
confidence in top federal emergency and security officials.
"I think the progress we're making is significant," he said. "I think the
performance in general at least in terms of the information I've received from
locals is definitely very impressive."
A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of Americans thought Bush could have
done more to speed up relief efforts, and just 28 percent believed he did all he
could. The president's approval rating fell to 40 percent, down four points
since July to the lowest point Pew has recorded.
In New Orleans the Army Corps of Engineers said about an eighth of the city's
pumping capacity was back in service, draining fetid water from the
below-sea-level city.
(Additional reporting by Jim Loney and Lesley Wroughton in Baton Rouge,
Adam
Tanner in Houston, Caren Bohan in Gulfport and Maggie Fox in Washington)
Bush
pledges help amid complaints, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T033611Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Katrina death toll still a question
Thu Sep 8, 2005 10:33 PM ET
Reuters
By Jim Loney
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 8 - Estimates of the
death toll from Hurricane Katrina have run as high as 10,000 but the actual body
count so far is much lower and officials who feared the worst now hope the dire
predictions were wrong.
The recovery of Katrina's victims speeded up in the last two days. As of
Thursday, Mississippi had recorded 201 deaths and Louisiana 118, while other
affected states had much lower numbers.
Searchers are now going door-to-door in New Orleans neighborhoods where the
water has fallen enough for a look inside flooded homes. In Mississippi teams
have been recovering bodies since hours after the storm struck on Monday last
week.
The results in both places have encouraged some officials to hope the body count
may not reach the predicted heights.
"I am thinking we are better off than we thought we'd be," said Louisiana state
Sen. Walter Boasso, who represents St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans, parts of
which still sit under 8 feet of water.
The authorities are ready in case the total sharply rises.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, taking the lead in the recovery, has
brought 25,000 body bags to the Gulf region. A morgue in St. Gabriel, Louisiana,
is capable of processing 140 corpses a day and officials have formed a plan to
handle in excess of 5,000 bodies.
Usually when a hurricane strikes, local officials announce death tolls within
days as searchers retrieve bodies from crushed buildings and crumpled cars.
New Orleans is different. The flood waters unleashed by Katrina's assault on its
levees sit stagnant in low-lying areas, preventing rescue crews from searching
thousands of houses that are up to their eaves in polluted water.
In the first week after the disaster, officials and politicians discussed the
possible death toll reluctantly, often only after being pressed by journalists.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin offered up a figure as high as 10,000 under such
questioning. Louisiana U.S. Sen. David Vitter said his "guesses" started at
10,000, but made it clear he had no factual basis for saying that.
SLOW WASHINGTON RESPONSE
Advancing the notion of a catastrophic death toll may have helped get the
attention of Washington, which has being widely criticized for a slow response.
First reports from the city, where bodies were seen floating in the water,
seemed to support a horrifying toll.
Clusters of corpses have been found in some areas. In St. Bernard Parish, east
of New Orleans, at least 32 deaths were confirmed at a nursing home. But such
finds have been few.
Hundreds of thousands fled the Gulf coast before the storm, spurred by
"mandatory" evacuation orders, which in the United States are not enforced by
police.
Rescuers plucked thousands more from streets, levees, roads and rooftops. At
least 32,000 were rescued and another 70,000 were evacuated from New Orleans
after the storm, according to official figures.
But some feared thousands were trapped in attics and would succumb to the water
or the heat. But rescuers later found many damaged roofs where residents chopped
through with axes, encouraging those hoping the toll will be lower than
expected.
In Mississippi Gulf towns, there is little stench of death compared to
devastated regions of Indonesia after the tsunami.
In the rural areas east of St. Bernard Parish, some bodies will never be found
because alligators will have taken them away, locals said.
(Additional reporting by Michael Christie in New Orleans
and Crispian Balmer
in Mississippi)
Katrina death toll still a question, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T023413Z_01_SPI877714_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-DEATHS-DC.XML
Bush signs $51.8 bln storm relief bill
Thu Sep 8, 2005 10:07 PM ET
Reuters
By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 - President George W. Bush
signed legislation to provide $51.8 billion in additional funding for Hurricane
Katrina relief on Thursday, shortly after the measure was approved by Congress.
The Senate approved the bill by a vote of 97-0 after receiving it from the House
of Representatives, which also passed it overwhelmingly.
"The people affected by this storm have immediate needs that we must continue to
meet without delay," Bush said in a statement. "More resources will be needed as
we work to help people get back on their feet."
It was the second time in a week that Congress has rushed through emergency
funding for the victims of the hurricane that hit Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama and Florida at the end of August.
Congress has now approved $62.3 billion sought by Bush, who has warned that
further requests will come. Some lawmakers have estimated a final price tag of
$150 billion to $200 billion.
"If we were to fail to act, every relief that is going on right this very moment
... will be without money when the sun rises tomorrow," Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said on the Senate floor.
Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Government
Reform Committee, and three senior senators from both major political parties
cautioned that a provision in the legislation could open the door to fraudulent
spending of emergency aid.
The provision would allow federal workers with government-issued credit cards to
buy up to $250,000 in goods or services in a single purchase, up from a $15,000
limit.
A government watchdog agency has found purchases of personal items like jewelry,
stereo equipment and home supplies, charged to such credit cards in the past,
the lawmakers said.
John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said the
legislation would reduce delays in delivering aid and that federal auditors will
review credit card purchases.
Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, whose home state of Alabama suffered in the
hurricane, also feared misuse of funds and called for the appointment of a
hurricane czar to oversee spending. "We have got to be careful this does not
become a feeding frenzy," he warned.
'FAILURES OF LEADERSHIP'
Democrats supported the emergency aid but some accused the House Republican
leadership of rushing it and blocking debate on an amendment to revamp the
widely criticized Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of relief.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, came to the defense of the
White House. Referring to the evacuees sheltered and the food, water and
equipment delivered, DeLay said: "We ought to be proud of that. But what are we
doing in Washington? We're pointing our fingers."
The disaster will add to already large budget deficits this year and next. Those
deficits also are being fueled by the war in Iraq that has cost about $300
billion since 2003.
FEMA will receive nearly all of the funds approved on Thursday -- $50 billion --
while the Defense Department will get $1.4 billion for its rescue efforts. The
Army Corps of Engineers will get $400 million to dredge navigation channels,
repair pump stations and levees in New Orleans and repair other projects in Gulf
states.
Bush
signs $51.8 bln storm relief bill, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-09T020743Z_01_SPI900473_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CONGRESS-DC.XML
Bush suffers in polls post-Katrina
Thu Sep 8, 2005
5:42 PM ET
Reuters
By John Whitesides,
Political Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W.
Bush's image suffered in public opinion polls taken after Hurricane Katrina hit
the U.S. Gulf Coast, with some finding growing doubts about his leadership and
the country's direction.
After a week of criticism for a slow response to the devastation caused by
Katrina, polls released on Thursday registered drops in Bush's approval ratings
and in confidence in his leadership.
A Pew Research Center poll found 67 percent of Americans believed Bush could
have done more to speed up relief efforts, and just 28 percent believed he did
all he could. His approval rating slipped to 40 percent, down four points since
July to the lowest point Pew has recorded.
The Pew poll also found a shift in public priorities after Katrina caused a jump
in gasoline prices last week, with a majority saying for the first time since
the September 11, 2001, attacks that it was more important for Bush to focus on
domestic policy than the war on terrorism.
"Americans are depressed, angry and very worried about the economic consequences
of the disaster," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew poll.
A WEEK OF CRITICISM
The new polls indicated a week of criticism and political finger-pointing over
who is to blame for the disastrous response to Katrina could have taken a toll
on the White House.
A CBS poll taken September 6-7 found 38 percent approved of Bush's handling of
the storm's aftermath, while 58 percent disapproved. That was a dramatic shift
from immediately after the storm last week, when 54 percent approved and 12
percent disapproved.
The CBS poll also found confidence in Bush during a crisis had fallen and only
48 percent now view him as a strong leader -- the lowest number ever for Bush in
the poll. A year ago 64 percent of voters saw Bush as a strong leader.
Bush's approval rating fell to 41 percent in a new Zogby poll, with only 36
percent giving him a passing grade on his handling of the response to the storm.
The Zogby poll also found broad pessimism among a majority of Americans after
the storm, with 53 percent saying the country is headed in the wrong direction
and 42 percent saying it is on the right track.
A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken on September 5-6 found 42 percent believed
Bush did a "bad" or "terrible" job handling the storm and subsequent flooding,
while 35 percent thought he performed "great" or "good."
A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken September 2 offered more mixed results,
with 46 percent approving of Bush's performance and 47 percent disapproving.
There was plenty of blame to go around for the slow response to Katrina, with
local and state governments also taking a hit.
The Gallup poll found 13 percent blamed Bush for the problems in New Orleans,
while 18 percent blamed federal agencies, 25 percent blamed state and local
officials and 38 percent said no one was to blame.
In the Pew poll, 58 percent thought the federal government had done only a fair
or poor job after the storm, but 51 percent also thought state and local
governments in Louisiana and Mississippi had done just a fair or poor job.
Bush
suffers in polls post-Katrina, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-09-08T214323Z_01_SPI878093_RTRIDST_0_POLITICS-POLLS-DC.XML
Journey out of New Orleans
not easy for
die-hards
Thu Sep 8, 2005
3:15 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
ALTON, Illinois (Reuters) - When die-hard New
Orleans resident Terry White woke up on Wednesday he had no intention of leaving
the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
By nightfall, he was one of 138 people sleeping in an Illinois mental hospital,
evacuated by plane from a place most did not want to leave.
With an estimated 10,000 people still remaining in New Orleans, police have
upped the pressure to get everyone out of the city, where foul flood waters and
rotting corpses have made conditions unsanitary.
Many of the reluctant refugees are finally going, but their trip to safety is
not an easy one.
They are shuffled from place to place, forced to wait at the airport and finally
flown away to a destination not disclosed until they get off the plane.
White's departure began at 8 a.m. on Wednesday when he walked outside of his
home in the impoverished 9th Ward to check on a friend and was greeted by a
group of New Orleans police officers.
They told him that if he did not leave, they'd be back to kick down his door and
take him by force, he said.
"If the cops hadn't told me I had to get out, I never would have left," White
said. "I had everything I needed in my house, but what was I going to do? They
had guns."
He and others from one of the city's poorest neighborhoods were trucked to the
convention center, where there was a National Guard staging post for evacuees.
They arrived looking tired and filthy. Some brought much-loved pets. Most had
suitcases and others just the clothes they wore. There were couples with
children, the old and infirm. None knew their final destination.
"I've always wanted to go to California," one young black man mused as he waited
to board a bus.
The bus took them through the ruined city to the airport, where Red Cross
volunteers greeted people with toiletries and food and doctors treated those
needing help. Soon the crowd massed at departure gates, still unaware where they
were headed.
And despite their plight, they bantered.
"You gonna come back," one man hollered at a friend.
"Oh yeah, sure I will," his friend replied. "I just gotta go to Las Vegas first
and marry me a rich one."
TIME TO REMEMBER
During the long wait, the men's restroom became an impromptu smoking lounge.
They huddled and recalled the dead bodies they saw, spoke of people they rescued
and acts of heroism, and of proudly of sticking it out despite all the hardship.
Joseph Berrio, 46, said he used music to keep away the armed looters who came to
his street each night on a boat.
"I put my stereo on my porch and played 'Alice in Chains' really loud," he said,
referring to the heavy metal rock band. "It scared the hell out of them. I heard
them say to each other, 'Stay away from that crazy white boy."'
In the departure lounge, people spoke about how New Orleans' horrid devastation
might have a silver lining. Maybe the city could be cleaned up and there would
be fewer drugs, guns and gangs on the streets, people said. Maybe the rebuilding
will bring high-paying jobs and maybe the criminal element will not come back.
Linda Johnson, 47, was among those mulling a fresh start. The transsexual drag
queen and burlesque dancer said she lost all her sequined costumes and was
broke, but insisted, "I'll be happy anywhere I go."
Mike Bailey, 45, clutched his only remaining possession -- a large mixed-breed
dog called BoBo -- and said, "Most of these people were born and raised here and
have never been out of New Orleans."
With just $140 to his name, Bailey is nervous about his future. "They say it
could be February or March before we get back. I'll try to get a job and
survive; it's all I can do."
And like many, he was also nervous of flying for the first time.
When they were finally boarded a chartered Boeing 727, they still had not been
told their destination, which annoyed many.
One man shouted "You're treating us like criminals."
An hour and 20 minute flight took the group to Scott Air Force Base in
Mascoutah, Illinois, where they were herded onto buses and finally told their
destination was the mental hospital, now a shelter for the Katrina displaced,
near the town of Alton. They were 700 miles from home.
"We're going to a funny farm," said Gary Mansky, 44. "They must have figured
we're from New Orleans so we'd fit right in."
They were the first to arrive at the facility, which can house 250 people
sleeping six to a room in cots.
After handing out clothes and toiletries, offering food and giving out room
assignments, staff said assistance would be discussed in the morning. Many of
the evacuees want to reunite with friends or family elsewhere, while some were
considering staying here for as long as was possible.
But White, a house painter who likes his independence, was unimpressed.
"I can't live like this. This is like a prison," he said, smoking a cigarette
shortly after arriving here at almost 2 a.m. "I do appreciate their generosity,
but a man needs a place of his own. I've got to get back to New Orleans."
Upstairs in the cramped sleeping quarters, men chatted about what might await
them when they eventually return to the city they love. Putting aside their
despair, they joked.
"Did you clean out your fridge before you left," one man asked another.
"Had no time," was the response. "And it had meat in there."
"Oh, brother! When you go back, that fridge is going to be talking."
Journey out of New Orleans not easy for die-hards, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T191554Z_01_MCC869290_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-JOURNEY-DC.XML
New Orleans hunts for survivors,
Bush
pledges help
Thu Sep 8, 2005
3:19 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
and Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS, Sept 8 - The hunt for the
helpless and the hiding went on across New Orleans on Thursday as President
George W. Bush promised to streamline the government bureaucracy to speed relief
to the hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
"We have much more work to do," said Bush whose administration has been under
attack ever since the August 29 storm for the scope and speed of government
help.
He promised to make access to special relief payments and existing government
programs as easy as possible. But not long before he spoke to the nation,
refugees among the thousands housed at the Astrodome in Houston were complaining
of long lines and cranky machinery that produced only hours of waiting with no
real help.
In New Orleans, once home to 450,000 people, rescue teams hunted door to door
for what may be as many as 10,000 people, some refusing to leave despite an
evacuation order and pernicious flood waters, others perhaps still trapped.
CNN reported that shrimp fishermen had found 14 bodies inside an abandoned
hospital in the eastern side of the city. Earlier 30 corpses were found inside a
nursing home.
Officials have 25,000 body bags on hand for the gruesome clean-up operation, and
while some have speculated the toll could reach into the thousands no one knows
for sure how many lives were lost. Some say victims may have been washed out to
sea or buried under sludge.
"We saw a lot of dead people, both in the water and in buildings," said South
Carolina game warden Gregg Brown, whose team scoured flooded New Orleans
neighborhoods by boat.
FLOATING CORPSES
Rescue teams tied floating corpses to trees or fences for future recovery, and a
morgue set up outside the city stood ready to receive more than 5,000 bodies.
At least 30 bodies were found at the St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard
Parish east of New Orleans, Louisiana state Sen. Walter Boasso said. He said as
many as three dozen other residents were rescued from the facility.
In the bohemian neighborhood of Bywater, which escaped relatively unscathed,
troops stepped up the pressure on residents to abandon the city.
"They came around last night and told us we had to get our asses out by 6 p.m.
today," said Blaine Barefoot, a 41-year-old street musician who was getting
ready to leave. "I'm not going to fight it."
Helicopters clattered overhead and National Guard troops peered into windows of
homes in search of the sick or dying, the dead, and those resisting efforts to
evacuate them.
"Certain people are hiding out and are not going to leave. They've got pets, and
they ain't leaving them behind," said Adrian Tate, a carpenter with a pit bull
dog, although he conceded he would now obey the orders to leave.
"I have no choice."
Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. Coast Guard chief of staff named this week to
take over the federal response in New Orleans, said authorities would comb the
city block-by-block, knocking on doors to find stragglers.
"We need everybody out so we can continue with the work of restoring this city,"
Allen said on the CBS "Early Show."
Katrina's survivors have been without fresh water and electricity in oppressive
heat since Katrina roared in and levee breaks flooded most of New Orleans, one
of the world's most famous cities and home to about 450,000 people.
About one million people were forced from their homes along the Gulf Coast.
So far, the official death tolls stand at 83 in Louisiana and 201 in
Mississippi, but officials say they expect to find thousands of bodies in the
attics of flooded homes and the rubble of destroyed towns and cities.
Congress was set to pass $51.8 billion in new hurricane relief on Thursday. The
federal government has exhausted a $10.5 billion fund approved by Congress just
a week ago.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
With the high death toll and a national recovery effort that may cost taxpayers
$150 billion to $200 billion there was widespread criticism of the federal
response to the disaster and new concerns in Congress over controlling the money
headed toward the effort.
"It's just a lot of money and people are worried that it's done correctly," said
Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican who serves on the House Appropriations
Committee.
CHENEY IN REGION
A CBS News poll said 65 percent Americans thought Bush was too slow to respond
to the disaster and 58 percent disapproved of his performance. Large majorities
said federal, state and local officials all acted too slowly.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, scorched by criticism of its
performance, had planned to hand out $2,000 debit cards -- $100 million worth in
total -- to thousands of survivors, but they too were being delayed. Bush
promised to get them into people's hand as quickly as possible.
The White House dispatched a team of top officials to the disaster zone on
Thursday, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to help speed the recovery
efforts.
One success story came earlier this week when Army engineers filled wide
breaches in the levees with rocks and sand, and started pumping water out of
flooded districts.
As much as 60 percent of New Orleans remained under water but state officials
said on Thursday that city area pumps are now pushing out about 60,000 gallons
of water per second.
(Additional reporting by Jim Loney in Baton Rouge, Adam Tanner in Houston and
Maggie Fox in Washington)
New
Orleans hunts for survivors, Bush pledges help, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T192010Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Long lines,
confusion over cash aid
Thu Sep 8, 2005 2:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Thousands of refugees
lined up under the hot sun for payments from the American Red Cross on Thursday
in a confused atmosphere that prompted officials to close off access to the
Astrodome complex at one point.
For the evacuees whose lives were ruined by flood, their days are now spent
waiting for housing, food stamps, school registration and cash to restart their
lives. Frustration is growing.
"Basically you spend all day going from line to line to get the assistance you
need," said David Williams, who said he spent four days on his rooftop in New
Orleans before getting rescued. "Then you get only two to three hours sleep
before you get on line again."
"I got here on line at 7 a.m. and I was probably the 3,000th person on line," he
said.
Williams and many others were waiting outside a convention center across from
the Astrodome stadium -- the single largest gathering U.S. point for Hurricane
Katrina refugees over the past week -- to receive several hundred dollars of
payments from the Red Cross.
The money came from private donations, and will be distributed at other sites
across the region in coming days.
A spokeswoman for the Red Cross in Washington initially said that the Federal
Emergency Management Agency was making the payments, then said she did not know
the amounts involved. A FEMA spokesman said that planned $2,000 U.S. government
vouchers for refugees would not be distributed on Thursday as previously
announced.
Officials overseeing the Astrodome complex sealed off the perimeter for part of
the morning, offering little explanation.
"I don't understand what's going on, it's just a bunch of confusion right now,"
said Terrance Green, 24, a Red Cross volunteer helping process aid applications.
"Everyone is saying different things."
FRUSTRATED AND TIRED
Carolyn Biggs, who held her six-month old great-grand daughter in his arms, said
she started her morning at 4:45 a.m. on the housing line. "Now I've got to go
all the way to the back of the line, I don't think it is fair," she said,
referring to the Red Cross payment line.
"I'm tired, I'm very tired," she said, suggesting that all the services be
coordinated into one line. "I am frustrated."
She was however one of relatively few to figure out that the U.S. government
would pay for two weeks in a hotel, information unknown to thousands living
under the same roof at the Astrodome and other Houston facilities.
Dorothy Bell, 41, a retired nurse from New Orleans, said she had done little but
wait in recent days. For her efforts she said she had received $149 in food
stamps, more than $900 in Social Security benefits and was hoping on Thursday to
receive public housing.
"As long as I find a place to stay, I'm not worried about the money," she said.
Bell was lucky enough to be on a queue that extended inside where it was air
conditioned. Outside, a steady sun beat down as the temperature rose into the
mid 90s. Mounted police watched the line, and a helicopter occasionally hovered
above, adding to the noise of thousands of agitated people.
But for most refugees, there was no choice but to wait and take whatever was
being given. "If they gave me four dollars, I'd wait in line," said Williams.
Long
lines, confusion over cash aid, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T183210Z_01_MCC865866_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-EVACUEES-DC.XML
Bush Pledges
to Expedite Aid to Gulf
Region;
Day of Prayer Is Set
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - President Bush said
today that he would work with Congress to "cut through the red tape" and get
federal aid as fast as possible to people whose lives had been disrupted by wind
and flood along the Gulf Coast.
"The government is going to be with you for the long haul," Mr. Bush said in a
brief speech at the White House as he tried to counter charges that he and his
administration had reacted slowly and ineffectively to the crisis. The president
said that Sept. 16, next Friday, would be designated a national day of prayer
and remembrance.
Mr. Bush said that the $2,000 per family in aid that had already been announced
would be sped up, and that workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency
and the Red Cross were working to get the money into the hands of those who
needed it.
He said some 400,000 families had already registered with FEMA for federal help,
and that 3,000 people were taking calls around the clock at the agency, with the
number of operators to be increased "dramatically" very soon.
People who fled the affected areas and consequently might have little or no
identification would be given "special evacuee status" to make them eligible for
the full range of federal benefits - Medicaid, food stamps, school lunch
programs and aid to needy families, to name a few - without the usual paperwork,
Mr. Bush said.
The president said he and Congress would also see to it that the states that
took in people fleeing the gulf region would be reimbursed for the extra burdens
on their budgets. "You should not be penalized for showing compassion," Mr. Bush
said.
"We have many difficult days ahead," Mr. Bush observed.
As Mr. Bush made his case, Congress was trying to rush through the $51.8 billion
aid package requested by the White House. Lawmakers of both parties seemed in
agreement that the federal government should spend heavily to help the disaster
victims. But they were far apart on related issues.
Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the Senate minority leader, expressed
disdain for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and said that Democrats were
prepared to bypass the agency entirely.
"Is there anyone - anyone - who believes that we should continue to let the
money go to FEMA and be distributed by them?" Mr. Reid asked.
Mr. Reid said again that the hurricane and flood disaster, and a faulty federal
response, should be investigated by an independent commission like the one that
dissected the Sept. 11 terror attacks, instead of by Congressional committee, as
Republicans have proposed.
Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, a Democrat, who appeared alongside Mr. Reid,
said, "There will be a lot of time for blaming in the future, and everyone will
be held accountable, including us and including the president himself."
Bush
Pledges to Expedite Aid to Gulf Region; Day of Prayer Is Set, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08cnd-bush.html
Senators press Bush
on hurricane relief
czar
Thu Sep 8, 2005
1:48 PM ET
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two Republican senators
pressed U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday to appoint a top official to
lead the long-term recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
A White House spokesman said Bush still was not satisfied with the relief effort
and leading Democrats called for an independent investigation of the slow
response, saying a planned congressional inquiry would amount to a whitewash
that would protect the Bush administration.
Bush met with Republican congressional leaders at the White House, where Sens.
Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania urged him to
pick someone to lead the administration's much-criticized recovery effort in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
White House officials have not ruled out such an option, saying it is among
several being discussed for confronting long-term problems in Katrina's
aftermath.
Various names have been mentioned in Washington for the job, such as former New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired
Gen. Tommy Franks, former head of the U.S. Central Command.
"I believe that we do need a person on the ground for a long period of time, the
six- to nine-month range, who would be the person able to make decisions and cut
through red tape, and I think the president agrees with that," Hutchison told
reporters after the meeting.
Santorum also said the recovery campaign needed a long-term leader but said no
candidates were discussed at the meeting.
Asked whether the president agreed with creating the position, Santorum said:
"That's up to him. He didn't say yes or no."
A day after Republican congressional leaders announced a joint House-Senate
inquiry into government failures regarding the hurricane, Senate Democratic
Leader Harry Reid of Nevada took issue with the approach and said he still
wanted an investigation by an independent commission like the one that looked
into the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Reid said Democrats would not participate in the joint committee, which they
said was set up to protect the administration.
"These are serious concerns about the Republican approach," Reid said in remarks
prepared for delivery on the Senate floor. "Americans deserve answers
independent of politics. That's why Democrats and Republicans preferred an
independent commission for investigating 9/11 and we should be following that
model now."
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California also questioned the
congressional committee, saying, "Despite all the talk of bipartisanship, they
have just on their own, unilaterally, put forth a proposal that will result in a
whitewash of what is going on there."
Amid the partisan wrangling over the federal government's slow response to
Hurricane Katrina, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush still was not
satisfied with the operation nearly a week after he first said the results were
unacceptable.
"The president continues to be not satisfied about where things are right now,"
McClellan said. "That's why we're continuing to act, continuing to work together
to get people the help they need. There's been important progress made in a
number of areas but there are ongoing problems and challenges that we continue
to work to address."
The White House said on Thursday Bush would announce a plan to ensure that
evacuees from the Gulf Coast get delivery of food stamps and other benefits.
A CBS News poll reported that 58 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's
handling of the crisis and that only 32 percent expressed a lot of confidence in
his ability to handle a crisis, compared with 66 percent approval in the weeks
after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Patricia Wilson)
Senators
press Bush on hurricane relief czar, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T174904Z_01_DIT864067_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BUSH-DC.XML
Lawmakers fret costs
as hurricane aid set
to pass
Thu Sep 8, 2005
12:50 PM ET
Reuters
By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress was
set to pass $51.8 billion in new hurricane relief on Thursday as lawmakers grew
increasingly nervous about the staggering bill at the same time the Iraq war is
being waged.
The federal government exhausted a $10.5 billion fund approved by Congress just
a week ago, and lawmakers quickly began considering additional emergency funds
for hard-hit Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and other Gulf Coast areas.
Lawmakers were overwhelmed by the latest estimates, which put the overall rescue
and rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Katrina in the range of $150 billion to
$200 billion. About $300 billion has been spent on the Iraq war since 2003.
With polls showing voters worried about how the war in Iraq is being handled and
the White House facing criticism that disaster response was too little and too
late, Republicans and Democrats in Congress attempted to gain some control over
the billions being hurriedly approved.
"It's just a lot of money and people are worried that it's done correctly," said
Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican who serves on the House Appropriations
Committee.
LaHood told Reuters that conservatives pressed Bush administration officials for
assurances of proper oversight of the funds that will be used to clean up a
devastated New Orleans and rebuild highways, utilities and businesses.
As a result, the $51.8 billion bill would set aside $15 million for federal
auditors to watch over the spending.
Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations
Committee, had a broader goal of restructuring the embattled Federal Emergency
Management Agency that is overseeing the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Obey said he would offer an amendment to the emergency spending bill to restore
FEMA's status as an independent, Cabinet-level agency and require that its
director have substantial experience in disaster relief. In a post-September 11
shake-up, FEMA became part of the new Department of Homeland Security.
"The problem is the agency we are appropriating money to has demonstrated with
great clarity that it is spectacularly dysfunctional," Obey said on the House
floor.
But his amendment was expected to be blocked by the Republican leadership, which
wants to pass the bill quickly, especially with Vice President Richard Cheney
touring Mississippi on Thursday.
Conservative House Republicans presented their fiscal concerns to White House
officials late Wednesday, in a session that several of the lawmakers described
as "a tough meeting."
FEARS OF MORE COSTS TO COME
Rep. Randy Cunningham, a California Republican who also serves on the House
Appropriations Committee, told Reuters after the meeting that conservatives
fretted about the huge relief costs with "more storms (gathering off the
southern coast), the Iraq war and health care" costs that are rapidly escalating
for the federal government.
Cunningham said that none of those Republicans suggested scaling back costly
tax-cut proposals they have advanced for the past few years. Instead, he said
they urged the Bush administration to look at ways to save on Gulf Coast
reconstruction by waiving rules requiring union laborers for upcoming federal
contracts.
Meanwhile, lawmakers continued to question the efficiency of FEMA's relief
efforts.
Cunningham complained that FEMA was passing out emergency telephone numbers to
people with no telephone service and no electricity to recharge their mobile
phones.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, said he
had heard reports that recreational vehicle dealerships in his state were being
told to transfer their gasoline-guzzling inventories to the federal government.
"I would hope that before we buy up all the Winnebagos in America and send them
to the Gulf Coast (for temporary housing) that we would be thinking about the
cost of that and ... whether that's the best way to proceed," Gregg said on the
Senate floor.
Lawmakers fret costs as hurricane aid set to pass, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T165045Z_01_MCC860559_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CONGRESS-DC.XML
New Orleans pushing out survivors
in grim
search
Thu Sep 8, 2005 1:04 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao and Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS, Sept 8 - Rescue teams hunted door
to door in New Orleans on Thursday, searching for the living trapped or hiding
out in the ruined city, but finding 30 corpses in a nursing home, a grim
reminder of the task ahead.
About 10,000 people are believed to be inside the flooded city, surrounded by a
toxic soup of oil, chemicals, garbage, human waste and floating corpses since
Hurricane Katrina wrecked the home of jazz 10 days ago.
Officials believe thousands were killed and they have 25,000 body bags on hand
for the gruesome clean-up operation, but less than 100 corpses have been
recovered so far in all of Louisiana and no one knows for sure how many people
died.
"We saw a lot of dead people, both in the water and in buildings," said South
Carolina game warden Gregg Brown, whose team scoured flooded New Orleans
neighborhoods by boat.
Rescue teams tied floating corpses to trees or fences for future recovery, and a
morgue set up outside the city stood ready to receive more than 5,000 bodies.
At least 30 bodies were found at the St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard
Parish east of New Orleans, Louisiana state Sen. Walter Boasso said. He said as
many as three dozen other residents were rescued from the facility.
Mayor Ray Nagin has issued a mandatory evacuation order, saying people face risk
of death from the toxic flood waters and the city must be emptied until it is
cleaned up.
In the bohemian neighborhood of Bywater, which escaped relatively unscathed,
troops stepped up the pressure on residents to abandon the city.
"They came around last night and told us we had to get our asses out by 6 p.m.
today," said Blaine Barefoot, a 41-year-old street musician who was getting
ready to leave. "I'm not going to fight it."
PUSHING OUT SURVIVORS
Helicopters clattered overhead and National Guard troops peered into windows of
homes in search of the sick or dying, the dead, and those resisting efforts to
evacuate them.
"Certain people are hiding out and are not going to leave. They've got pets, and
they ain't leaving them behind," said Adrian Tate, a carpenter with a pit bull
dog, although he conceded he would now obey the orders to leave.
"I have no choice."
Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. Coast Guard chief of staff named this week to
take over the federal response in New Orleans, said authorities would comb the
city block-by-block, knocking on doors to find stragglers.
"We need everybody out so we can continue with the work of restoring this city,"
Allen said on the CBS "Early Show."
Katrina's survivors have been without fresh water and electricity in oppressive
heat since Katrina roared in and levee breaks flooded most of New Orleans, one
of the world's most famous cities and home to about 450,000 people.
About one million people were forced from their homes along the Gulf Coast.
So far, the official death tolls stand at 83 in Louisiana and 201 in
Mississippi, but officials say they expect to find thousands of bodies in the
attics of flooded homes and the rubble of destroyed towns and cities.
Congress was set to pass $51.8 billion in new hurricane relief on Thursday. The
federal government has exhausted a $10.5 billion fund approved by Congress just
a week ago.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
With the high death toll and a national recovery effort that may cost taxpayers
$150 billion to $200 billion there was widespread criticism of the federal
response to the disaster and new concerns in Congress over controlling the money
headed toward the effort.
"It's just a lot of money and people are worried that it's done correctly," said
Rep. Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican who serves on the House Appropriations
Committee.
BUSH TOO SLOW
A CBS News poll said 65 percent Americans thought Bush was too slow to respond
to the disaster and 58 percent disapproved of his performance. Large majorities
said federal, state and local officials all acted too slowly.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, scorched by criticism of its
performance, had planned to hand out $2,000 debit cards -- $100 million worth in
total -- to thousands of survivors, but they too were being delayed.
The White House dispatched a team of top officials to the disaster zone on
Thursday, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to help speed the recovery
efforts.
One success story came earlier this week when Army engineers filled wide
breeches in the levees with rocks and sand, and started pumping water out of
flooded districts.
As much as 60 percent of New Orleans remained under water but state officials
said on Thursday that city area pumps are now pushing out about 60,000 gallons
of water per second.
Criticism of the speed and scope of the government's response came from members
of both political parties and the private sector.
The situation "amounts to a massive institutional failure," said Raymond
Offenheiser, president of the Oxfam America affiliate of the international
relief agency. Oxfam mounted the first domestic U.S. rescue in its 35-year
history in Mississippi.
"Before Katrina, we reserved our emergency response for countries that lack the
resources of the United States. If we've got this kind of failure at home, how
can we expect poor countries to do better?" he asked.
There were signs of impatience from federal officials as well -- theirs was
directed at news coverage of the disaster. FEMA has excluded journalists from
recovery expeditions and asked them to not take pictures of the dead, drawing
protests from press-freedom advocates.
Leaders of Bush's Republican party said there would be a joint congressional
investigation into the government's hurricane response, to the disappointment of
minority Democrats who said an independent commission should investigate. Bush
has also said he would lead a probe.
(Additional reporting by Jim Loney in Baton Rouge, Adam Tanner in Houston
and Maggie Fox in Washington)
New
Orleans pushing out survivors in grim search, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T170503Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Katrina telethon draws stars;
can they
speak out?
Thu Sep 8, 2005 8:54 AM ET
Reuters
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Recording stars Sheryl
Crow, Alicia Keys, Paul Simon, Neil Young and the Dixie Chicks will headline a
telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims slated to air this week on six major U.S.
networks and around the world, producers said on Wednesday.
But it was not clear whether they or any of the other celebrities booked for
Friday's event, including comedian Chris Rock and movie star Jack Nicholson,
will be permitted to freely express their opinions during the show or required
to stick to the script.
The question arose after impromptu remarks last Friday by rapper Kanye West, who
used his appearance on a similar NBC network broadcast to accuse President
George W. Bush of racism in the government's relief effort.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West said, adding criticism of
the media's portrayal of blacks.
Kanye's comments were carried on NBC's live feed to the East Coast and central
time zones but were cut from the tape-delayed broadcast aired on the West Coast
and mountain regions. NBC said West had deviated from his script and that "his
opinions in no way represent the views of the network."
The General Electric Co.-owned broadcaster is one of the six major networks
planning to simulcast a separate live, commercial-free special this Friday,
titled "Shelter From the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast."
The hour-long event also will be carried by numerous U.S. cable channels and
broadcast in more than 100 countries, organizers said. Proceeds will go to
disaster relief efforts of the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
Although West was absent from the lineup of performers announced for the show, a
spokeswoman for producer Joel Gallen told Reuters that West was slated to make a
live appearance.
But she and two other spokesman for the show all said they did not know what, if
any, steps producers would take to censor or curb political statements celebrity
participants might make. One NBC spokesman said a decision about a possible time
delay for the live broadcast had not been made.
A number of stars on the bill, including the Dixie Chicks, Sheryl Crow, Chris
Rock and Neil Young, are known for their outspoken views on political and social
issues.
A spokeswoman for MTV, which is planning to air yet a third all-star telethon
for hurricane relief, said the cable music channel "does not censor artists."
She added West was slated to perform in a pre-taped segment for the MTV special.
Katrina telethon draws stars; can they speak out?, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-09-08T125500Z_01_ROB806853_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-TELETHON-DC.XML
Cheney Arrives in Region
as New Orleans
Seeks to Pull Residents
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
and SEWELL CHAN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Vice President Dick
Cheney surveyed hurricane- damaged neighborhoods in the Gulf Coast region today,
pledging that the federal government would help rebuild the devastated area.
Mr. Cheney landed in Gulfport, Miss., and is scheduled to tour Biloxi, Miss.,
Baton Rouge, La., and New Orleans, where flood waters are growing increasingly
fetid and thousands of people are still insisting on staying, despite a
mandatory evacuation order issued by the mayor.
"The president asked me to come down to take a look at things, and to begin to
focus on the longer term, in terms of making certain obviously that we're
getting the search and rescue missions done and all those other immediate
things," Mr. Cheney said after touring a neighborhood in Gulfport. "The progress
we're making is significant."
Mr. Cheney's visit follows a visit earlier this week by President Bush, his
second since the storm hit, following much criticism last week that the
administration and federal agencies had been slow in responding to the disaster.
New Orleans police officers today are expected today continue to try to force
residents to leave, including those living in dry and undamaged homes.
It was not clear how widespread the forced evacuations were. But the city's
police superintendent said that while his department would concentrate first on
removing those who wanted to leave, the hazards posed by fires, waterborne
diseases and natural-gas leaks had left the city with no choice but to use force
on those who resisted.
In at least one neighborhood, Bywater, a working-class area east of the French
Quarter, police officers and federal agents on Wednesday night began to press
hard for residents to evacuate. At two homes, police officers and emergency
service workers refused to leave until the two men living there agreed to go
with them, even though both men appeared healthy and said they had adequate
supplies.
Until now, city and state officials have implored residents to leave, but no one
has been forcibly removed. The announced change in policy - after an evacuation
order by Mayor C. Ray Nagin on Tuesday - came even as the floodwater receded
slightly and residents in some sections took small steps toward recovery,
cleaning debris from their streets and boarding up abandoned houses.
Some said they would fight the evacuations, potentially producing ugly
confrontations.
An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people remained inside New Orleans more than a week
after Hurricane Katrina hit, many in neighborhoods that are on high ground near
the Mississippi River.
But the number of dead still remained a looming and disturbing question.
In the first indication of how many deaths Louisiana alone might expect, Robert
Johannessen, a spokesman for the State Department of Health and Hospitals, said
on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had ordered 25,000
body bags. The official death toll remained at under 100.
In Washington, the House and Senate announced a joint investigation into the
government's response to the crisis. "Americans deserve answers," said a
statement by the two top-ranking Republicans, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and
Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader. "We must do all we can to learn from
this tragedy, improve the system and protect all of our citizens."
President Bush made plans to send Congress a request for $51.8 billion for
relief efforts, the second such request since the storm devastated the Gulf
Coast. The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the money would include
$50 billion for FEMA, $1.4 billion for the Department of Defense and $400
million for the Army Corps of Engineers. The request follows a $10.5 billion
package that Mr. Bush signed on Friday and is intended to address the immediate
needs of survivors.
The government continued its efforts to help evacuees. At the Astrodome in
Houston, where an estimated 15,000 New Orleans evacuees found shelter over the
weekend, the number had dwindled to only about 3,000 on Wednesday as people were
rapidly placed in apartments, volunteers' homes and hotels that had been
promised reimbursement by FEMA.
Michael D. Brown, the FEMA director, said his agency would begin issuing debit
cards, worth at least $2,000 each, to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies
for immediate needs. More than 319,000 people have already applied for federal
disaster relief.
"The concept is to get them some cash in hand," Mr. Brown said, "which allows
them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about what they need to have to
restart their lives."
As New Orleans officials grappled with how to make residents leave, new
government tests showed the danger of remaining.
In the first official confirmation of contaminants in the water covering the
city, federal officials said on Wednesday that they had found levels of E. coli
bacteria and lead 10 times higher than is considered safe. Those were the only
substances identified as potential health threats in tests of water conducted by
the Environmental Protection Agency at laboratories in Houston and Lafayette,
La.
Officials emphasized that as testing continued more substances were likely to be
found at harmful levels, especially from water taken near industrial sites.
"Human contact with the floodwater should be avoided as much as possible," the
environmental agency's administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said.
A spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said
state and local officials had reported three deaths in Mississippi and one in
Texas from exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, a choleralike bacterium found in salt
water, which poses special risks for people with chronic liver problems.
At a press conference this morning, officials in New Orleans cautioned people to
decontaminate themselves as best as possible when entering homes after wading
through the flood water.
With the overall death toll uncertain, Mr. Brown, the FEMA director, said in
Baton Rouge that the formal house-to-house search for bodies had begun at
midmorning. He said the temporary mortuary set up in St. Gabriel, La., was
prepared to receive 500 to 1,000 bodies a day, with refrigeration trucks on site
to hold the corpses.
"They will be processed as rapidly as possible," Mr. Brown said.
As it worked to remove the water inundating the city, the Corps of Engineers
said that one additional pumping station, No. 6, at the head of the 17th Street
Canal, had started up, and that about 10 percent of the city's total pumping
capacity was in operation. But the corps added that it was dealing with a new
problem: how to prevent corpses from being sucked to the grates at the pump
inlets.
"We're expending every effort to try to ensure that we protect the integrity of
remains as we get this water out of the city," said John S. Rickey, chief of
public affairs for the corps. "We're taking this very personally. This is a very
deep emotional aspect of our work down there."
As the forcible removal of New Orleans residents also threatened to become an
emotional issue, the city's superintendent of police, P. Edwin Compass III, said
at a news conference on Wednesday morning that such evacuations would not begin
until the police had helped the thousands of people who wanted leave.
"Once all the voluntary evacuations have taken place," Mr. Compass said, "then
we'll concentrate our efforts and our forces to mandatorily evacuating
individuals."
But on Wednesday night, a city police officer and a dozen heavily armed
immigration agents broke into a house in Bywater without knocking or announcing
their presence, saying they were looking for a looter. The house was clean and
neat and the only person inside, Anthony Paul, lived there, according to his
state-issued identification.
Although Mr. Paul appeared to be in good health and had plenty of food and
water, a psychologist with an emergency services team that was called to the
house said she would not leave until Mr. Paul agreed to evacuate. The
psychologist said that Mr. Paul was mentally stable, but that she wanted him to
leave for his own safety. "If I'm leaving, you guys are leaving," said the
psychologist, who identified herself only as Rain.
At one point Mr. Paul said, "You're going to have to kill me to get me out of
this house." But after nearly an hour, he agreed to leave and packed a single
backpack.
"I didn't want to leave right now," he said as he prepared to board an
ambulance. "If I had a choice, yeah, I would have rode it out."
The psychologist said that she viewed the evacuation as voluntary and that Mr.
Paul would eventually appreciate that he had made the right choice. "This is why
I wake up in the morning," she said.
Among the authorities, though, some confusion lingered on Wednesday about how a
widespread evacuation by force would work, and how much support it would get at
the federal and state level. Mayor Nagin told the police and the military on
Tuesday to remove all residents for their own safety, and on Wednesday, Mr.
Compass said state laws gave the mayor the authority to declare martial law and
order the evacuations.
"There's a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal authority for
mandatory evacuations," Mr. Compass said. "We'll use the minimum amount of force
necessary."
But because the New Orleans Police Department has only about 1,000 working
officers, the city is largely in the hands of National Guard troops and
active-duty soldiers.
State officials said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco could tell the Guard to
carry out the forced removals, but they stopped short of a commitment to do so.
In Washington, Lt. Gen. Joseph R. Inge, deputy commander of the United States
Northern Command, said regular troops "would not be used" in any forced
evacuation.
The state disaster law does not supersede either the state or federal
Constitutions, said Kenneth M. Murchison, a law professor at Louisiana State
University. But even so, Mr. Nagin's decision could be a smart strategy that
does not violate fundamental rights, Professor Murchison said.
While many New Orleans residents said they would not go gently, others appeared
disheveled, weak and ready to evacuate.
Sitting under an umbrella in a filthy parking lot at the eastern edge of
Bywater, Anthony Washington said on Wednesday morning that he worried he would
not be able to reach his family if he left the city. But after a reporter
offered him the chance to call his sister and explain where he was, he said he
would leave. By midafternoon Mr. Washington had boarded a bus for the city's
convention center, where evacuees were being taken.
"I don't have nothing here," he said.
Alex Berenson reported from New Orleans for this
article, andSewell Chan reported from Baton Rouge, La. Matthew L. Wald
contributed reporting from Vicksburg, Miss., and Christine Hauser and Timothy
Williams contributed reporting from New York.
Cheney Arrives in Region as New Orleans Seeks to Pull Residents, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08cnd-storm.html
Restarting Pumps
Required Pluck and Luck
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - Late Monday night, with
a whoosh and a thunderous rumble, the first pumps kicked in at Pumping Station
6, New Orleans's largest, and began draining water out of this sunken city and
into Lake Pontchartrain.
How engineers got them going is a story of adversity, ingenuity, perseverance
and luck - and the eureka moment when one of them realized he had seen a
functioning stoplight, a sign that an electrical grid was functioning and could
be tapped for power to run the pumps.
A crucial player on the ground for the Army Corps of Engineers, which is driving
the drainage effort, is Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Black. A wiry 44-year-old
engineer who wears army camouflage fatigues and a regulation black beret over
close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, he says his approach is not to tell other
people how to do their jobs: local workers know the idiosyncrasies of their
systems better than a visitor ever can.
Last Friday, with fetid water covering 80 percent of New Orleans, Mr. Black
first met with representatives of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board; of
Entergy, the local electric and gas company; and of Atmos Energy, which supplies
gas to parts of the city. They discussed where portable generators might be
placed - a tricky business, since they must be very close to large natural-gas
lines.
But when members of the group took a helicopter tour on Saturday, they realized
that the standard way of doing things would be very difficult; there simply was
not enough dry land near gas lines to get power flowing in less than a week. In
interviews here on Tuesday and Wednesday, Mr. Black said members of the group
came back from the flight with "droopy faces." All of their options were
unappealing.
Since Hurricane Katrina cut its destructive swath through the South, the Corps
of Engineers has come under attack for the levee breaches that sent water
pouring into the city and for taking part in planning that left New Orleans
vulnerable to powerful storms.
But the corps is also an essential part of repairing the damage that Hurricane
Katrina wreaked - and there is no higher priority than getting the stations
working again, because little else can move forward before the 30 billion
gallons of water is drained from the city, said Col. Richard P. Wagenaar, the
commander and district engineer for the New Orleans District of the corps.
"It's all about the water," he said.
Mr. Black is part of the Army's 249th Prime Power Battalion, which has its
headquarters in Fort Belvoir, Va., and provides electric power for military
operations and assists the Corps of Engineers in providing disaster relief. He
has traveled the world for the battalion, including 16 months in Iraq after the
American-led invasion.
New Orleans presents a different kind of challenge. Rebuilding the breached
levees has been an enormous undertaking. Many pumps are still submerged and will
need to be completely dried out before they can be restarted. Even pumps that
stayed high and dry could not be started because there was no power to feed
them.
After the first flight on Saturday dashed their hopes for a simple solution,
things seemed bleak. Until somebody - Mr. Black does not recall who - remembered
seeing the stoplight.
It was in Jefferson Parish, just west of New Orleans. What it meant was that a
power substation called Southport might be putting out electricity. If so, the
next question was whether power lines were still intact enough to link the power
plant to the pumps. In a second flight, the engineers determined that they were.
Last Saturday night, Shelby Grosz from Entergy ran a check on the substation and
then called Mr. Black excitedly. "It's hot!" he said.
Over the next two days, workers climbed into electrical towers, some reachable
only by boat, to make repairs. By Labor Day they had stitched together a direct
link from the substation to Pumping Station 6, in effect turning part of the
power grid into a giant extension cord.
Inside the pumping station, oily, rank water covered the floor a foot deep or
more in many places. But the Rube Goldberg concatenation of power lines was
complete by 10 p.m., and the lights came on.
The supervisor, Renauldo Robertson, left the control room and splashed across
the floor to the first of the biggest pumps, which have 3,000-horsepower motors.
Mr. Black followed. "There were wiggly things swimming in the water around our
feet," he recalled with a laugh. Mr. Robertson started four pumps that night,
though two developed problems and had to be shut down. Mr. Black returned to
Baton Rouge, where the emergency operations center is based, and did not get to
sleep until 3:30 a.m. Tuesday.
That afternoon, the helicopter took him back to New Orleans, to a part of
Interstate 610 just at the point that it dipped eerily into the floodwaters, and
where air boats would take him to the pumping station. But the boats were in
use, and so an Entergy employee gave him a ride in the bed of his pickup truck,
making his way through the deserted streets of Jefferson Parish.
Getting into the pumping station's control room, a lived-in place cooled with a
fan and currently stocked with cots and the military packages of meals ready to
eat, now involves walking on boards placed on a ladder laid flat between
staircases down to a walkway that is inundated. "Don't fall in the water," Mr.
Robertson warned, though the smell is warning enough. In the cavernous pump
room, some of the machines date back more than 60 years, elegant pumps with a
bold, futuristic beauty that recalls a time when industrial design and art were
one.
Mr. Black and Mr. Robertson have developed a quick friendship. But while Mr.
Black is a technophile and a tinkerer, Mr. Robertson blends technology with
intuition. When a worker came in to tell him one of the motors was running hot,
he ordered him to go back and test the temperature, literally by hand.
"Put your hand on it and count to 5," he said. "If you can hold it that long,
it's fine."
Mr. Robertson, 50, had ridden out the storm in Pumping Station 1, which is
downtown. "It was ugly," he said; the water poured in, and he and the rest of
the crew had to climb 30 feet to the plant's narrow catwalks for safety, where
they spent the first sleepless night in the heat and the dark, their arms hooked
over the railings so they would not fall into the swirling waters.
"I've never been in a situation where I felt I wouldn't live to see tomorrow,"
he said.
They were not rescued until last Wednesday morning. With his wife relocated to
be with a daughter, in Ville Platte, Mr. Robertson went back to Plant 6. "I
really do miss them, but this is very important," he said. "We're going to keep
fighting, pumping this water - I told my staff the biggest job in New Orleans is
getting Station 6 pumping right now."
"You're kicking butt," Mr. Black told him.
"If we don't pump this water out, we lose this city," Mr. Robertson said.
The work is a series of stops and starts, steps forward and back. Mr. Robertson
had started three of the plant's smaller pumps along with the two largest; he
took one of the two largest pumps out of service to address a leak in the
gearbox, which needed to be refilled with lubricant. It had to be cleaned and
dried.
The motors to raise the sluice gates were not working, which meant that the
water being pumped out had to escape from narrow openings around the gates.
That, in turn, caused the motors to work harder than they should and overheat.
On the spot, workers created a tool that would attach to a hand drill to turn
the mechanism.
At best, only 6 of the 15 pumps at Station 6 will be working in the near term,
because the older ones do not operate on the standard 60-hertz current that
flows through the nation's power grid. They require their own generator, which
will not be working for some time to come. But it is something. On the high side
of the canal, the water churned furiously.
At night, the pumping station is a noisy, brilliantly lit outpost in the middle
of a dark and silent ghost city. About 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Mr. Black left it
and caught a ride to the New Orleans offices of the Corps of Engineers, where a
late-night meeting was going on to discuss the issues still swirling around: the
overall "dewatering" process; the need to get a diesel generator to a bridge
across the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal so the bridge can be raised and allow
equipment through on barges. Mr. Black, clearly exhausted, sat down to take part
in the discussion.
The meeting broke up well after midnight. Even when the pumping begins in
earnest, there is a staggering amount of work to be done in New Orleans alone.
Colonel Wagenaar discussed the fact that there is ugliness to come, as well.
Debris is likely to crowd at the enormous intake tubes for the pumping plants,
including human remains. Though gratings at the mouth of the intake pipes will
prevent any bodies from being pulled into the works, that will inevitably add to
the lingering horror of the hurricane that seems to never end.
Restarting Pumps Required Pluck and Luck, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08pump.html
Gas Supply
Falls to Lowest Point in 5 Years
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By VIKAS BAJAJ
The nation's gasoline inventories fell to
their lowest levels in almost five years last week, the government said today,
quantifying for the first time Hurricane Katrina's impact on the nation's energy
supplies and production.
Americans bought and used about as much gasoline as they did a year earlier -
9.3 million barrels a day - in the week that ended last Friday, but gasoline
inventories fell 2.2 percent from the previous week because of supply and
production disruptions, the Energy Department reported. The figures did not
include the impact of the Labor Day holiday weekend, indicating that gasoline
stocks might have declined even further since then.
The hurricane dealt a severe blow to oil and gasoline production, refining and
distribution in the Gulf of Mexico region and energy companies are still trying
to recover significant lost capacity. For consumers, the disruptions meant high
retail prices and, in some areas, spot shortages of gasoline.
This morning, a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was selling for $3.03 on
average nationwide, down from $3.04 on Wednesday, according to AAA. Average
prices peaked at $3.06 on Monday and briefly spiked up to $4 to $5 in the last
week in some cities like Atlanta.
Gasoline futures for October delivery fell 1.22 cents, to $2.01 a gallon, on the
New York Mercantile Exchange around midday. Crude oil prices fell 47 cents, to
$63.90 a barrel.
Up to 10 refineries in the Gulf Coast that account for 10 percent of the
nation's capacity were shut down and two critical pipelines that bring gasoline
and other fuels to the South, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast were not operating at
full capacity for much of last week. Six refineries are still shut down and
about half of the gulf's oil and natural gas production also remains out of
service.
All told, gasoline inventories fell to 190.1 million barrels as of Friday, down
8.6 percent from the same period a year earlier. Crude oil inventories of 315
million barrels were up 13.1 percent from a year earlier and down 2 percent from
the previous week. Domestic oil production fell 3.5 percent from a year earlier,
to 5.1 million barrels a day.
Gas
Supply Falls to Lowest Point in 5 Years, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/business/08cnd-oil.html
Rescuers search door to door
Thu Sep 8, 2005
9:13 AM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Police and National
Guard troops planned a door-to-door search on Thursday for thousands of people
unable or unwilling to leave ruined New Orleans.
Boats continued to cruise the waters in search of the thousands feared dead from
Hurricane Katrina and the White House dispatched a team of top officials,
including Vice President Dick Cheney, to tour the destruction zone.
But the immediate focus 10 days after Katrina hit land and changed the face of
the U.S. Gulf Coast was evacuation.
Vice Admiral Thad Allen, the U.S. Coast Guard chief of staff named this week to
take over the federal response in New Orleans, said authorities would comb the
city block-by-block, knocking on doors to find stragglers.
"We need everybody out so we can continue with the work of restoring this city,"
Allen said on the CBS "Early Show."
About one million people have been displaced by the August 29 storm in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
But officials have said perhaps 10,000 people remain in the flooded city
surrounded by a toxic soup of garbage, human waste and floating corpses. The
survivors have been without water and electricity in oppressive heat for more
than a week since levee breaks flooded most of what had been home to 450,000
people.
Some are waiting to be rescued, others were staying in defiance of Mayor Ray
Nagin's mandatory evacuation order.
New Orleans Police Chief Edwin Compass said authorities were prepared to force
people to leave, but they have not yet finished voluntary evacuations. He told
NBC's "Today Show" police in the city renowned for its street parties were
well-rehearsed in dealing with unruly residents. "We're going to use those same
methods we use to control Mardi Gras."
HIGH COST, POLITICAL TOLL
The misery was unrelenting. Pumps worked to gradually drain the bacteria and
chemical-laced oily water away from the city, but far more were out of
commission than working. As much as 60 percent of New Orleans remained under
water.
Teams gathering bodies resorted to tying floating corpses to trees or fences for
future recovery. A morgue set up outside the city stood ready to receive more
than 5,000 bodies.
"It's my understanding FEMA has 25,000 body bags on hand," Bob Johannessen, a
spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.
He said it was not to be considered an indicator of the final death toll but "It
tells us we're prepared."
In neighboring Mississippi, ripped apart by the storm but spared the flooding
that has plagued New Orleans, the death toll stood at around 200.
"The 200 or just over 200 we think is a credible or reliable figure,"
Mississippi Gov Haley Barbour told NBC's "Today."
With the high death toll and a national recovery effort that may cost taxpayers
$150 billion there was widespread criticism of the federal response to the
disaster and the government's seeming lack of preparation ahead of the storm.
A CBS News poll said 65 percent Americans thought Bush was too slow to respond
to the disaster and 58 percent disapproved of his performance. Large majorities
said federal, state and local officials all acted too slowly.
FEMA, scorched by criticism of its performance, was handing out $2,000 debit
cards -- $100 million worth -- to thousands of survivors. At the Houston
Astrodome where 16,000 New Orleans evacuees are being housed, long lines formed
for the money.
Bush on Thursday asked Congress for $51.8 billion for the recovery, on top of
$10.5 billion approved by Congress last week. Federal disaster spending hit
about $2 billion per day over the weekend and could stay above $500 million for
some time, his budget director said.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
Cheney was to visit hard-hit Mississippi as well as New Orleans. He has kept a
low profile since the storm, but Bush asked him earlier this week to speed the
recovery efforts.
In addition, Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez,
Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Social Security Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart
are to travel to Houston, Louisiana, and Alabama on Thursday and Friday. They
were to see relief facilities and get first-hand accounts about damage and
recovery efforts.
"INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE"
Criticism of the speed and scope of the government's response came from members
of both political parties and the private sector.
The situation "amounts to a massive institutional failure," said Raymond
Offenheiser, president of the Oxfam America affiliate of the international
relief agency. Oxfam mounted the first domestic U.S. rescue in its 35-year
history in Mississippi.
"Before Katrina, we reserved our emergency response for countries that lack the
resources of the United States. If we've got this kind of failure at home, how
can we expect poor countries to do better?" he asked.
One stricken New Orleans suburb was dotted with Canadian flags after a Canadian
search-and-rescue team made it to the St. Bernard Parish five days before the
U.S. military, Louisiana state Sen. Walter Boasso said. He said the outlying
parish was largely ignored by the federal government.
"Why does it take them seven days to get the Army in?" Boasso asked.
There were signs of impatience from federal officials as well -- theirs was
directed at news coverage of the disaster. FEMA has excluded journalists from
recovery expeditions and asked them to not take pictures of the dead, drawing
protests from press-freedom advocates.
Leaders of Bush's Republican party said there would be a joint congressional
investigation into the government's hurricane response, to the disappointment of
minority Democrats who said an independent commission should investigate. Bush
has also said he would lead a probe.
(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in New Orleans, Jim Loney in Baton
Rouge, Adam Entous, Adam Tanner in Houston and Maggie Fox in Washington)
Rescuers search door to door, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T131416Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Jay-Z backs
Kanye West's telethon outburst
Thu Sep 8, 2005 4:06 AM ET
Reuters
By Gail Mitchell
LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Rap mogul Jay-Z is
standing behind Kanye West, who went off-script to declare that "George Bush
doesn't care about black people" during his appearance in last Friday's NBC
telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims.
"I'm backing Kanye 100%," Jay-Z told Billboard by phone from London. "This is
America. You should be able to say what you want to say. We have freedom of
speech."
Jay-Z is also West's boss in his capacity as president/CEO of Def Jam
Recordings. West's new album, "Late Registration," opened at No. 1 on the
Billboard 200 Wednesday.
During his Friday appearance, West added that America was set up "to help the
poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible."
Jay-Z said he shared some of West's views. "It's really numbing," he said. "You
can't believe it's happening in America. You wonder, what's going on? Why were
people so slow to react? I don't understand it."
Although Jay-Z said he hasn't "spoken to anyone about doing a concert event" to
benefit Katrina victims, he says he wants to speak with Sean "Diddy" Combs about
starting a fund exclusively to help blacks in times of crisis. "Just in case
anything like this happens in the future, we can do what the elder Bush and
(former President Bill) Clinton are doing for our people specifically."
Reuters/Billboard
Jay-Z
backs Kanye West's telethon outburst, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2005-09-08T080635Z_01_FOR829114_RTRIDST_0_ENTERTAINMENT-JAYZ-OUTBURST-DC.XML

Sandy Huffaker
Cagle
8 September 2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/huffaker.asp
Pianist : US president George W. Bush.
Music of New Orleans
reminds of what's lost
Thu Sep 8, 2005 12:45 AM ET
Reuters
By Chris Morris
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - In the
drowned city of New Orleans, Preservation Hall is still standing.
A story in Monday's Los Angeles Times said the fate of the historic jazz venue
on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter was still unknown. But -- in the
uncertainty of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and because of the dicey nature of
communications out of the city -- information about New Orleans is being passed
hand to hand, from one soul to the other.
Ben Jaffe -- whose family has operated Preservation Hall since 1961 as a temple
devoted to the city's traditional jazz music -- survived Katrina's blow,
according to Andy Hurwitz of Ropeadope Records in New York, who is working on a
remix project with the Preservation Hall label.
"He decided that he and his family had been through worse," Hurwitz wrote in an
e-mail last week, "so he rode out the actual storm, and both he and the hall
made it relatively unscathed. But just yesterday (August 31), he felt the need
to finally flee -- not because of the hurricane but because of the wild looting
and lawlessness. He said he was scared, and he's the baddest cat I know."
Shots of Preservation Hall are among the first and last things one sees in
Michael Murphy's new documentary "Make It Funky!" In an unsettling coincidence
of timing, the Triumph Films release opens Friday at the Chinese Theater in
Hollywood and the Quad Cinemas in Manhattan.
Murphy's film, like the all-star April 2004 concert that serves as its center,
was meant to be a celebration of New Orleans' fount of musical genius. Most of
the Crescent City's best-known and best-loved stars -- Allen Toussaint, Irma
Thomas, the Neville Brothers, Snooks Eaglin -- are seen in live performance.
It's a jubilant movie, but, in Katrina's aftermath, it jarringly serves to show
us all the more what's been lost in the destruction of New Orleans.
Murphy's walk through musical history makes the point that New Orleans music is
very much a form of street music. The town's sound was born on the pavement --
in the singing of slaves on Congo Square, in the playing of funeral parade
bands, in the rhythmic contests of Mardi Gras Indians.
And now one must wonder if that joyous noise will ever rise again out of those
now-inundated streets.
For the time being, at least, the only way we can honor the city's tradition is
to revisit it by dipping into the jazz of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and
Sidney Bechet; the R&B of Fats Domino, Professor Longhair and Dave Bartholomew;
the funk of the Meters and Dr. John.
Although closed indefinitely, the indomitable Preservation Hall has established
a fund devoted to the relief of the city's musicians. (Consult
http://www.preservationhall.com.) The fund will be sustained by the sale of
T-shirts emblazoned with a famed Armstrong song title, "Do You Know What It
Means to Miss New Orleans?"
Now, sadly, we will likely all know what it means.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
Music
of New Orleans reminds of what's lost, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2005-09-08T044549Z_01_HO817042_RTRIDST_0_ENTERTAINMENT-NEWORLEANS-DC.XML
US seeks
more NATO help on Katrina
Thu Sep 8, 2005 8:27 AM ET
Reuters
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States asked
NATO on Thursday for help in transporting European aid to victims of Hurricane
Katrina amid concern that assistance is not getting through to the devastated
region quickly enough.
U.S. ambassador Victoria Nuland asked allies at an emergency meeting to study "a
stronger logistical and transport role" for the 26-nation defense alliance in
shifting the mass of pledged European humanitarian aid, NATO and U.S. officials
said.
"Especially heavy sea-lift may be used," said one NATO official, who requested
anonymity. Some airlift assistance was also being examined.
NATO ambassadors were expected to take a decision on the request on Friday, and
a mission could be mobilised within three to five days of an agreement on what
was to be transported.
"There was broad support for this in the meeting today," a U.S. mission
spokesman said.
NATO, together with the European Union, is already acting as a clearing house
for European offers of help to Katrina victims ranging from medical supplies,
tents, water purification and high-speed pumps to diapers, gloves and coats.
Some European officials have cited snags in getting the aid through. One Swedish
plane laden with aid was kept waiting this week because it lacked approval to
land in the United States.
NATO nations have a number of "roll-on roll-off" ships suitable for delivering
bulky equipment.
The mission would be an early test of the alliance's much-heralded NATO Response
Force (NRF), a rapid reaction fighting unit created to allow it deploy in
trouble zones across the globe within a matter of days.
US
seeks more NATO help on Katrina, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T122751Z_01_FOR837734_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-NATO-DC.XML
Living hard to find in New Orleans
Thu Sep 8, 2005
8:32 AM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The living are no
longer easy to find in the swampy ruins of New Orleans.
Rescue boats staffed by police, sheriff's deputies, wildlife officers and
firefighters still fan out across parts of the devastated city where rooftops
poke through rancid waters. But 10 days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the
rescuers find very few people to save.
Those who wanted to get out had largely been found, said Gregg Brown, a game
warden from South Carolina.
"Those that don't want us to find them, they hide," he added.
The authorities in New Orleans on Wednesday warned they would eventually force
the few stragglers left in the deserted city to leave.
In the French Quarter, bruised by the hurricane but largely dry and intact, a
small group of eccentrics, aging hippies, artists and renegades remained,
dropping in to Johnny White's bar for a few beers before a police-enforced
curfew at 7 p.m.
Police officers from the New York Police Department hung around in a couple of
squad cars outside.
"I'm not leaving. What they going to do? Shoot me?" asked a local who asked not
to be named.
The bar's acting manager, Marcia Ramsey, said French Quarter residents were
negotiating with police to be allowed to stay, looking after the community and
helping with the cleanup of their home city.
"If they make us leave, they make us leave. There's not much we can do," Ramsey
shrugged. "I mean, we don't want to but it's their rules, not ours."
Out in flooded sections of town, stragglers and people hoping to be found are
few and far between. So are the bodies of the thousands that city officials fear
may have died.
Capt. Scott Powell of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources led a
small fleet of 14 boats manned by game wardens and New Orleans police officers
through parts of the city just south of Lake Pontchartrain on Wednesday.
FEW SIGNS OF LIFE
In the first days after arriving in New Orleans over the weekend, Powell's water
rescue squad brought 12 to 15 people a day to safety, he said. They also found a
lot of people who didn't want to come.
"We saw a lot of dead people, both in the water and in buildings," he added. In
one retirement home, the South Carolina game wardens reached a closed door on
the second floor that they believed had been used as a morgue for pensioners who
had died. The stench was so strong they left the door closed, game wardens said.
"You could smell it. There wasn't anybody alive in that building," said Brown.
A few days later, as the rescuers cruised slowly through flooded streets,
shouting "hello, hello," replies never came.
The only signs of life were a few squirrels jumping through tree branches that
stuck out of the water, an odd abandoned dog on a rooftop and newly hatched
tadpoles. Even the fish had died, floating on top of the murky mixture of water,
oil, sewage and household chemicals that covered more than half the city.
Leaking natural gas bubbled to the surface in places.
Many homes had holes punched in their roofs where people had clawed their way
out of their attics to safety when the waters first began to rise.
"I'd rather try," even if it meant finding nobody, a New Orleans police officer
said.
Living hard to find in New Orleans, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T123226Z_01_FOR835911_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RESCUERS-DC.XML
Hide and seek
in New Orleans storm effort
Thu Sep 8, 2005
6:01 AM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - National Guard troops
prepared to hunt on Thursday for thousands of people still clinging to life in
ruined New Orleans, as the White House sent more money and top officials to
Hurricane Katrina's destruction zone.
The New Orleans stragglers were but a fraction of the million people displaced
by the August 29 storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Their fate in what
was once one of Americas's favorite party cities was playing out in the
spotlight.
Officials have said perhaps 10,000 people remain in the flooded city surrounded
by a toxic soup of garbage, human waste and floating corpses. The survivors have
been without water and electricity in oppressive heat for more than a week since
levee breaks flooded most of what had been home to 450,000 people.
Eddie Compass, the New Orleans police chief, said there were residents who
wanted to leave and just waiting for help.
But some were staying in defiance of Mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation
order. "Those that don't want us to find them, they hide," said Gregg Brown, a
South Carolina game warden helping in the search.
Robert Johnson, 58, said he had no money and nowhere to go, and wanted to stay
to protect his home. "If I'm gonna be miserable I'd better be miserable right
here," he said.
The misery was unrelenting. Pumps worked to gradually drain the bacteria and
chemical-laced oily water away from the city, but far more were out of
commission than working. As much as 60 percent of New Orleans remained under
water.
Teams trying to find the thousands feared killed in the storm and its aftermath
resorted to tying floating corpses to trees or fences for future recovery. A
morgue set up outside the city stood ready to receive more than 5,000 bodies.
HIGH COST, POLITICAL TOLL
With a national recovery effort that may cost taxpayers $150 billion there was
widespread criticism of the U.S. government's response to the disaster and the
government's seeming lack of preparation ahead of the long-predicted storm.
U.S. President George W. Bush asked Congress on Thursday for $51.8 billion for
the recovery, on top of $10.5 billion approved by Congress last week. Federal
disaster spending hit about $2 billion per day over the weekend and could stay
above $500 million for some time, his budget director said.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Bush has asked to cut through any red tape
slowing the recovery, was due on Thursday to visit hard-hit Mississippi as well
as New Orleans.
In addition, Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez,
Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Social Security Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart
are to travel to Houston, Louisiana, and Alabama on Thursday and Friday. They
were to see relief facilities and get first-hand accounts about damage and
recovery efforts.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), scorched by criticism of its
performance, was handing out $2,000 debit cards -- $100 million worth -- to
thousands of survivors. At the Houston Astrodome where 16,000 New Orleans
evacuees are being housed, long lines formed for the money.
"INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE"
Criticism of the speed and scope of the government's response came from members
of both political parties and the private sector.
The situation "amounts to a massive institutional failure," said Raymond
Offenheiser, president of the Oxfam America affiliate of the international
relief agency. Oxfam mounted the first domestic U.S. rescue in its 35-year
history in Mississippi.
"Before Katrina, we reserved our emergency response for countries that lack the
resources of the United States. If we've got this kind of failure at home, how
can we expect poor countries to do better?" he asked.
A Canadian search-and-rescue team had made it to the flooded New Orleans suburb
of St. Bernard Parish five days before the U.S. military, Louisiana state Sen.
Walter Boasso said. "We've got Canadian flags flying everywhere," he said.
Bush's family also came in for criticism. A comment made earlier in the week by
his mother, Barbara Bush, was slammed on Internet sites and newspaper pages.
Speaking of evacuees in the Astrodome, the former first lady told a reporter in
Houston: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in
Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people
in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very
well for them."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan described her comments as "a personal
observation."
There were signs officials were growing impatient with news coverage of the
disaster. FEMA has excluded journalists from recovery expeditions and asked them
to not take pictures of the dead, drawing protests from press-freedom advocates.
NBC anchor Brian Williams wrote on the network's Web site that an out-of-town
police officer at a New Orleans fire scene pointed her weapon at media members
"armed only with notepads," and a National Guard sergeant interfered with
attempts to film members of the unit.
Leaders of Bush's Republican party said there would be a joint congressional
investigation into the government's hurricane response, to the disappointment of
minority Democrats who said an independent commission should investigate. Bush
has also said he would lead a probe.
Bush's response to the crisis was rated "bad" or "terrible" by 42 percent of
Americans surveyed for a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll released on Wednesday,
compared with 35 percent who said it was "good" or "great."
(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in New Orleans, Jim Loney in Baton
Rouge, Adam Entous, Adam Tanner in Houston and Maggie Fox in Washington)
Hide
and seek in New Orleans storm effort, R, 8.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T100203Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Shelters for Pets
Fill With Furry Survivors
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By DEBORAH BLUMENTHAL
HOUSTON, Sept. 7 - Peter, a yellow cockatiel,
came through the door of the Houston animal shelter from New Orleans perched on
his owner's finger. With pets barred from the bus trip, Lola, a green parrot,
made it hidden inside her owner's bra. And the Great Dane? Well, no one is quite
sure about him.
The Houston S.P.C.A. has opened its doors to almost 900 animals in recent days,
including cats, dogs, parrots, iguanas, a pig and, even temporarily, a pet chick
named Lucy, all belonging to hurricane survivors from Louisiana who are in homes
and shelters in Houston that do not allow pets.
"It's become our disaster by default," said Patricia E. Mercer, the president of
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals here.
In addition to untold numbers of pets killed, animals made homeless by the
hurricane are wandering hungry and confused throughout the Gulf Coast.
Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United
States, said, "In New Orleans alone, we think there are 50,000 pets."
Jane Garrison, who is working with a Humane Society rescue team in New Orleans,
said her best rescue was on Wednesday, when she heard a dog's cries and looked
up to see a Labrador mix marooned on the second-story awning of a house that was
completely crumbled.
"We went up by ladder and threw a leash around her neck," Ms. Garrison said.
"She jumped down into my partner's arms and immediately started licking her."
The Houston S.P.C.A. sent a staff member along with six members of Florida's
Broward County chapter to New Orleans to pick up homeless animals. "Hundreds of
people, if not thousands around the country, are working to save animals," Ms.
Mercer said. Louisiana State University has 300 animals, she said, and 500 are
being housed in Gonzales, La.
Jacque Meyer, executive director of the Greater Birmingham Humane Society who is
in Jackson, Miss., to help, said 30 dogs from the Gulfport, Miss., region whose
owners were killed were rounded up on Tuesday.
Some groups, like the North Shore Animal League on Long Island, have helped by
taking animals previously held in shelters in the hurricane areas to make room
for more animals, Ms. Meyer said.
The effort to find animals can be slow and sometimes unpredictable, said Dino
Vlachos, an animal rescuer from Atlanta who is in New Orleans.
"We just completed a rescue off the French Quarter where we were told there were
62 cats," Mr. Vlachos said Wednesday. "But when we got there we found 62 birds
and two goats."
He estimates that they have picked up 200 dogs and 250 cats since Monday. "But
we need help," he said. To join the effort, volunteers have to register with the
Humane Society at 1-800-HUMANE (1-800-486-2631).
Mr. Pacelle said: "The clock is ticking. We've had 2,000 calls from people who
have left their pets behind. We're too late for some, but we may be just in time
for others."
Mr. Pacelle said the Humane Society was "not getting the help we need from
local, state and the federal government."
"There are policemen and firemen out there who want to help," he said, "but the
order on high is to help people, not pets. Three days from now, there will be
massive die offs."
Initially, the society's efforts were directed at picking up animals at the
Houston Astrodome, and 400 owned animals at the Houston shelter now, Ms. Mercer
said, were picked up by volunteers who met rescue buses at the Astrodome,
Reliant Park and the George R. Brown Convention Center. The center has taken in
animals from evacuees who found the shelter on their own.
Patricia Simmons, 47, a nurse from New Orleans, was one of them. Ms. Simmons
stood in the lobby of the shelter on Monday holding a leash without a dog
attached to it. She and her roommate, Deneen Taylor, had just bid a bittersweet
goodbye to their dogs, Tiffany, 11m a Rottweiler-Doberman mix, and Cocoa, 1, a
chow, because there was no room for them at Ms. Taylor's family home in Houston.
Nettie Hock was also at the S.P.C.A. with her mother, also named Nettie Hock,
and her brother, Raymond. The family had come to visit Tanya, their 3-year-old
bright-eyed Pekingese who was soon to be given a foster home by Michael Stanley,
a lawyer from Sugar Land; his wife, Terrice; and their three children. The
Stanleys met the family while they were volunteering at the Astrodome and were
struck by how traumatized the elderly Mrs. Hock was without her beloved dog.
"She was sitting there in suspended animation," Mr. Stanley whispered, shaking
his head.
Ms. Mercer said the shelter was close to its capacity of 800 animals. Three
off-site overflow centers are open, and the group is working with others around
the country to find space.
Although none of the pets who have owners will be put up for adoption, the
shelter hopes to find foster homes for the animals where they can be cared for
until their owners are able to take them back.
In the meantime, accounts trickle in of how pets and their owners escaped the
wrath of the storm. A woman who came to claim her chow told Ms. Mercer, "We swam
out together, and she didn't give up on me, and I'm not giving up on her."
Shelters for Pets Fill With Furry Survivors, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08pets.html
Jazz Musicians
Ask if Their Scene Will
Survive
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By BEN RATLIFF
New Orleans is a jazz town, but also a funk
town, a brass-band town, a hip-hop town and a jam-band town. It has
international jazz musicians and hip-hop superstars, but also a true,
subsistence-level street culture. Much of its music is tied to geography and
neighborhoods, and crowds.
All that was incontrovertibly true until a week ago Monday. Now the future for
brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, to cite two examples, looks particularly
bleak if their neighborhoods are destroyed by flooding, and bleaker still with
the prospect of no new tourists coming to town soon to infuse their traditions
with new money. Although the full extent of damage is still unknown, there is
little doubt that it has been severe - to families, to instruments, to
historical records, to clubs, to costumes. "Who knows if there exists a Mardi
Gras Indian costume anymore in New Orleans?" wondered Don Marshall, director of
the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation.
"A lot of the great musicians came right out of the Treme neighborhood and the
Lower Ninth Ward," said the trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, temporarily speaking in
the past tense, by phone from Houston yesterday. Mr. Ruffins, one of the most
popular jazz musicians in New Orleans, made his name there partly through his
regular Thursday-night gig over the last 12 years at Vaughan's, a bar in the
Bywater neighborhood, where red beans and rice were served at midnight. Now
Vaughn's may be destroyed, and so may his new house, which is not too far from
the bar.
On Saturday evening Mr. Ruffins flew back to New Orleans from a gig in San
Diego, having heard the first of the dire storm warnings. He stopped at a
lumberyard to buy wood planks, boarded up 25 windows on his house, then went
bar-hopping and joked with his friends that where they were standing might be
under water the next day.
The next morning he fled to Baton Rouge with his family, and now he is in
Houston, about to settle into apartments, along with more than 30 relatives. He
is being offered plenty of work in Houston, and is already thinking ahead to
what he calls "the new New Orleans."
"I think the city is going to wind up being a smaller area," he said. "They'll
have to build some super levees.
"I think this will never happen again once they get finished," Mr. Ruffins
added. "We're going to get those musicians back, the brass bands, the jazz
funerals, everything."
Brass bands function through the year - not only through the annual Jazzfest,
where many outsiders see them, and jazz funerals, but at the approximately 55
social aid and pleasure clubs, each of which holds a parade once a year. It is
an intensely local culture, and has been thriving in recent years. Brass-band
music, funky and hard-hitting, can easily be transformed from the neighborhood
social to a club gig; brass bands like Rebirth, Dirty Dozen and the Soul Rebels
have done well by touring as commercial entities. Members of Stooges Brass Band
have ended up in Atlanta, and of Li'l Rascals in Houston; there could be a
significant brass-band diaspora before musicians find a way to get home to New
Orleans. (Rebirth's Web site, www.rebirthbrassband.com, has been keeping a count
of brass-band musicians who have been heard from.)
The Mardi Gras Indian tradition is more fragile. Monk Boudreaux is chief of the
Golden Eagles, one of the 40 or so secretive Mardi Gras tribes, who are known
not just for their flamboyant feathered costumes but for their competitive
parades through neighborhoods at Mardi Gras time. (Mardi Gras Indians are not
American Indians but New Orleanians from the city's working-class black
neighborhoods.) Mr. Boudreaux, now safe with his daughter in Mesquite, Tex.,
stayed put through the storm at his house in the Uptown neighborhood; when he
left last week, he said, the water was waist-high. He chuckled when asked if the
Mardi Gras Indian tradition could survive in exile. "I don't know of any other
Mardi Gras outside of New Orleans," he said.
These days a city is often considered a jazz town to the extent that its
resident musicians have international careers. The bulk of New Orleans jazz
musicians have shown a knack for staying local. (Twenty or so in the last two
decades, including several Marsalises, are obvious exceptions.)
But as everyone knows, jazz is crucial to New Orleans, and New Orleans was
crucial in combining jazz's constituent parts, its Spanish, French, Caribbean
and West African influences. The fact that so many musicians are related to one
or another of the city's great music families - Lastie, Brunious, Neville,
Jordan, Marsalis - still gives much of the music scene a built-in sense of
nobility. "Whereas New York has a jazz industry," said Quint Davis, director of
Jazzfest, "New Orleans has a jazz culture." (Speaking of Jazzfest, Mr. Davis was
not ready to discuss whether there will be a festival next April. "First I'm
dealing with the lives and subsistence of the people who produce it," he said.)
And most jazz in New Orleans has a directness about it. "Everyone isn't
searching for the hottest, newest lick," said Maurice Brown, a young trumpeter
from Chicago who had been rising through the ranks of the New Orleans jazz scene
for the last four years before the storm took his house and car. "People are
trying to stay true to the melody."
Gregory Davis, the trumpeter and vocalist for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, one of
the city's most successful groups, said the typical New Orleans musician was
vulnerable because of how he lives and works. (Mr. Davis's house is in the
Gentilly neighborhood; he spoke last week from his brother's home in Dallas.)
"A lot of these guys who are playing out there in the clubs are not home
owners," he said. "They're going to be at the mercy of the owners of those
properties. For some of them, playing in the clubs was the only means of earning
any money. If those musicians come back and don't have an affordable home,
that's a big blow."
Louis Edwards, a New Orleans novelist and an associate producer of the Jazz and
Heritage Festival, said, "No other city is so equipped to deal with this." A
French Quarter resident, Mr. Edwards was taking refuge last week at his mother's
house in Lake Charles, La.
"Think of the jazz funeral," he said. "In New Orleans we respond to the concept
of following tragedy with joy. That's a powerful philosophy to have as the
underpinning of your culture."
In the meantime, Mr. Boudreaux, chief of the Golden Eagles, has a feeling his
own Mardi Gras Indian costume is intact. He was careful to put it in a dry place
before he left home. "I just need to get home and get that Indian suit from on
top of that closet," he said.
Jazz
Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/arts/music/08jazz.html
Forced Evacuation
of a Battered New Orleans Begins
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEX BERENSON
and SEWELL CHAN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - With the waters inside
this city growing increasingly fetid and thousands of people still holding out,
New Orleans police officers began on Wednesday evening to force residents to
leave, including those living in dry and undamaged homes.
It was not clear how widespread the forced evacuations were. But earlier in the
day the city's police superintendent said that while his department would
concentrate first on removing those who wanted to leave, the hazards posed by
fires, waterborne diseases and natural-gas leaks had left the city with no
choice but to use force on those who resisted.
In at least one neighborhood, Bywater, a working-class area east of the French
Quarter, police officers and federal agents on Wednesday night began to press
hard for residents to evacuate. At two homes, police officers and emergency
service workers refused to leave until the two men living there agreed to go
with them, even though both men appeared healthy and said they had adequate
supplies.
Until now, city and state officials have implored residents to leave, but no one
has been forcibly removed. The announced change in policy - after an evacuation
order by Mayor C. Ray Nagin on Tuesday - came even as the floodwater receded
slightly and residents in some sections took small steps toward recovery,
cleaning debris from their streets and boarding up abandoned houses.
Some said they would fight the evacuations, potentially producing ugly
confrontations.
An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people remained inside New Orleans more than a week
after Hurricane Katrina hit, many in neighborhoods that are on high ground near
the Mississippi River.
But the number of dead still remained a looming and disturbing question.
In the first indication of how many deaths Louisiana alone might expect, Robert
Johannessen, a spokesman for the State Department of Health and Hospitals, said
on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had ordered 25,000
body bags. The official death toll remained at under 100.
In Washington, the House and Senate announced a joint investigation into the
government's response to the crisis. "Americans deserve answers," said a
statement by the two top-ranking Republicans, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and
Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader. "We must do all we can to learn from
this tragedy, improve the system and protect all of our citizens."
President Bush made plans to send Congress a request for $51.8 billion for
relief efforts, the second such request since the storm devastated the Gulf
Coast. The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the money would include
$50 billion for FEMA, $1.4 billion for the Department of Defense and $400
million for the Army Corps of Engineers. The request follows a $10.5 billion
package that Mr. Bush signed on Friday and is intended to address the immediate
needs of survivors.
The government continued its efforts to help evacuees. At the Astrodome in
Houston, where an estimated 15,000 New Orleans evacuees found shelter over the
weekend, the number had dwindled to only about 3,000 on Wednesday as people were
rapidly placed in apartments, volunteers' homes and hotels that had been
promised reimbursement by FEMA.
Michael D. Brown, the FEMA director, said his agency would begin issuing debit
cards, worth at least $2,000 each, to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies
for immediate needs. More than 319,000 people have already applied for federal
disaster relief.
"The concept is to get them some cash in hand," Mr. Brown said, "which allows
them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about what they need to have to
restart their lives."
As New Orleans officials grappled with how to make residents leave, new
government tests showed the danger of remaining.
In the first official confirmation of contaminants in the water covering the
city, federal officials said on Wednesday that they had found levels of E. coli
bacteria and lead 10 times higher than is considered safe. Those were the only
substances identified as potential health threats in tests of water conducted by
the Environmental Protection Agency at laboratories in Houston and Lafayette,
La.
Officials emphasized that as testing continued more substances were likely to be
found at harmful levels, especially from water taken near industrial sites.
"Human contact with the floodwater should be avoided as much as possible," the
environmental agency's administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said.
A spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said
state and local officials had reported three deaths in Mississippi and one in
Texas from exposure to vibrio vulnificus, a choleralike bacteria found in salt
water, which poses special risks for people with chronic liver problems.
With the overall death toll uncertain, Mr. Brown, the FEMA director, said in
Baton Rouge that the formal house-to-house search for bodies had begun at
midmorning. He said the temporary mortuary set up in St. Gabriel, La., was
prepared to receive 500 to 1,000 bodies a day, with refrigeration trucks on site
to hold the corpses.
"They will be processed as rapidly as possible," Mr. Brown said.
As it worked to remove the water inundating the city, the Corps of Engineers
said that one additional pumping station, No. 6, at the head of the 17th Street
Canal, had started up, and that about 10 percent of the city's total pumping
capacity was in operation. But the corps added that it was dealing with a new
problem: how to prevent corpses from being sucked to the grates at the pump
inlets.
"We're expending every effort to try to ensure that we protect the integrity of
remains as we get this water out of the city," said John S. Rickey, chief of
public affairs for the corps. "We're taking this very personally. This is a very
deep emotional aspect of our work down there."
As the forcible removal of New Orleans residents also threatened to become an
emotional issue, the city's superintendent of police, P. Edwin Compass III, said
at a news conference on Wednesday morning that such evacuations would not begin
until the police had helped the thousands of people who wanted leave.
"Once all the voluntary evacuations have taken place," Mr. Compass said, "then
we'll concentrate our efforts and our forces to mandatorily evacuating
individuals."
But on Wednesday night, a city police officer and a dozen heavily armed
immigration agents broke into a house in Bywater without knocking or announcing
their presence, saying they were looking for a looter. The house was clean and
neat and the only person inside, Anthony Paul, lived there, according to his
state-issued identification.
Although Mr. Paul appeared to be in good health and had plenty of food and
water, a psychologist with an emergency services team that was called to the
house said she would not leave until Mr. Paul agreed to evacuate. The
psychologist said that Mr. Paul was mentally stable, but that she wanted him to
leave for his own safety. "If I'm leaving, you guys are leaving," said the
psychologist, who identified herself only as Rain.
At one point Mr. Paul said, "You're going to have to kill me to get me out of
this house." But after nearly an hour, he agreed to leave and packed a single
backpack.
"I didn't want to leave right now," he said as he prepared to board an
ambulance. "If I had a choice, yeah, I would have rode it out."
The psychologist said that she viewed the evacuation as voluntary and that Mr.
Paul would eventually appreciate that he had made the right choice. "This is why
I wake up in the morning," she said.
Among the authorities, though, some confusion lingered on Wednesday about how a
widespread evacuation by force would work, and how much support it would get at
the federal and state level. Mayor Nagin told the police and the military on
Tuesday to remove all residents for their own safety, and on Wednesday, Mr.
Compass said state laws gave the mayor the authority to declare martial law and
order the evacuations.
"There's a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal authority for
mandatory evacuations," Mr. Compass said. "We'll use the minimum amount of force
necessary."
But because the New Orleans Police Department has only about 1,000 working
officers, the city is largely in the hands of National Guard troops and
active-duty soldiers.
State officials said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco could tell the Guard to
carry out the forced removals, but they stopped short of a commitment to do so.
In Washington, Lt. Gen. Joseph R. Inge, deputy commander of the United States
Northern Command, said regular troops "would not be used" in any forced
evacuation.
The state disaster law does not supersede either the state or federal
Constitutions, said Kenneth M. Murchison, a law professor at Louisiana State
University. But even so, Mr. Nagin's decision could be a smart strategy that
does not violate fundamental rights, Professor Murchison said.
"What I suspect is that if they do forcible evacuations, the authorities will
tell the residents that they must leave and that they will arrest them if they
don't," Professor Murchison said. "I would suspect that once they are moved to a
location outside of New Orleans, the authorities will release them. It would
then be up to the district attorney someday to decide whether to prosecute them
or not. But in the meantime, the authorities sure aren't going to let anyone
back in."
Professor Murchison said that anyone even seeking to challenge the forcible
evacuations on constitutional grounds would have to travel to Baton Rouge, where
the federal judges from the Eastern District of Louisiana, based in New Orleans,
have relocated.
While many New Orleans residents said they would not go gently, others appeared
disheveled, weak and ready to evacuate.
Sitting under an umbrella in a filthy parking lot at the eastern edge of
Bywater, Anthony Washington said on Wednesday morning that he worried he would
not be able to reach his family if he left the city. But after a reporter
offered him the chance to call his sister and explain where he was, he said he
would leave. By midafternoon Mr. Washington had boarded a bus for the city's
convention center, where evacuees were being taken.
"I don't have nothing here," he said.
Alex Berenson reported from New Orleans for this
article,Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La., andMatthew L. Wald from Vicksburg,
Miss.
Forced Evacuation of a Battered New Orleans Begins, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08storm.html
Macabre Reminder:
The Corpse on Union Street
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - In the downtown
business district here, on a dry stretch of Union Street, past the Omni Bank
automated teller machine, across from a parking garage offering "early bird"
rates: a corpse. Its feet jut from a damp blue tarp. Its knees rise in rigor
mortis.
Six National Guardsmen walked up to it on Tuesday afternoon and two blessed
themselves with the sign of the cross. One soldier took a parting snapshot like
some visiting conventioneer, and they walked away. New Orleans, September 2005.
Hours passed, the dusk of curfew crept, the body remained. A Louisiana state
trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of
several in that area. The police marked it with traffic cones maybe four days
ago, he said, and then he joked that if you wanted to kill someone here, this
was a good time.
Night came, then this morning, then noon, and another sun beat down on a dead
son of the Crescent City.
That a corpse lies on Union Street may not shock; in the wake of last week's
hurricane, there are surely hundreds, probably thousands. What is remarkable is
that on a downtown street in a major American city, a corpse can decompose for
days, like carrion, and that is acceptable.
Welcome to New Orleans in the post-apocalypse, half baked and half deluged:
pestilent, eerie, unnaturally quiet.
Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then
return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the interstate and no one
cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been
replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.
The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into
acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had
guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an
electronics store.
A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window
to ask a soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"
Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here - not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda,
here - is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane's aftermath:
floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the
living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation
is numb with post-traumatic shock.
Wandering New Orleans this week, away from news conferences and
search-and-rescue squads, has granted haunting glimpses of the past, present and
future, with the rare comfort found in, say, the white sheet that flaps, not in
surrender but as a vow, at the corner of Poydras Street and St. Charles Avenue.
"We Shall Survive," it says, as though wishing past the battalions of bulldozers
that will one day come to knock down water-corrupted neighborhoods and rearrange
the Louisiana mud for the infrastructure of an altogether different New Orleans.
Here, then, the New Orleans of today, where open fire hydrants gush the last
thing needed on these streets; where one of the many gag-inducing smells - that
of rancid meat - is better than MapQuest in pinpointing the presence of a
market; and where images of irony beg to be noticed.
The Mardi Gras beads imbedded in mud by a soldier's boot print. The "take-away"
signs outside restaurants taken away. The corner kiosk shouting the Aug. 28
headline of New Orleans's Times-Picayune: "Katrina Takes Aim."
Rush hour in downtown now means pickups carrying gun-carrying men in sunglasses,
S.U.V.'s loaded with out-of-town reporters hungry for action, and the occasional
tank. About the only ones commuting by bus are dull-eyed suspects shuffling
two-by-two from the bus-and-train terminal, which is now a makeshift jail.
Maybe some of them had helped to kick in the portal to the Williams Super Market
in the once-desirable Garden District. And who could blame them if all they
wanted was food in those first desperate days? The interlopers took the water,
beer, cigarettes and snack food. They did not take the wine or the New Orleans
postcards.
On the other side of downtown across Canal Street in the French Quarter, the
most raucous and most unreal of American avenues is now little more than an
empty alley with balconies.
The absence of sweetly blown jazz, of someone cooing "ma chère," of men sporting
convention nametags and emitting forced guffaws - the absence of us - assaults
the senses more than any smell.
Past the famous Cafe du Monde, where a slight breeze twirls the overhead fans
for no one, past the statue of Joan of Arc gleaming gold, a man emerges from
nothing on Royal Street. He is asked, "Where's St. Bernard Avenue?"
"Where's the ice?" he asks in return, eyes narrowed in menace. "Where's the ice?
St. Bernard's is that way, but where's the ice?"
In Bywater and the surrounding neighborhoods, the severely damaged streets bear
the names of saints who could not protect them. Whatever nature spared, human
nature stepped up to provide a kind of democracy in destruction.
At the Whitney National Bank on St. Claude Avenue, diamond-like bits of glass
spill from the crushed door, offering a view of the complementary coffee table.
A large woman named Phoebe Au - "Pronounced 'Awe,' " she says - materializes to
report that men had smashed it in with a truck. She fades into the
neighborhood's broken brick, and a thin woman named Toni Miller materializes to
correct the record.
"They used sledgehammers," she said.
Farther down St. Claude Avenue, where tanks rumble past a smoldering building,
the roads are cluttered with vandalized city buses. The city parked them on the
riverbank for the hurricane, after which some hoods took them for fare-free joy
rides through lawless streets, and then discarded them.
On Clouet Street, where a days-old fire continues to burn where a warehouse once
stood, a man on a bicycle wheels up through the smoke to introduce himself as
Strangebone. The nights without power or water have been tough, especially since
the police took away the gun he was carrying - "They beat me and threatened to
kill me," he says - but there are benefits to this new world.
"You're able to see the stars," he says. "It's wonderful."
Today, law enforcement troops began lending muscle to Mayor C. Ray Nagin's vow
to evacuate by force any residents too attached to their pieces of the toxic
metropolis. They searched the streets for the likes of Strangebone, and that
woman whose name sounds like Awe.
Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled
black water over someone's corpse.
Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08orleans.html

Chart
Alarm Growing on Storm's Cost for
Agriculture
NYT 8.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/business/08farm.html
Alarm Growing
on Storm's Cost for
Agriculture
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
and JEFF BAILEY
CHICAGO, Sept. 7 - Two weeks from the
beginning of harvest season, there is a mounting sense of alarm over a potential
financial blow to American farming. Farmers in the breadbasket states rely on
barges to carry their corn, soybeans and wheat down the Mississippi River, but
cannot be certain that the Port of New Orleans, a crucial link to export markets
that was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, will reopen anytime soon.
In the gulf states, the storm left farmers reeling from numerous other problems,
including a lack of electricity to restore chicken and dairy plants to service,
and a shortage of diesel fuel needed for trucks to save dying cattle stranded on
the breached levees.
For all of them, it is a race against time.
Farmers in some states in the Midwest had already endured the worst drought in
almost 20 years. The storm, moreover, flattened sugar cane and rice fields in
the South. And farmers nationwide must pay more for fuel to bring the harvest in
and transport crops, lowering the profit they will earn when they sell them. Now
Hurricane Katrina is adding to the pain by threatening to curtail exports.
In all, the hurricane will cause an estimated $2 billion in damage to farmers
nationwide, according to an early analysis by the American Farm Bureau
Federation. The estimate includes $1 billion in direct losses, as well as $500
million in higher fuel and energy prices.
Midwestern farmers are threatened by additional losses. Farmers are clearing out
stored corn and soybeans to prepare for this year's harvest, which they normally
begin exporting at the end of September. But the hurricane caused substantial
damage to waterways and grain-handling facilities, and hundreds of barges have
been backing up on the Mississippi River with no place to go.
The latest blow to the farm economy comes at a delicate time for the Bush
administration, which has been pushing to trim farm subsidies to comply with
mounting pressure from the World Trade Organization to level the playing field
for producers in developing countries.
The post-Katrina troubles of American farmers could make it tougher for the
administration to push through an overhaul of subsidies that is being sought by
developing countries. That, in turn, could affect the administration's effort to
win new export markets for American production. Some 27 percent of American farm
receipts come from exports.
Higher transportation and logistical costs - including diesel fuel, rail costs
and barge rates - are slicing prices producers get for a variety of commodities.
Corn prices, for example, have dropped 15 to 20 cents a bushel, or about a 9
percent decrease, based on Wednesday's price of $2.17 a bushel on the Chicago
Board of Trade, said Jerry Gidel, an analyst at North America Risk Management
Services in Chicago.
The farm sector's problems are in sharp contrast to its good fortune last year.
Driven by record-large crops, high beef prices and generous farm subsidies, net
farm income hit a record $82.5 billion in 2004. Now the hurricane will put
disaster relief programs into play and depress commodity prices, leading to
billions of dollars more in government payments to farmers.
Next week, the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are expected to issue
reports on how they plan to cut $3 billion in Agriculture Department programs
from the federal budget.
Farm groups have been pushing for any trims to take place in the food stamps and
conservation programs, while the Bush administration has proposed ending the
cotton subsidy program, which the World Trade Organization has ruled illegal in
parts after complaints from Brazil and other cotton producers.
But the devastation wrought by the storm - and the ensuing economic impact on
farmers both near the gulf and several states away - could alter the debate in
Washington and hamper crucial trade talks scheduled for a December meeting of
the World Trade Organization in Hong Kong.
"Without question, this makes the reforms that a lot of the rest of the world
would like to see happen here in the U.S. a lot more difficult," said Clayton
Yeutter, a former secretary of agriculture and United States trade
representative. "The general psychology of the event is clearly negative."
In recent weeks, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns has been crisscrossing the
nation talking to farmers. His message is the need to reduce farm subsidies both
to open more export markets to American farmers and to comply with international
free trade agreements. "There is a real conditioning going on here," said Keith
Bolin, a corn and hog farmer and president of the American Corn Growers
Association, who attended a session last week in Decatur, Ill., three days after
the hurricane. "Get used to less, get used to less. That's the message."
After two failed efforts at trade negotiations in the so-called Doha round,
another failure in Hong Kong could be devastating to developing countries, which
are desperate to lift their economies through access to markets in Europe and
the United States.
The World Trade Organization is working to remove $280 billion in subsidies
among the world's richest countries. Of that, American taxpayers and consumers
paid $47 billion to farmers last year, an amount equal to about 20 percent of
farm receipts, according to the World Bank.
But Mr. Yeutter and others said the emotional and financial impact of the
hurricane on farmers will be tough to ignore in Washington.
The American Farm Bureau Federation estimated that Louisiana would lose two
million tons, or 20 percent, of its sugar cane crop. That would reduce the total
United States sugar harvest by 3.5 percent, according to the analysis.
In Franklinton, La., a milk-processing plant is struggling without power to dump
60,000 gallons of stored milk that has gone bad. At some nearby Louisiana dairy
farms, farmers have continued to milk cows, but with nowhere to sell the milk,
they have simply dumped it down the drain.
Some 25 million pounds of milk at plants in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi
could be lost over the next month if the plants do not return to operation soon,
said Michael Danna, a spokesman for the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation.
Louisiana sugar cane farmers are worried that they may have to delay delivering
their crop to mills while they wait for fields to dry long enough to apply an
agent that ripens sugar cane, increasing the sugar content and making the crop
more salable.
The delay could put the farmers dangerously close to the onset of winter frost,
Mr. Danna said.
In Covington, La., thousands of cows are stranded in two feet of brackish water
on the levees near New Orleans. Mike Strain, a veterinarian and co-owner of the
Strain Cattle Company, struggled Wednesday to find a plane to airlift hay into
the area to give his remaining 400 head of cattle "enough strength and energy to
get them out of there." Already, well more than half of the 1,100 animals in his
herd have perished, costing his company $2 million in uninsured losses.
"The timetable for survival is diminishing rapidly," said Dr. Strain, who is
also a state legislator. "The death loss of cattle in southeast Louisiana will
be 80,000 to 100,000 head when it's all tallied. That's 50 to 70 percent of the
herd here, and that's before disease sets in."
Dr. Strain's rescue efforts are being severely hampered is a lack of diesel fuel
to move the cattle to a ranch 100 miles north. "There is no fuel in the service
stations that have power. That's just unconscionable."
Government officials are hoping for the best. Mr. Johanns, the agriculture
secretary, said Wednesday that he was encouraged by the progress so far in
restoring the flow of commerce on the river. He said ships are moving again and
the majority of grain elevators in the region are resuming operations, at 63
percent of capacity.
"We are assuring our international customers that we expect minimal
disruptions," Mr. Johanns said in a statement. He said workers were focused on
restoring power, ensuring adequate staffing and reinstalling navigational aids
to allow safe passage of ships.
Given a nighttime curfew, little electric power and potentially hazardous and
disease-ridden working conditions, the issue of who will operate the ports
remains unclear, with some analysts saying the military or National Guard may
have to step in.
A union representative expressed confidence Wednesday that such severe measures
would not be needed. The International Longshoreman Association's more than 500
regular New Orleans dock workers - nearly all of them evacuated to other cities
- could be ready to work there "immediately," said Benny Holland, vice president
of the union. Additional workers are available, if needed, from regional ports,
like Gulfport, Miss., that are not operating, he said.
Most nations that import large amounts of agricultural commodities shipped
through New Orleans and other gulf ports have plenty of stockpiles to ride out
any disruption in shipping, the Agriculture Department's chief economist, Keith
Collins, said in an interview. "I don't think any of them are in any kind of
jeopardy," he said.
China, the largest buyer of United States soybeans, for instance, is estimated
to have 4.1 million tons on hand, equal to about 10 percent of its annual
consumption. Japan, the biggest foreign buyer of American corn, has about 1.3
million tons in storage. "That's a typical number for them," Mr. Collins said.
Some of the slaughtered chicken in storage at ports in New Orleans and Gulfport
was lost, but production, which totals about 8.8 billion broilers a year in the
United States, is little affected.
Alarm
Growing on Storm's Cost for Agriculture, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/business/08farm.html
After the Storm, the Swindlers
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Even as millions of Americans rally to make
donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Internet is brimming with
swindles, come-ons and opportunistic pandering related to the relief effort in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. And the frauds are more varied and more
numerous than in past disasters, according to law enforcement officials and
online watchdog groups.
Florida's attorney general has already filed a fraud lawsuit against a man who
started one of the earliest networks of Web sites - katrinahelp.com,
katrinadonations.com and others - that stated they were collecting donations for
victims of the storm.
In Missouri, a much wider constellation of Internet sites - with names like
parishdonations.com and katrinafamilies.com - displayed pictures of the
flood-ravaged South and drove traffic to a single site, InternetDonations.org, a
nonprofit entity with apparent links to white separatist groups.
The registrant of those Web sites was sued by the state of Missouri yesterday
for violating state fund-raising law and for "omitting the material fact that
the ultimate company behind the defendants' Web sites supports white supremacy."
Late yesterday afternoon, the F.B.I. put the number of Web sites claiming to
deal in Katrina information and relief - some legitimate, others not - at "2,300
and rising." Dozens of suspicious sites claiming links to legitimate charities
are being investigated by state and federal authorities. Also under
investigation are e-mail spam campaigns using the hurricane as a hook to lure
victims to reveal credit card numbers to thieves, as well as phony hurricane
news sites and e-mail "updates" that carry malicious code designed to hijack a
victim's computer.
"The numbers are still going up," said Dan Larkin, the chief of the F.B.I.'s
Internet Crime Complaint Center in West Virginia. Mr. Larkin said that the
amount of suspicious, disaster-related Web activity is higher than the number of
swindles seen online after last year's tsunami in Southeast Asia. "We've got a
much higher volume of sites popping up," he said.
The earliest online frauds began to appear within hours of Katrina's passing.
"It was so fast it was amazing," said Audri Lanford, co-director of
ScamBusters.org, an Internet clearinghouse for information on various forms of
online fraud. "The most interesting thing is the scope," she said. "We do get a
very good feel for the quantity of scams that are out there, and there's no
question that this is huge compared to the tsunami."
By the end of last week, Ms. Landford's group had logged dozens of
Katrina-related scams and spam schemes. The frauds ranged from opportunistic
marketing (one spam message offered updates on the post-hurricane situation,
with a link that led to a site peddling Viagra) to messages purporting to be
from victims, or families of victims.
"This letter is in request for any help that you can give," reads one crude
message that was widely distributed online. "My brother and his family have lost
everything they have and come to live with me while they looks for a new job."
Several antivirus software companies have warned of e-mail "hurricane news
updates" that lure users to Web sites capable of infecting computers with a
virus that allow hackers to gain control of their machines. And numerous
scammers have seeded the Internet with e-mail "phishing" messages that purport
to be from real relief agencies, taking recipients to what appear to be
legitimate Web sites, where credit card information is collected from unwitting
victims who think they are donating to hurricane relief.
On Sunday, the Internet security company Websense issued an alert regarding a
phishing campaign that lured users to a Web site hosted in Brazil and was
designed to look like a page operated by the Red Cross. Users who submitted
their credit card numbers, expiration dates, and PIN numbers via the Web form
were then redirected to the legitimate Red Cross Web site, making the ruse
difficult to detect. The security company Sophos warned of a similar phishing
campaign on Monday.
"They're tugging at people's heartstrings," said Tom Mazur, a spokesman for the
United States Secret Service. Mr. Mazur said there were "a number of instances
that we're looking into with this type of fraud, both domestically and
overseas," but he would not provide specifics.
The lawsuit filed in Florida last Friday accused Robert E. Moneyhan, a
51-year-old resident of Yulee, Fla., of registering several Katrina-related
domain names - including KatrinaHelp.com, KatrinaDonations.com,
KatrinaRelief.com and KatrinaReliefFund.com - as early as Aug. 28, even before
the hurricane had hit the Louisiana coast.
By Aug. 31, according to the Florida attorney general, Charles J. Crist Jr., Mr.
Moneyhan's sites had begun asking visitors to "share YOUR good fortune with
Hurricane Katrina's victims." A "Donate" button then took payments through a
PayPal account that Mr. Moneyhan had set up.
Mr. Moneyhan did not respond to numerous phone calls and e-mail messages, but
the Web site names in question are now owned by Project Care.com, a loose
collection of Web sites that is using the Katrina sites as an information center
for hurricane victims.
Kevin Caruso, the proprietor of Project Care.com, said that he had offered to
buy the sites from Mr. Moneyhan on Sept. 2, but that Mr. Moneyhan, distressed
over the lawsuit, simply donated them to Project Care without charge. Mr. Caruso
also said that after several phone conversations, he believed that Mr. Moneyhan,
was "trying to help the Hurricane Katrina survivors, but did not have the
experience to proceed properly."
The lawsuit, however, states that Mr. Moneyhan had attempted to sell his
collection of Katrina-related domain names on Sept. 1 "to the highest bidder."
The suit seeks $10,000 in civil penalties and restitution for any consumers who
may have donated to the Web sites while they were controlled by Mr. Moneyhan.
Jay Nixon, the Missouri attorney general, sued to shut down one of the more
bizarre fundraising efforts yesterday. A state circuit court granted a temporary
restraining order against Internet Donations Inc., the entity behind a dozen Web
sites erected over the last several days purporting to collect donations for
victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Also named in the Missouri suit, which seeks monetary penalties from the
defendants, is the apparent operator of the donation sites, Frank Weltner, a St.
Louis resident and radio talk show personality who operates a Web site called
JewWatch.com.
That site - which indexes Adolf Hitler's writings, transcripts of anti-Semitic
radio broadcasts and other materials, according to the Anti-Defamation League -
attracted headlines last year when it appeared at or near the top of Google
search results for the query "Jew." It remains the No. 2 search result today.
Most of Mr. Weltner's Katrina-related Web sites - which include
KatrinaFamilies.com, Katrina-Donations.com, and NewOrleansCharities.com - appear
to have been registered using DomainsByProxy.com, a service that masks the
identity of a domain name registrant. However, Mr. Weltner's name appeared on
public documents obtained through the Web site of the Missouri Secretary of
State yesterday. Those documents indicated that Mr. Weltner had incorporated
Internet Donations as a nonprofit entity last Friday.
The various Web sites, which use similar imagery and slight variations on the
same crude design, all point back to InternetDonations.org. There, visitors
interested in donating to the Red Cross, Salvation Army, or other relief
organizations are told that "we can collect it for you in an easy one-stop
location."
It is unclear whether any of the sites successfully drew funds from any donors,
or if Mr. Weltner, who did not respond to e-mail messages and could not be
reached by phone, had channeled any proceeds to the better-known charities named
on his site. But the restraining order issued yesterday enjoins Mr. Weltner and
Internet Donations Inc. from, among other things, charitable fundraising in
Missouri, and "concealing, suppressing or omitting" the fact that donations
collected were intended "for white victims only."
"It's the lowest of the low when someone solicits funds" this way, Mr. Nixon
said in an interview prior to announcing the lawsuit. "We don't want one more
penny from well-meaning donors going through this hater."
After
the Storm, the Swindlers, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/technology/08fraud.ready.html
Democrats Step Up Criticism
of White House Response
September 8, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - After 10 days of often
uncertain responses to the Bush administration's management of Hurricane
Katrina, Democratic leaders unleashed a burst of attacks on the White House on
Wednesday, saying the wreckage in New Orleans raised doubts about the country's
readiness to endure a terrorist attack and exposed ominous economic rifts that
they said had worsened under five years of Republican rule.
From Democratic leaders on the floor of Congress, to a speech by the Democratic
National Committee chairman at a meeting of the National Baptist Convention in
Miami, to four morning television interviews by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton,
Democrats offered what was shaping up as the most concerted attack that they had
mounted on the White House in the five years of the Bush presidency.
"Oblivious. In denial. Dangerous," Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of
California and the House minority leader, said of President Bush as she stood in
front of a battery of uniformed police officers and firefighters in a Capitol
Hill ceremony that had originally been scheduled to commemorate the fourth
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Americans should now harbor no illusions about the government's ability to
respond effectively to disasters," she said. "Our vulnerabilities were laid
bare."
Former Senator John Edwards, a likely candidate for president in 2008 and the
Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee in 2004, argued that the breakdown
in New Orleans illustrated the central theme of his national campaigns: the
nation has been severed into two Americas.
"The truth is the people who suffer the most from Katrina are the very people
who suffer the most every day," Mr. Edwards said in a speech in North Carolina
on Wednesday, according to a transcript provided by his office.
And Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in
2004, said in an interview: "It's a summary of all that this administration is
not in touch with and has faked and ducked and bobbed over the past four years.
What you see here is a harvest of four years of complete avoidance of real
problem solving and real governance in favor of spin and ideology."
The display of unity was striking for a party that has been adrift since Mr.
Kerry's defeat, struggling to reach consensus on issues like the war in Iraq and
the Supreme Court nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. The aggressiveness was
evidence of what Republicans and Democrats said was the critical difference
between the hurricane and the Sept. 11 attacks: Democrats appear able to
question the administration's competence without opening themselves to attacks
on their patriotism.
Not insignificantly, they have been emboldened by the fact that Republicans have
also been critical of the White House over the past week, and by the perception
that this normally politically astute and lethal administration has been
weakened and seems at a loss as it struggles to manage two crises: the aftermath
of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast and the political difficulties that it has
created for Mr. Bush in Washington.
Their response may have allowed the Democrats to seize the issue that
Republicans had hammered them with in the past two elections: national security.
"Our government failed at one of the most basic functions it has - providing for
the physical safety of our citizens," Senator Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat who
is considering a run for president in 2008, declared in a speech on the Senate
floor.
The Democrats' aggressiveness is not without its risks. The White House has been
seeking to minimize the criticisms of Mr. Bush by portraying them as partisan,
and some prominent Democrats had earlier avoided going after Mr. Bush on this
issue, aware of what the Republicans were trying to accomplish.
At a contentious press briefing on Wednesday, the White House spokesman, Scott
McClellan, used the phrase "blame game" eight separate times as he tried to push
back on criticism of the White House effort.
Representative J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, struck a similar theme,
saying: "Some people are really very anxious to start pointing fingers and
playing the blame game. I think we need to get our work done."
Mr. McClellan did not respond to e-mails seeking a response to the Democratic
criticisms. But in a sign of the White House effort to move the dispute out of
the Oval Office and try to cast the argument in partisan terms, the Republican
National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, issued a statement assailing Democrats
like Ms. Pelosi for "pointing fingers in a shameless effort to tear us apart."
Mrs. Clinton, in back-to-back television interviews Wednesday morning, angrily
dismissed those kinds of attacks as a diversion from legitimate attempts by
critics to point up shortcomings.
"That's what they always do; I've been living with that kind of rhetoric for the
last four and a half years," Mrs. Clinton, Democrat of New York, said on the
"Today" show. "It's time to end it. It's time to actually show this government
can be competent."
The Democratic reaction took many forms, from urging campaign contributors to
give money to hurricane victims, to proposing legislation to provide aid to
stricken areas, as Mr. Kerry did, to criticizing the Bush administration for
cuts it had made to the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as
Mrs. Clinton did. In one less-noted gesture, Al Gore, the former vice president,
chartered a private jet and flew doctors to storm-stricken areas.
The Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, said this could be a
transitional moment for his party. "The Democratic Party needs a new direction,"
he said. "And I think it's become clear what the direction is: restore a moral
purpose to America. Rebuild America's psyche."
"This is deeply disturbing to a lot of Americans, because it's more than
thousands of people who get killed; it's about the destruction of the American
community," Mr. Dean said. "The idea that somehow government didn't care until
it had to for political reasons. It's appalling."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: "The powerful winds
of this storm have torn away that mask that has hidden from our debates the many
Americans who are left out and left behind."
For all the turmoil, Republican House leaders said Wednesday that they were
confident it would not translate into a shift in power - if only, they argued,
because there are not enough truly competitive seats next year to provide an
opportunity for Democrats.
"Democrats throw stuff at the wall almost every week looking for something to
stick," said Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, head of the National
Republican Congressional Committee. "This is something they have now chosen to
politicize during a national disaster, versus let's get people taken care of and
then move on to what we have learned from it."
Democrats Step Up Criticism of White House Response, NYT, 8.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08democrats.html
Barbara Bush
Calls Evacuees Better Off
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - As President Bush
battled criticism over the response to Hurricane Katrina, his mother declared it
a success for evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway," saying on Monday that
many of the poor people she had seen while touring a Houston relocation site
were faring better than before the storm hit.
"What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas,"
Barbara Bush said in an interview on Monday with the radio program
"Marketplace." "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality."
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."
Mrs. Bush toured the Astrodome complex with her husband, former President George
Bush, as part of an administration campaign throughout the Gulf Coast region to
counter criticism of the response to the storm. Former President Bush and former
President Bill Clinton are helping raise money for the rebuilding effort.
White House officials did not respond on Tuesday to calls for comment on Mrs.
Bush's remarks.
Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07barbara.html
The blame game
Sep 7th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
Most of those in need of food, water and
medical help after Hurricane Katrina have now been reached, engineers have
started to pump water out of New Orleans, and the authorities have begun
forcibly evacuating residents who refuse to leave. Who is to blame for the
botched relief effort: George Bush, local officials, or no one in particular?
EPA
What took you so long?
THE evacuation of New Orleans was finally nearing completion on Wednesday
September 7th, more than a week after the breaching of the low-lying city’s
levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. National Guardsmen, regular troops and
federal marshals—many of whom had been brought in late last week following
criticism of the sluggish relief effort—had moved into the worst-affected
districts and were making house-to-house searches for the remaining survivors.
However, an estimated 5,000-10,000 residents were still refusing to leave. As a
result, the authorities began on Tuesday to enforce a compulsory evacuation
order. “We'll do everything it takes to make this city safe,” said Edwin
Compass, New Orleans's police superintendent. “These people don't understand
they're putting themselves in harm's way.”
With most of the survivors now taken care of, the focus is shifting to those who
perished in the storm and subsequent flood. The official death toll in the three
worst-hit states—Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—is still in the low
hundreds. But the final toll could be as high as 10,000. Many corpses have sunk
in the water that still covers around three-fifths of New Orleans. On Monday,
the US Army Corps of Engineers said it had plugged a big gap in the levees and
started to pump water out of the city. But it could be two to three months
before the task is completed, and up to a year before those who have left can
return. The economic costs of this, and of the damage done to the region's oil
and gas facilities, are still being counted (see article).
Perhaps 100,000 people either could not or would not leave New Orleans when
warned to do so before Katrina struck. Tens of thousands ended up at either the
city’s Superdome stadium or its convention centre for days, turning them into
sinks of hot and smelly misery. By the weekend, these refugees had been bussed
out. Some 20 states have offered to house and school refugees temporarily. But
the strain is already starting to show in neighbouring states. In Texas, home to
almost half of those who fled New Orleans, officials say they are struggling to
cope and have asked that any further refugees be airlifted to other states. On
Tuesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would fly evacuees at
New Orleans's airport to five air bases around the country, where beds have
become available because of soldiers going to Iraq.
If the world was saddened by the devastation wrought by Katrina, it was shocked
by the breakdown of law and order that followed. Looters roamed the streets,
stealing food and water in desperation but also computers, sporting equipment
and guns in opportunism. Rapes and car-jackings were reported, and there were
angry confrontations between roving thugs and the few shop- and homeowners who
stayed. Some saw the social tension as having a racial element, since most of
those left behind were poor and black.
Though New Orleans was flooded on Tuesday of last week, it wasn’t until Friday
that the relief effort gained real momentum, with the arrival of thousands of
national guardsmen. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, gave warning
that “they know how to shoot to kill”, and by the weekend they had restored
order to most parts of the city. But they and other emergency personnel are
under huge pressure, with many of them working round the clock; the New York
Times quoted Mr Compass as saying that at least 200 of his 1,500 police officers
had refused to do their job.
Let down, but by whom?
While Katrina was a powerful storm, the extent
of the chaos and suffering in her wake has nonetheless been surprising. America
has dealt with ferocious hurricanes before, and New Orleans’s vulnerabilities
were well known. Thus many are starting to point fingers in relation to both the
short-term response and long-term policy failures.
Ray Nagin, New Orleans’s mayor, showed increasing frustration throughout last
week, especially with the federal government’s response and its press
conferences: “They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning
and people are dying…Get off your asses and let’s do something.” An
under-pressure President George Bush criticised the relief effort on Friday,
calling it “not acceptable”, before flying to the region to see the damage.
Later, he suggested that local officials had made some mistakes. This earned him
the threat of a punch from one Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu.
Many of the immediate difficulties are understandable. As Michael Chertoff, the
secretary of homeland security, pointed out, the disaster has in fact been a
double one. The hurricane’s winds flattened homes on the Gulf of Mexico coast,
and shortly thereafter the rains burst the levees, the latter creating a
“dynamic” situation while authorities responded to the former.
Nevertheless, many Americans are blaming the man at the top. Mr Bush should have
gone to the region sooner, his critics say. (He made a second trip on Monday.)
Some Bush supporters worry that the botched relief effort could hurt the
president at a time when his ratings are already low, thanks to the troubles of
Iraq.
A Washington Post/ABC poll, conducted on Friday, found that the nation was split
down the middle, with 46% saying Mr Bush had handled the crisis well and 47%
saying he had done badly. By Tuesday, support for the president appeared to have
slipped: in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 42% of respondents rated his response
to the disaster as “bad” or “terrible”, while 35% said it was “good” or “great”.
Only 35% described the response of state and local officials as bad or terrible,
with slightly more, 37%, saying it was good or great. But when asked who was
responsible for the problems in New Orleans after Katrina struck, fewer blamed
Mr Bush (13%) than federal agencies (18%) or state and local officials (25%);
38% blamed no one.
In an effort to head off criticism, the
president has said that he will lead an investigation into his administration's
response to the disaster. The House of Representatives and the Senate will hold
their own probes. Politicians on both sides are angry. On Tuesday Susan Collins,
a Republican senator who will lead an investigation by the chamber's Homeland
Security Committee, said: “If our system did such a poor job when there was no
enemy, how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a
terrorist attack that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing
as much death and destruction as possible?”
Mr Bush's critics argue that some of his administration's longer-term policy
decisions have made the response to the disaster more difficult. The war in
Iraq, it has been noted, has depleted the number of available national guardsmen
by a third or more in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama; many of those serving
in Iraq are trained emergency personnel. Others allege that the war has squeezed
the budget, causing a postponement last year of projects to improve the
levees—though it is far from clear that these could have been completed in time
to stop the flooding after Katrina.
Even if some failures can be attributed to the Bush administration, the most
important reasons for Katrina’s deadliness may lie in decisions that predate the
current president, from Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville’s decision to found
the city in its precarious location, in 1718, to the more recent “improvements”
in the area’s maritime navigability that have damaged south-eastern Louisiana’s
wetlands. For much of the 20th century the federal government tampered with the
Mississippi, to help shipping and—ironically—prevent floods. In the process it
destroyed large swathes of coastal marshland around New Orleans—something which
suited property developers, but removed much of the city’s natural protection
against flooding. Support may now grow for a multi-billion-dollar plan to
restore the wetlands, though a similar project in Florida has proved difficult.
It is an uncomfortable fact that millions of Americans have made the decision to
live in areas prone to this kind of disaster. Though Congress has authorised an
immediate $10.5 billion relief package and Mr Bush has said he will seek another
$40 billion for the first phase of rebuilding, Denny Hastert, the speaker of the
House, has questioned whether huge amounts of money should be spent on
reconstruction in a location as exposed as New Orleans (though he later
backpedalled). But there remain important questions to be asked at both the
local and national level about the failures that led to Katrina’s destruction
and chaos. It has provided yet another reminder that decisions made without due
regard for the consequences can prove painful indeed later on.
The
blame game, E, 7.9.2005,
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4366649
Storm survivors defy order to leave
Wed Sep 7, 2005
10:38 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
and Mark Egan
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Thousands of Hurricane
Katrina's victims in New Orleans clung to their ravaged lives on Wednesday, some
refusing to leave despite threats of forcible evacuation, others simply trapped.
There are still thousands in the city "wanting to leave" and waiting for help,
New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass told CNN. But others made it clear they
planned to stay put despite an order to leave, the threat of disease and the
lure of cash payments from the government.
The toxic cesspool that engulfed the city for days receded bit by bit as pumps
labored to push water from broken levees out to sea in an effort that could take
80 days.
Police said the arson, looting and violence that hit New Orleans had subsided,
but some 10,000 of the city's 450,000 residents failed to heed or could not
respond to a mandatory evacuation order issued by Mayor Ray Nagin.
Robert Johnson, 58, held fast to his run-down clapboard house in a poor New
Orleans neighborhood, saying he had neither the money to leave nor anywhere to
go.
"If Mayor Nagin comes to try to take me out I will f... him up," he said. "If
I'm gonna be miserable I'd better be miserable right here."
Minimum force -- but enough to do the job -- will be used to flush out those
remaining, the police chief said earlier.
There were grim reminders everywhere of the deadly storm that savaged the Gulf
Coast 10 days ago.
In New Orleans, rescue teams tied bodies to trees or fences and noted the
location for later recovery. They are part of the still uncounted carnage from
the August 29 storm and the death toll could total thousands in Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama.
Federal health officials reported three people in the region had died from
bacterial infections and tests confirmed the floodwater in New Orleans was a
witch's brew of sewage-borne bacteria.
DEBIT CARDS FOR VICTIMS
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, scorched by criticism that it failed to
act fast and fully when the storm hit, was handing out $2,000 debit cards to
thousands of survivors. At the Houston Astrodome where 16,000 New Orleans
evacuees are being housed, long lines formed for the money.
Hundreds of thousands of coastal residents have been displaced in one of the
largest disruptions of its kind America has seen. Of the one million believed
displaced, 235,000 were reported living in shelters but thousands more had
relocated or found temporary housing from one end of the country to the other.
Criticism and blame mounted over the federal government's response efforts.
It "amounts to a massive institutional failure," said Raymond Offenheiser,
president of Oxfam America, U.S. affiliate of the international relief agency
that said it had been forced to mount in Mississippi the first domestic rescue
effort in its 35-year history.
"Before Katrina, we reserved our emergency response for countries that lack the
resources of the United States. If we've got this kind of failure at home, how
can we expect poor countries to do better?" he asked.
Nor was President George W. Bush's family immune. A comment made earlier in the
week by his mother, Barbara Bush, prompted jibes on Internet Web sites and a
foot-in-mouth criticism from one newspaper columnist.
Speaking of evacuees in the Astrodome, the former first lady told a reporter in
Houston: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in
Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people
in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very
well for them."
ECONOMIC BLOW FEARED
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's
economic growth slashed by up to 1 percentage point by the disaster. Insurance
companies put their losses at $14 billion to as much as $35 billion.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the cost of recovery and
relief could be more than $150 billion, while the Louisiana Homeland Security
department estimated the storm's cost would exceed $100 billion.
But the long-term impact on a city world famous for its carefree ways and jazz
was almost impossible to calculate.
Above streets that until 10 days ago hosted wild street parties, the skies were
thick with sleek and menacing Black Hawks, twin-rotor Chinooks, and
orange-colored Coast Guard choppers.
Slow-moving military transport planes brought in supplies while helicopters
ferried survivors to waiting ambulances.
"The sounds of New Orleans were jazz, people laughing, people eating a good
meal," Nagin said. "And now the sounds of New Orleans are helicopters and army
vehicles. This is almost surreal."
The White House is preparing a new emergency budget request likely to total $40
billion to $50 billion for the recovery, in addition to $10.5 billion approved
by Congress last week. Some in the U.S. Congress estimate that federal spending
will ultimately total upward of $150 billion.
Early estimates place the rebuilding cost for roads and bridges in Louisiana and
Mississippi at nearly $2.5 billion, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said.
Leaders of Bush's Republican party said there would be a joint Congressional
investigation into the government's hurricane response, to the disappointment of
minority Democrats who said probe should be turned over to an outside
independent commission.
Bush has said he would lead an investigation into the emergency operation, but
he resisted demands for an immediate inquiry.
The chief executive's response to the crisis was rated "bad" or "terrible" by 42
percent of Americans surveyed for a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll released on
Wednesday, compared with 35 percent who said it was "good" or "great."
(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in New Orleans, Jim Loney in Baton
Rouge, Adam Entous, Adam Tanner in Houston and Maggie Fox in Washington)
Storm
survivors defy order to leave, R, 7.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T023829Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Katrina telethon
draws stars, questions
Wed Sep 7, 2005
10:29 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Recording stars Sheryl
Crow, Alicia Keys, Paul Simon, Neil Young and the Dixie Chicks will headline a
telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims slated to air this week on six major U.S.
networks and around the world, producers said on Wednesday.
But it was not clear whether they or any of the other celebrities booked for
Friday's event, including comedian Chris Rock and movie star Jack Nicholson,
will be permitted to freely express their opinions during the show or required
to stick to the script.
The question arose after impromptu remarks last Friday by rapper Kanye West, who
used his appearance on a similar NBC network broadcast to accuse President
George W. Bush of racism in the government's relief effort.
"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West said, adding criticism of
the media's portrayal of blacks.
Kanye's comments were carried on NBC's live feed to the East Coast and central
time zones but were cut from the tape-delayed broadcast aired on the West Coast
and mountain regions. NBC said West had deviated from his script and that "his
opinions in no way represent the views of the network."
The General Electric Co.-owned broadcaster is one of the six major networks
planning to simulcast a separate live, commercial-free special this Friday,
titled "Shelter From the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast."
The hour-long event also will be carried by numerous U.S. cable channels and
broadcast in more than 100 countries, organizers said. Proceeds will go to
disaster relief efforts of the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
Although West was absent from the lineup of performers announced for the show, a
spokeswoman for producer Joel Gallen told Reuters that West was slated to make a
live appearance.
But she and two other spokesman for the show all said they did not know what, if
any, steps producers would take to censor or curb political statements celebrity
participants might make. One NBC spokesman said a decision about a possible time
delay for the live broadcast had not been made.
A number of stars on the bill, including the Dixie Chicks, Sheryl Crow, Chris
Rock and Neil Young, are known for their outspoken views on political and social
issues.
A spokeswoman for MTV, which is planning to air yet a third all-star telethon
for hurricane relief, said the cable music channel "does not censor artists."
She added West was slated to perform in a pre-taped segment for the MTV special.
Katrina telethon draws stars, questions, R, 7.8.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2005-09-08T023018Z_01_ROB806853_RTRIDST_0_ENTERTAINMENT-TELETHON-DC.XML
Infections kill 3 after Katrina;
others at
risk
Wed Sep 7, 2005
11:52 PM ET
Reuters
By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three people have died
from bacterial infections in Gulf states after Hurricane Katrina, and tests
confirm that the water flooding New Orleans is a stew of sewage-borne bacteria,
federal officials said on Wednesday.
A fourth person in the Gulf region is suspected to be infected with Vibrio
vulnificus, a common marine bacteria, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told reporters, citing reports from state health
officials in Mississippi and Texas.
"This does not represent an outbreak," Gerberding told a news conference. "It
does not spread from person to person."
"People who are compromised in immunity can sometimes develop very severe
infections from these bacteria. We see cases of this from time to time along the
coast," she added.
Two of those who died were in Mississippi and one was an evacuee to Texas from
Louisiana, health officials said.
And tests of the waters flooding New Orleans show it is, as expected, loaded
with raw sewage.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson said all the tests
of waters in flooded residential areas of New Orleans exceeded by at least 10
times the safe levels of E. coli and other so-called coliform bacteria, found in
the human gut and used as an indicator of sewage contamination. They also have
high levels of lead.
"Human contact with the floodwaters should be avoided as much as possible,"
Johnson told the news conference. "This may seem obvious ... but no one should
drink the floodwaters, especially children."
Gerberding said the message was clear.
"For evacuees who haven't left the city yet, you must do so," he said. "This
water is not going away any time soon."
STOMACH TROUBLE
Rescuers are scrubbing down evacuees with soap and water at the first possible
opportunity, and Gerberding said anyone who comes into contact with the water
should also wash.
But the danger of infection also continues in the crowded shelters where many
evacuees are staying for the foreseeable future.
"Right now in the shelters where most of the people are located we have seen
sporadic reports of gastrointestinal illness," Gerberding said. The conditions
are specially ripe, she said, for norovirus, a type of virus that includes the
Norwalk virus that occasionally causes outbreaks on cruise ships.
"Norovirus is not generally life-threatening," said Gerberding. But stressed and
fragile evacuees will be especially vulnerable, she said.
In Houston, David Persse, who oversees medical issues for Houston, said the city
that has accommodated more displaced people than any other has not seen any
evidence of disease from infected flood waters.
Yet with thousands living in huge shelters such as the Astrodome, a former
baseball stadium, risk of disease spreading remained high, he said.
"You are never over the hump as long as they are living in a very crowded living
setting," he said in an interview. "As long as we continue to have that, we are
going to continue to be at risk."
Respiratory illness could be another problem. The CDC's Gerberding said as soon
as this season's influenza vaccine becomes available, they will be encouraging
refugees to be vaccinated quickly.
Another concern is the mental health of refugees, National Institute of Mental
Health Director Dr. Thomas Insel said. Simple measures can ensure that the
immense stress of losing homes, livelihoods and loved ones does not turn into
something more serious, he said.
"For the vast, vast majority of people the word is resilience here. Most people
will recover completely."
(Additional reporting by Adam Tanner in Houston)
Infections kill 3 after Katrina; others at risk, R, 7.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-08T035234Z_01_SPI774989_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-HEALTH-DC.XML
Democrats Assail White House
on Katrina
Effort
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON -- Congress' top two Democrats
furiously criticized the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina on
Wednesday, with Sen. Harry Reid demanding to know whether President Bush's Texas
vacation impeded relief efforts and Rep. Nancy Pelosi assailing the chief
executive as "oblivious, in denial."
With much of New Orleans still under water, the White House announced that Bush
is asking lawmakers to approve another $51.8 billion to cover the costs of
federal recovery efforts. Congressional officials said they expected to approve
the next installment as early as Thursday, to keep the money flowing without
interruption.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the new request, which is in addition
to $10.5 billion already approved and was being sent to Capitol Hill later
Wednesday, would not be the last.
"We are sparing no effort to help those that have been affected by Katrina and
are in need of help," he said. "There will be more that will be needed."
Included in the request are $1.4 billion for the military and $400 million for
the Army Corps of Engineers, which is working to plug breached levees that
submerged most of New Orleans and to drain the city of the rank floodwaters,
McClellan said. The rest would go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press learned that the government planned to
distribute debit cards worth $2,000 to victims of the hurricane.
"They are going to start issuing debit cards, $2,000 per adult, today at the
Astrodome," said Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The cards could be used to buy food, transportation, gas and other essentials
that displaced people need, according to a state official who was on the call
and requested anonymity because the program had not been publicly announced.
GOP congressional leaders met privately to plan their next step, possibly
including an unusual joint House-Senate committee to investigate what went wrong
in the government's response and what can be fixed. Establishment of a joint
panel would presumably eliminate overlapping investigations that might otherwise
spring up as individual committees looked into the natural disaster and its
aftermath.
In a letter to the Senate's Homeland Security Committee chairwoman, Reid, the
Senate Democratic leader, pressed for a wide-ranging investigation and answers
to several questions, including: "How much time did the president spend dealing
with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation? Did the fact that he was
outside of Washington, D.C., have any effect on the federal government's
response?"
At a news conference, Pelosi, D-Calif., said Bush's choice for head of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency had "absolutely no credentials."
She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire
Michael Brown.
"He said 'Why would I do that?"' Pelosi said.
"'I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.'
And he said 'What didn't go right?"'
"Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she added.
In the first government estimate of Katrina's economic impact, the bipartisan
Congressional Budget Office said the damage seemed likely to reduce employment
by 400,000 in coming months and to trim economic growth by as much as a full
percentage point in the second half of the year. The impact should be temporary,
with gasoline prices declining and consumer spending rebounding, said the
assessment obtained by The Associated Press.
At the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration was
acting quickly on an emergency supplemental measure for Katrina efforts because
a $10.5 billion down payment approved last week "is being spent more quickly
than we even anticipated."
Bush is expected to return to the region, but the White House would not say
when. Separately, first lady Laura Bush planned to travel to Mississippi on
Thursday, the same day Vice President Dick Cheney heads to the Gulf states.
Buffeted by criticism of the Republican administration, GOP Senate chairmen
stood in unison and announced that Congress first would open hearings on how to
help the Gulf Coast recover from the disaster, and then later examine the
response.
"Our role in the United States Senate will be, yes, to investigate and provide
appropriate oversight, but also to lower barriers for the recovery and the
rebuilding and the economic growth of the Gulf states," said Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Susan Collins, the
senator whom Reid's letter was addressed to, said her panel would open hearings
on "what should we be doing right now." Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said that as
chairman of the energy and water subcommittee, he could convene a panel this
week to provide the Army Corps of Engineers with the money it needs to help the
region recover.
The House on Wednesday was expected to pass two Katrina-related bills: One would
allow the secretary of education to waive the current rule that recipients of
Pell Grants for low-income students must repay those grants when they are forced
to withdraw from classes due to natural disasters.
The other would allow circuit, district and bankruptcy courts to conduct special
sessions outside their geographic boundaries when they are unable to meet
because of emergency conditions.
Even as they called for investigations of the government's response, several
Democratic senators said it was already clear that Brown, the FEMA director,
should go.
Hillary Rodham Clinton bristled when asked about Republican accusations that she
was trying to capitalize on a natural disaster to help her political career.
She said on NBC's "Today," "Every time anyone raises any kind of legitimate
criticism and asks questions, they're attacked."
Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D, said in a telephone call with reporters Wednesday that
he and other members of the Senate may try to push legislation that would
separate FEMA from the Homeland Security Department. He said they may try to add
the language to a spending bill that would fund the Commerce and Justice
Departments.
Reid said in his letter that Collins' panel should pursue answers to several
questions. Among them, why Bush and administration officials said no one
anticipated the breach of the levees despite public studies and warnings,
whether budget cuts thwarted the Army Corps of Engineers and whether enough
troops were dispatched promptly.
Democrats Assail White House on Katrina Effort, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-Washington.html

Officers are walking door to door in New
Orleans
to evacuate residents.
Paul Buck
Authorities Increase Pressure on Holdouts in New Orleans
NYT
7.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07cnd-storm.html
Authorities Increase
Pressure on Holdouts in New
Orleans
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By JERE LONGMAN
and SEWELL CHAN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 7 - The floodwaters have
started to drain fitfully from this crippled city after a handful of pumps came
back into operation, but so far today there have been no signs of forced
evacuations under Mayor C. Ray Nagin's plans to ratchet up the pressure on the
thousands of remaining citizens to leave.
Authorities have growing concerns about gas leaks, fires, toxic water and
diseases spread by mosquitoes in the fetid waters flooding the city's streets
and lapping at doorsteps.
A police captain, Capt. Marlon Defillo, said the law enforcement authorities
were focusing for now on people who wanted to be rescued, according to The
Associated Press. And Lt. Gen. Joseph R. Inge, at a Pentagon briefing, said that
any such evacuations were a job for the 900 police in the city and that as a law
enforcement issue, the regular troops would not be used.
That position was echoed by a senior official in charge of disaster recovery in
Louisian, Art Jones, who said national guard troops would not force people out
of their homes.
Mr. Nagin said late last night that he was reissuing a mandatory evacuation
order and urged stragglers to leave immediately, saying he did not want possible
explosions and disease to increase a death toll that, Lt. David Benelli,
president of the Police Association of New Orleans, said could reach 2,000 to
20,000.
Today, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom
Skinner, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that at least five people
have been confirmed dead from a bacteria in the contaminated water caused by the
hurricane.
In Washington, President Bush promised an investigation into what went wrong in
the response to Hurricane Katrina and planned to dispatch Vice President Dick
Cheney to the Gulf Coast to cut through any bureaucratic obstacles slowing the
recovery.
The Senate and the House have also announced their own investigation into the
government's response, with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a leading
Republican, calling the response "woefully inadequate." The committee is
preparing for public hearings next week on response to the storm.
Officials said about 60 percent of New Orleans was still under water, but that
was down from a peak of about 80 percent. Most of the gain came because the Army
Corps of Engineers began opening gaps in the city's levees after the water level
in surrounding bodies of water fell. The holes ensured that the levees -
designed to keep water out of the below-sea-level city - would not hold it in.
Four of the approximately 40 pumping stations in the New Orleans area were
running on Tuesday at least at partial capacity, officials said, but haltingly;
a fifth giant one, at the 17th Street Canal, site of a major levee breach,
started but had to be shut off again because the pumps sucked in debris.
Officials said it would take 24 days to pump the water from an eastern section
of New Orleans and 80 days to clear the flooding from Chalmette, the nearby seat
of St. Bernard Parish.
The receding waters were expected to reveal ever more bodies, to be identified
by a team of forensic pathologists, medical examiners, coroners and morticians
from local funeral homes.
"We are going to take one deceased victim at a time and count one at a time,"
said Robert Johannessen, a spokesman for Louisiana's Department of Health and
Hospitals. Of the process of identifying the bodies, Mr. Johannessen said, "It
could take days, it could take years, it could take lifetimes."
The official death toll in Louisiana stood at 83, but state officials said the
counting had only begun. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour announced Tuesday
evening that the state's "unofficial but credible estimate" of the death toll
was at 196, but that it was still rising. Mr. Barbour said that more than a
quarter of the deaths had been reported in inland counties, not along the coast.
Evacuees continued to come back into Jefferson Parish to check on their homes,
overwhelming roads and bridges.
Louisiana officials offered a first glimpse at the environmental wreckage. The
state secretary of environmental quality, Michael D. McDaniel, said that
wildlife habitats along hundreds of miles of coastline had been destroyed and
that the hurricane exacerbated the slow coastal erosion that had already made
the coast more vulnerable to hurricanes.
Mr. McDaniel said that there was no alternative to pumping billions of gallons
of brackish water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but that it was too early to
determine the harmfulness of the toxins and pollutants that were being slowly
sifted out of New Orleans.
In New Orleans, fires have broken out and gas leaks are numerous.
Mr. Nagin said in an interview Tuesday that a new evacuation order would
eliminate exemptions that had allowed people to stay in hotels and hospitals.
Essentially, the city will be closed to everyone but law enforcement, military,
and public safety and health officials while it is drained of water and
utilities are restored.
Mr. Nagin said that many evacuees were delirious, severely dehydrated, missing
their medication and in need of immediate medical attention.
The mayor said that the National Guard had asked him whether handing out
sustenance provisions would encourage people to stay, but that his response was,
"Do not harm anyone, do not allow anyone to starve, do not allow anyone to go
without water and always treat everyone with respect."
That left officials with the question of how to strongly encourage holdouts to
leave. No one is being forced to leave yet, but officials said that could
change.
"We may have to force people out to save their lives, if we get to that point,"
said P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police. "I'm using this as a tactic
to scare people into leaving."
With assistance from 4,000 National Guard troops and another 4,000 troops from
the 82nd Airborne, New Orleans was now secure and "locked down," with looting
reduced to minimal levels, said Warren J. Riley, the deputy superintendent of
the New Orleans police.
Still, parts of the city, like the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, along with
Chalmette in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, remain inundated, and it could take
two months to get electricity fully restored to the hardest-hit areas, officials
said. Police officers and firefighters have been inoculated against hepatitis,
cholera, typhoid, tetanus and diphtheria.
The spine of St. Charles Avenue, with its broken canopy of oak trees and its
streetcar tracks laced with downed power lines, provided a look at the successes
and failures of New Orleans's recovery effort on Tuesday. Near St. Charles and
Josephine Street, a fire consumed two city blocks, officials from the Oklahoma
National Guard said.
At Lee Circle, Victor Mejia, 58, a janitor, stood in the shade and said he had
no intention of leaving. "I live here," he said. "Where am I going to go?"
Jere Longman reported from New Orleans for this
article, and Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La. Reporting was contributed by
Michael Cooper from Jackson, Miss.; Anne E. Kornblut from Washington; Christine
Hauser from New York and Matthew L. Wald from Vicksburg, Miss.
Authorities Increase Pressure on Holdouts in New Orleans, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07cnd-storm.html
Budget Office Says
Storm Could Cost Economy
400,000
Jobs
September 7, 2005
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 - Hurricane Katrina is
about to blow a hole in the federal budget, and it is already jeopardizing
President Bush's agenda for cutting taxes and reducing the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office reported today that it had told congressional
leaders that Hurricane Katrina could reduce employment this year by 400,000 jobs
and could slow the economy's expansion by as much as a full percentage point. As
a nonpartisan advisor to Congress, the office had previously predicted that the
economy would grow by 3.7 percent in 2005 and by 3.4 percent in 2004. The budget
office's report came in a nine-page memo delivered Tuesday to Sen. Bill Frist,
Republican of Tennessee and the majority leader.
Also on Tuesday, administration officials told Republican lawmakers that relief
efforts were running close to $700 million a day, and that the total federal
cost could reach as high as $100 billion.
That would be many times the cost of any other natural disaster or even the $21
billion that was allocated for New York City after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.
Still, the budget office saidin its report that the start of the recovery of the
country's refineries was promising. "Last week, it appeared that larger economic
impacts might occur, but despite continued uncertainty, progress in opening
refineries and restarting pipelines now makes those larger impacts less likely."
It added: "While making specific estimates is fraught with uncertainty, evidence
to date suggests that overall economic effects will be significant but not
overwhelming."
But the expenses of Katrina are mounting just as Mr. Bush and Republican leaders
are trying to push through spending cuts for programs like Medicaid and student
loans, extend about $70 billion in expiring tax cuts, and reduce the federal
budget deficit.
"There is no question but that the costs of this are going to exceed the costs
of New York City after 9/11 by a significant multiple," said Senator Judd Gregg,
Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
White House officials are planning to ask Congress as early as Wednesday for a
second round of emergency financing, perhaps as much as $40 billion, but they
said even that would be a "stopgap" measure while they assessed the full costs.
Though it is still too early for accurate estimates, the costs are all but
certain to wreak havoc with Mr. Bush's plans to reduce the federal deficit and
possibly his plans to extend tax cuts.
On Monday, Mr. Frist postponed plans to push for a vote on repealing the estate
tax, a move that would benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of households, costing
more than $70 billion a year once fully put in effect.
House and Senate leaders are also grappling with their pre-hurricane plan to
propose $35 billion in spending cuts over the next five years for entitlement
programs like Medicaid, student loans, food stamps and welfare payments.
Those cuts could suddenly prove politically unpalatable to Mr. Bush and
Republican lawmakers, who are trying to rebuff criticism that the federal
government shortchanged the hurricane's poorest victims.
Congressional Democrats are already using the hurricane as a reason to block
Republican tax and spending plans.
"Democrats think this is the worst possible time to be cutting taxes for those
at the very top and cutting the social safety net of those at the very bottom,
and adding $35 billion," said Thomas S. Kahn, staff director for Democrats on
the House Budget Committee.
Budget analysts said the magnitude and unique characteristics of the hurricane
made it unlike any previous natural disaster, resulting in a variety of
extraordinary costs:
¶Shelter for as many as a million people for months.
¶A potentially high share of uninsured property losses that stem from flooding,
which is not covered by private insurers.
¶Education and health care for hundreds of thousands forced to live outside
their home states.
"Katrina could easily become a milestone in the history of the federal budget,"
said Stanley Collender, a longtime budget analyst here. "Policies that never
would have been considered before could now become standard."
Indeed, there were signs on Tuesday that Republicans and Democrats had already
begun to compete with each other over who might be willing to spend more.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, predicted on Tuesday
that costs could total $150 billion. Top Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have
begun to call for "stimulus" measures to buck up the overall economy.
White House officials contend that costs attributable to the hurricane are
separate from Mr. Bush's underlying budget goals, which include cutting the
deficit in half over the next four years and permanently extending most of the
tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003.
Budget analysts also note that natural disasters are essentially one-time costs
that do not affect the government's long-run fiscal health.
"We can afford $100 billion - one time," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of
the Congressional Budget Office. "What we cannot afford is $100 billion in
additional spending year after year."
The problem is that, even without the hurricane, the federal government's
underlying fiscal health is in poor shape. In July, the White House predicted
that surging tax revenues would reduce the deficit this year to $333 billion
from $412 billion in 2004.
But many analysts believe that the tax surge was largely a one-time event and
that overall government spending is still poised to climb rapidly as a result of
the war in Iraq, the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the growing number
of baby boomers who will soon reach retirement age.
Before the hurricane, House and Senate Republicans were preparing to work out
$35 billion in spending cuts over the next five years that would trim Medicaid
payments by $10 billion and make smaller cuts in student loan programs, farm
programs, food stamps, housing and cash assistance to poor families.
Under the budget resolution that Congress passed this spring, Congressional
committees are supposed to spell out the proposed cuts by Sept. 16. House and
Senate leaders had been planning to pass the cuts within a week or so after
that.
Jennifer Bayot contributed reporting to this article.
Budget
Office Says Storm Could Cost Economy 400,000 Jobs, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/06cnd-deficit.html
Heating Oil Prices
Likely to Rise 31% This
Winter
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By VIKAS BAJAJ
Retail gasoline prices should fall to $2.58 a
gallon by the end of the year, the government said today, but consumers should
not celebrate just yet. Heating oil will probably cost 31 percent more this
winter than the already high prices Americans paid last year, the government
said today.
Less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and severely disrupted
the nation's energy infrastructure, the nation's energy tab is expected to climb
significantly for the remainder of the year and well into next year, according
to a monthly forecast released by the Energy Information Administration.
All told, the United States will spend 18 percent more on energy, or $1.03
trillion, in 2005 than it did in 2004, accounting for 8.3 percent of the gross
domestic product, the highest since 1987.
The hurricane, which has displaced about one million people on the Gulf Coast
and killed untold numbers, dealt a major setback to the nation's energy supply
system by disrupting offshore oil and natural gas production, refineries and
pipelines that transport gasoline and other fuels to the eastern half of the
nation. Though the energy industry is making progress in restoring production
and refineries and the pipelines have been restored to full capacity, the
hurricane's impact will be felt for some time to come, the report said.
Acknowledging that it remains difficult to predict energy prices, demand and
supply, the E.I.A., a division of the Energy Department, offered three recovery
scenarios - fast, medium and slow. Through most of its report, the agency used
its medium forecast, which calls for $3 a-gallon gasoline prices through most of
September.
According to the AAA, a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was selling on
average for $3.042 around the country this morning, little changed from Tuesday
but up about 70 cents a gallon from a month ago and $1.20 a year ago. Prices in
many urban areas are hovering around $3.20.
The E.I.A. estimates Americans will still buy 100,000 barrels a day more of
gasoline this year than they did last year, but that figure is about 60,000
barrels less than the agency's forecast in August.
For many consumers the greater shock may come as summer gives way to fall and
winter. Americans spent 34 percent more on heating oil during the 2004-2005
winter than the year before.
Consumers who use natural gas to heat their homes will also pay more. At $13.03
per thousand cubic feet, the average 2004 price for residential natural gas
prices will be 21.3 percent higher than they were in 2004.
"With the full impact on near-term domestic oil and natural gas supply of
Hurricane Katrina still being assessed, the fuel price outlook for the upcoming
winter remains particularly uncertain for now," the E.I.A. report said.
Spending on electricity this summer, by comparison, is expected to be up 5
percent.
Heating Oil Prices Likely to Rise 31% This Winter, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/business/07cnd-energy.html
Boats cruise flooded New Orleans
but find few survivors
Tue Sep 6, 2005
5:57 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Relief workers cruised
the flooded streets of New Orleans in small boats on Tuesday, blowing whistles
and yelling out for stranded survivors of Hurricane Katrina, but found few signs
of life.
In Gentilly, a middle-class neighborhood that was among the hardest hit during
the hurricane, street signs poked out of the murky, tea-colored waters and
countless cars lay submerged amid other debris in the depths.
The bloated body of a man floated on a side street.
"Is anybody there? Does anybody need help," Troy Armstrong, a military policeman
from Nevada, shouted from a boat that cruised slowly down Gentilly Boulevard,
where the water was as high as eight feet in some parts.
His shouts were met with an eerie silence, broken only by the incessant barking
of dogs left behind by owners during a frantic evacuation of the city. The
animals stared from rooftops and the hoods of cars.
When a handful of survivors were finally located hours into the search, they
refused to leave their swamped homes and join the hundreds of thousands who have
already left the low-lying Mardi Gras capital.
"I don't want to leave because I've got faith in God," said Bruce St. John, the
pastor of a Christian church. He said he was content to remain in his home but
asked for a message to be passed to friends.
"Tell them St. John is going to weather the storm," he said.
Not even offers of food and water and warnings that such supplies would not be
coming in the days or weeks ahead were enough to coax stubborn residents onto
the boats.
Donald Civelo, who stood barefoot on the porch of his house in a foot of filthy
water, refused to budge even though his wife, Joan, suffered from a kidney
condition.
"We've got enough medication," Civelo said. He added that the couple had been
reluctant to join other evacuees after hearing reports of squalor and violence
at the Louisiana Superdome and other temporary shelters in the city.
Authorities evacuated thousands of refugees from the Superdome and other
shelters in New Orleans last weekend, spurred by national outrage over the
miserable conditions at those sites.
Although officials have strongly urged all residents to leave New Orleans,
noting that it could be uninhabitable for months, they have not yet resorted to
force to evacuate residents.
They worry that leaving people to their own devices in flooded homes could lead
to more deaths. The official death toll from Katrina in Louisiana stands at just
71 but is expected to climb into the thousands.
Boats
cruise flooded New Orleans but find few survivors, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T215802Z_01_SPI678756_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RESCUE-DC.XML

September 12, 2005
Vol. 166 No. 11
added 06.9.2005
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601050912,00.html
New Orleans waters recede
as political
storm rages
Tue Sep 6, 2005
9:27 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Engineers pumped flood
waters out of New Orleans on Tuesday and rescuers pulled out survivors of a
disaster which claimed thousands of lives as the political storm grew over
disorganized Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
As New Orleans authorities pleaded with survivors who have stayed in the now
dangerously unsanitary city to leave, the Republican senator leading a Senate
investigation into the government's response to Hurricane Katrina called it
"woefully inadequate."
"If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy, how would the
federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that
provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much death and
destruction as possible?" said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who will
lead the investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told people who have insisted on staying in their
homes to get out.
"It is a health risk. There are toxins in the water, there are gas leaks where
we may have explosions. We are fighting at least four fires right now and we
don't have running water. It is not safe," Nagin said.
Oil floating on toxic waters could mingle with flaming gas leaks. "If these two
unite, God bless us," he said.
Police said they would begin to remove survivors from the city whether they like
it or not.
"We'll do everything it takes to make this city safe. These people don't
understand they're putting themselves in harm's way," police superintendent P.
Edwin Compass said.
After days of delays, aid efforts have now picked up and water was being pumped
out of flooded streets after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used rocks and
sandbags to plug breached levees that were overwhelmed during the hurricane.
Flood levels in some areas were said to have dropped a foot
and Nagin said 60 percent of the city was now under water, down from 80 percent
last week.
But it will still take weeks to dry the city out, and rescue teams expect to
find thousands of bodies inside homes swallowed in the flood. Huge fires at
buildings around the city hampered rescue efforts on Tuesday.
The White House is preparing a new emergency budget request for recovery efforts
likely to total $40 billion to $50 billion, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid
of Nevada said after a meeting with President George W. Bush and budget director
Josh Bolten.
The money will supplement $10.5 billion approved by Congress last week.
Eight days after Katrina tore in, sending waters from Lake Pontchartrain
cascading into the home of jazz and Mardi Gras, few bodies have even been
recovered.
Facing a mammoth task to find, identify and bury thousands of bodies, many of
them decayed, Louisiana state is looking for a burial ground with individual
graves for those that cannot be identified.
LURED OUT WITH FOOD
Rescue teams sent dozens of boats and helicopters back into flooded
neighborhoods to rescue remaining survivors, while other helicopters dropped
water onto building fires.
In drier areas, rescuers offered residents food if they agreed to be evacuated.
"These are people who tried to stick it out but time and a lack of food has worn
them down. So we are using food to lure them out," said Texas fireman Brady
Devereaux.
"They said if we tried to stay, they will come back soon and force us out," said
Warren Champ, 50.
He and about 30 others were then put on a government bus for evacuation after
being patted down for weapons. Officials said about 3,000 people were rescued in
the last day.
But others were refusing to budge, because they were scared their homes would be
looted and they have no place to go.
"They ain't taking me nowhere, man," said Vietnam War veteran Errol Morning.
New Orleans' famous French Quarter was a militarized zone with 82nd Airborne
Division troops patrolling, road blocks set up and Texas sheriffs in cowboy hats
riding horses in streets that used to host the most famous street parties in
America.
It was a show of force to deter criminal gangs that ran wild, looting and
shooting, in the days after Katrina.
The challenges ahead are huge. State officials said 140,000 to 160,000 homes
were flooded and will not be recovered, and it would take years to restore water
service to all of the city.
More than a million people may have been driven from their homes -- many perhaps
permanently -- with hundreds of thousands taking refuge in shelters, hotels and
homes across the country following one its worst natural disasters.
BOTCHED RESCUE
Bungled rescue efforts in the first days of the crisis and a slew of dramatic
images that made New Orleans look more like the scene of a Third World refugee
crisis have touched off a political crisis for Bush.
The president said he would lead an investigation to find out what happened with
the emergency operation, but he resisted growing demands for an immediate probe.
"There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right, and what
went wrong. What I'm interested (in) is helping save lives," he said.
The New York Times said Bush's administration was trying to deflect blame to
state and local authorities. The White House denied the report.
U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi who lost his coastal home in
the storm, said Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown's job
is in jeopardy.
"If he doesn't solve a couple of problems that we've got right now he ain't
going to be able to hold the job, because what I'm going to do to him ain't
going to be pretty," he said on CBS.
Senate Democratic leader Reid backed calls for a commission, like the one that
examined the September 11, 2001, attacks, to study how the hurricane response
went wrong.
U.S. oil prices fell on Tuesday as industrialized countries prepared to release
oil from emergency stocks and some U.S. refineries began to resume operations.
(Additional reporting by Mark Egan and Paul Simao in New Orleans; Jim Loney
and Lesley Wroughton in Baton Rouge, Steve Holland and Maggie Fox in Washington)
New
Orleans waters recede as political storm rages, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-07T012741Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
New Orleans bus station
becomes temporary
jail
Tue Sep 6, 2005
7:10 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Rapists, an attempted
murder suspect and dozens of men who looted New Orleans after hurricane Katrina
huddle in a temporary jail set up as police try to regain city streets which
were lawless last week.
The scrawled cardboard sign on the front door of the Greyhound Bus Station, now
a makeshift jail reads simply, "We Are Taking New Orleans Back."
Inside the accused, almost all black men aged 18 to 35, are herded out of
confinement into buses by heavily armed officers from Angola State Penitentiary.
They stand handcuffed, disheveled and filthy, many with torn clothes, waiting to
be taken to a place where they will stand trial via videoconference with judges
in Baton Rouge.
The trial facility became operational on Sunday as part of an effort to restore
law and order to a chaotic city, rife with crime and lawlessness for days after
Katrina hit.
Louisiana State Department of Corrections Lt. Col. Bobby Achord described those
held as mainly looters. Others were incarcerated for more serious accusations.
"One guy here is up for attempted murder on a New Orleans police officer,"
Achord told Reuters. "He was involved in a shootout with New Orleans police in
an incident where the officer shot four of them dead."
"We had another guy here last night who was found shooting at a helicopter," he
said.
In another case, a homeless man is accused of raping a woman in a deserted
downtown street. The woman fought and freed herself then flagged down police,
who apprehended her attacker.
Other crimes were less serious. Achord said some looters were caught with absurd
spoils, like the man arrested fleeing a hardware store with a large bag of
screws.
Facilities, where the inmates are kept for up to 24 hours before being shipped
out, are crude. In cramped enclosures made of wire fences topped with barbed
wire, they sit on concrete floors stained with oil from busses that normally
load passengers here.
In the corner of each enclosure is a "porta-potty" with no door and a water
cooler. Meals are military rations.
The temporary jail can hold 700 inmates.
Those locked up here are guarded by corrections officer from Angola prison -- a
notorious facility known for it's hardened criminals and tough guards.
Pointing at officers nudging prisoners to waiting busses, Achord said, "These
guards are used to handling people who are real bad. They are very professional
but very firm."
Those charged with felonies will go to Angola if they are convicted. About 90
percent of Angola's inmates -- currently totaling 5,108 -- usually die there.
Since Katrina devastated New Orleans and other Louisiana towns, another 2,000
prisoners have been temporarily transferred to Angola.
Officials at the bus station jail said they want to get the message out that
they are in business because most police in the mostly evacuated city are
unaware it exists.
Asked if reporters could talk to the inmates, Achord suggested that was not a
good idea.
"The thing is," he said, pointing at the men behind the fence, "if those guys
got rowdy we do have non-lethal weapons we could use to try and control them.
But if they started pushing that fence down, we'd have to kill somebody."
New
Orleans bus station becomes temporary jail, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T231036Z_01_SPI683374_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-JAIL-DC.XML
Flooding Recedes in New Orleans;
U.S.
Inquiry Is Set
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By JERE LONGMAN
and SEWELL CHAN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 6 - The floodwaters began
fitfully to drain from this crippled city on Tuesday as a handful of pumps came
back into operation. But with growing concerns about gas leaks, fires, toxic
water and diseases spread by mosquitoes, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said he wanted to
ratchet up pressure on the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 remaining citizens to
leave.
Mr. Nagin said he was reissuing a mandatory evacuation order and urged
stragglers to leave immediately, saying he did not want possible explosions and
disease to increase a death toll that, Lt. David Benelli, president of the
Police Association of New Orleans, said could reach 2,000 to 20,000.
In Washington, President Bush promised an investigation into what went wrong in
the response to Hurricane Katrina and planned to dispatch Vice President Dick
Cheney to the Gulf Coast to cut through any bureaucratic obstacles slowing the
recovery. [Page A17.]
The Senate and the House also announced their own investigation into the
government's response, with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a leading
Republican, calling the response "woefully inadequate."
"If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy," said Ms. Collins,
chairwoman of the Homeland Security Committee, "how would the federal, state and
local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance
warning and that was intent on causing as much death and destruction as
possible?"
The committee is preparing for public hearings next week on response to the
storm.
Officials said about 60 percent of New Orleans was still under water, but that
was down from a peak of about 80 percent. Most of the gain came because the Army
Corps of Engineers began opening gaps in the city's levees after the water level
in surrounding bodies of water fell. The holes ensured that the levees -
designed to keep water out of the below-sea-level city - would not hold it in.
Four of the approximately 40 pumping stations in the New Orleans area were
running on Tuesday at least at partial capacity, officials said, but haltingly;
a fifth giant one, at the 17th Street Canal, site of a major levee breach,
started but had to be shut off again because the pumps sucked in debris.
Officials said it would take 24 days to pump the water from an eastern section
of New Orleans and 80 days to clear the flooding from Chalmette, the nearby seat
of St. Bernard Parish.
The receding waters were expected to reveal ever more bodies, to be identified
by a team of forensic pathologists, medical examiners, coroners and morticians
from local funeral homes.
"We are going to take one deceased victim at a time and count one at a time,"
said Robert Johannessen, a spokesman for Louisiana's Department of Health and
Hospitals. Of the process of identifying the bodies, Mr. Johannessen said, "It
could take days, it could take years, it could take lifetimes."
The official death toll in Louisiana stood at 83, but state officials said the
counting had only begun. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour announced Tuesday
evening that the state's "unofficial but credible estimate" of the death toll
was at 196, but that it was still rising. Mr. Barbour said that more than a
quarter of the deaths had been reported in inland counties, not along the coast.
Evacuees continued to come back into Jefferson Parish to check on their homes,
overwhelming roads and bridges. Interstate 10, which connects Baton Rouge and
New Orleans, was backed up for about five miles.
Louisiana officials offered a first glimpse at the environmental wreckage. The
state secretary of environmental quality, Michael D. McDaniel, said that
wildlife habitats along hundreds of miles of coastline had been destroyed and
that the hurricane exacerbated the slow coastal erosion that had already made
the coast more vulnerable to hurricanes.
Mr. McDaniel said that there was no alternative to pumping billions of gallons
of brackish water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but that it was too early to
determine the harmfulness of the toxins and pollutants that were being slowly
sifted out of New Orleans.
"I know there's been a lot of discussion about 'toxic soup' and 'witch's brew,'
" he said. "I've seen no data to date that backs up that kind of statement. We
do know and would expect that there are a lot of bacteriological contaminants in
the water."
In New Orleans, four major fires had broken out by Tuesday morning and gas leaks
were numerous, Mayor Nagin said.
"I don't want make any statement that suggests I'm giving up on New Orleans," he
said at a news conference. "But it's a very volatile situation in the city right
now. There's lots of oil on the water and there's gas leaks where it's bubbling
up, and there's fire on top of that. If those two unite, God bless us. I don't
know what's going to happen."
Mr. Nagin said in an interview that a new evacuation order would eliminate
exemptions that had allowed people to stay in hotels and hospitals. Essentially,
the city will be closed to everyone but law enforcement, military, and public
safety and health officials while it is drained of water and utilities are
restored. The 82nd Airborne Division closed a Hyatt hotel to civilians on
Tuesday afternoon.
The new evacuation order has been drafted and will be issued shortly, Mr. Nagin
said, even though Louisiana state officials question his authority to issue such
a command. "I don't care, I'm doing it," he said. "We have to get people out."
That meant people were once again bound to the city's convention center, where
25,000 people or more had huddled in desperate conditions for days. At St.
Charles and Louisiana Avenues, about two dozen people were patted down by
federal customs officials and placed on a bus for the convention center, where
they were to be airlifted out of town.
Told that some people were waiting as long as three hours at the convention
center before being flown out, Mr. Nagin said that was a considerable
improvement over the five days that it took some people to be evacuated last
week.
Lucas Russ, 65, a retired school district employee, said, "It's getting nasty
and really smelly," as he prepared to board a bus with a bag of his belongings.
Mr. Russ said that National Guard troops had told him he had to leave and that
he would receive no more food and water. Guard officials denied that, and Mr.
Nagin said that many evacuees were delirious, severely dehydrated, missing their
medication and in need of immediate medical attention.
The mayor said that the National Guard had asked him whether handing out
sustenance provisions would encourage people to stay, but that his response was,
"Do not harm anyone, do not allow anyone to starve, do not allow anyone to go
without water and always treat everyone with respect."
That left officials with the question of how to strongly encourage holdouts to
leave. No one is being forced to leave yet, but officials said that could
change.
"We may have to force people out to save their lives, if we get to that point,"
said P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police. "I'm using this as a tactic
to scare people into leaving."
Brig. Gen. Michael P. Fleming, an Army National Guard commander said of a forced
evacuation: "It's a tough decision. Between the mayor and governor, if they
decide that's what's to be done, the New Orleans Police Department, the state
police and National Guard would be part of it. We would help them implement it
if we're called on to do so."
With assistance from 4,000 National Guard troops and another 4,000 troops from
the 82nd Airborne, New Orleans was now secure and "locked down," with looting
reduced to minimal levels, said Warren J. Riley, the deputy superintendent of
the New Orleans police.
Mr. Nagin said, "I think we're turning the corner."
Still, parts of the city, like the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, along with
Chalmette in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, remain inundated, and it could take
two months to get electricity fully restored to the hardest-hit areas, officials
said. Police officers and firefighters have been inoculated against hepatitis,
cholera, typhoid, tetanus and diphtheria.
The spine of St. Charles Avenue, with its broken canopy of oak trees and its
streetcar tracks laced with downed power lines, provided a look at the successes
and failures of New Orleans's recovery effort on Tuesday. Near St. Charles and
Josephine Street, a fire consumed two city blocks, officials from the Oklahoma
National Guard said.
At Lee Circle, Victor Mejia, 58, a janitor, stood in the shade and said he had
no intention of leaving. "I live here," he said. "Where am I going to go?"
With attention turning to what had gone wrong, Mr. Nagin said he wanted an
independent assessment of the missteps, saying he believed the matter was beyond
the ability of politicians to solve. He blamed a lack of coordination, a rescue
plan that was slow to be carried out and what he called a "two-step" danced by
federal and state officials to determine who was in charge.
The mayor said he welcomed any effort to criticize his own handling of the
crisis.
"My big question to anybody who's trying to shift the blame is, 'Where were
you?' " Mr. Nagin said. "I was here. I know what happened. I walked among the
people in the Superdome and in the convention center. I saw babies dying. I saw
old people so tired, they said, 'Just let me lay down and die.' They can talk
that, but bring it on. I'm ready for it."
No Photographing the Dead
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 6 (Reuters) - The Federal Emergency Management Agency said on
Tuesday that it did not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as
they were recovered in New Orleans.
FEMA rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats.
An agency spokeswoman said that "the recovery of the victims is being treated
with dignity and the utmost respect."
Jere Longman reported from New Orleans for this
article, and Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La. Michael Cooper contributed
reporting from Jackson, Miss.; Anne E. Kornblut from Washington; and Matthew L.
Wald from Vicksburg, Miss.
Flooding Recedes in New Orleans; U.S. Inquiry Is Set, NYT, 7.6.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07storm.html
In Nursing Home,
a Fight Lost to Rising
Waters
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By GARDINER HARRIS
CHALMETTE, La., Sept. 6 - They nailed a table
against one window, ran a heavy electric wheelchair with a table on top against
another and pushed a couch against a door. These failed defenses are still in
St. Rita's nursing home, as are at least 14 swollen, unrecognizable bodies.
St. Bernard Parish officials say that 32 of the home's roughly 60 residents died
on Aug. 29, more than a week ago.
It is a measure of the enormity of the disaster that has struck southern
Louisiana that no one has removed many of the bodies, and local officials say
there are no immediate plans to do so. The flood victims still lie where they
died - draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor
in several inches of muck.
The home, about 20 miles southeast of downtown New Orleans, is still surrounded
by three feet of murky water. Eight vehicles are parked in front, covered in
debris and mud.
Indeed, officials suspect that there may be hundreds of similar, though smaller
scenes of death that will become apparent only after the water recedes and they
are able to search every house in the region.
Many evacuees have told stories of near escapes, of busting out attic windows or
axing through the roof to reach safety. The stories that will never be told are
of those who tried and failed to make those escapes.
St. Rita's nursing home whispers this story.
Ricky Melerine, a St. Bernard Parish councilman, said the water in his area rose
at least three feet from 10 to 10:15 that Monday morning. And it rose faster
still after that.
Ronald Nunez, a local resident, said several men tried to save St. Rita's
residents by floating some out on mattresses. Others were able to walk and float
on their own to a nearby school, Mr. Nunez said.
And someone had time to put up a fight against the tide.
Nails were pounded through a table. Dressers were thrown against windows.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, perhaps in
hopes of evacuation. They simply ran out of time.
There are signs in the home that the water rose to the roof. Three inches of
muck still cover the floors. Tadpoles wriggle in doorways. The stench is
nauseating.
The story of St. Rita's leads locals here to voice the same frustrations they
have about the entire disaster.
"Why didn't they evacuate?" Mr. Nunez asked. "Why?"
Mr. Nunez also said, with some bitterness, that his parish got only sporadic
help from state and federal authorities.
St. Bernard's Parish has five major nursing homes with roughly 65 patients each,
said Henry Rodriguez Jr., the parish president. There are another six smaller
facilities, he said. Almost all but St. Rita's were evacuated before the storm.
Steve Kuiper, vice president of operations for Acadian Ambulance, said he was
told that St. Rita's had an evacuation plan that depended on another nursing
home. Acadian, by far the largest ambulance provider in the state, used
helicopters to evacuate many of the parish's neediest medical cases after the
storm hit. But Mr. Kuiper said he never heard from St. Rita's.
"They didn't think this would ever happen," Mr. Melerine said. "They just didn't
evacuate."
The failure at St. Rita's is particularly difficult to explain. The home is in a
depression in the ground. The nearby road, which was covered with four or five
feet of water, sits at least five feet above the home's floor. The home appears
in retrospect to be particularly vulnerable to flood. Efforts to reach its
management late Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Military and private helicopters began ferrying people out of St. Bernard Parish
almost as soon as the storm hit. The Coast Guard spent much of the day of the
storm landing people on a berm above the Mississippi River near downtown
Chalmette, which is some of the highest ground around.
Mr. Nunez said he helped establish a shelter there. Water was running so fast
down the nearby road that it nearly swept some of those seeking shelter away.
Mr. Nunez said he had to tie himself to a tractor to save some people from the
current.
"We ran a little over 400 people through that camp," Mr. Nunez said.
Dozens of boats are still on the side of the road in and around Chalmette, most
of them washed there by the storm, and others stranded there after use by
rescuers.
Janie Fuller, an Acadian paramedic, helped deliver a baby in the town jail and
then managed to get a helicopter to evacuate mother and child. Ms. Fuller got
another woman out who seemed to be suffering internal bleeding by commandeering
an air boat and then a pickup truck to get her to a landing zone for a National
Guard helicopter.
Still, the parish is only now getting the full attention of the authorities, who
initially focused on the tens of thousands stranded in the Superdome and the
convention center in New Orleans. For parish residents, this is a badge of honor
as well as a source of quiet anger.
As a result, there are myriad stories of heroism and rescues in St. Bernard
Parish. But there is also St. Rita's.
"I just can't understand how you don't evacuate," Mr. Melerine said.
In
Nursing Home, a Fight Lost to Rising Waters, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07chalmette.html
In Baton Rouge,
a Tinge of Evacuee Backlash
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Last week came the
rumors - of riots at Wal-Marts, of break-ins at homes, of drug gangs from New
Orleans roaming the streets of its more sedate neighbor 75 miles up Interstate
10.
Today came the reality - of a dozen or more relatives crowded under one roof, of
hours stuck in traffic trying to get to school or work, of frustration and fear
about what kind of city Baton Rouge will be with at least 100,000 evacuees and
rescue workers added to the 227,000 residents it had before the storm hit.
Make no mistake. The overwhelming response of people in Baton Rouge to Hurricane
Katrina has been one of compassion and sacrifice with every church in town, it
seems, housing or feeding evacuees.
But there have also been runs on gun stores, mounting frustration over
gridlocked roads and an undercurrent of fear about crime and the effect of the
evacuees.
After the chaos of the storm, which did some damage here, and a long weekend,
Tuesday was the first day most residents returned to work and school. Before the
evacuation, blacks made up about half the population of Baton Rouge and almost
70 percent of New Orleans, and in conversations in which race is often explicit
or just below the surface, voices on the street, in shops, and especially in the
anonymous hothouse of talk radio were raising a new question: just how
compassionate can this community, almost certainly home to more evacuees than
any other, afford to be?
"You can't take the city out of the yat, and you can't take the yat out of the
city," said Frank Searle, a longtime Baton Rouge resident, using a slang term
for New Orleanians derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at?"
"These people will not assimilate here," Mr. Searle said. "They put up with the
crime in New Orleans, and now it's staring them in the face, but up here that's
not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they
have to. This is the South. We will take care of it."
For a week Baton Rouge, the state capital, home of Louisiana State University
and a place that sees itself as a less raucous cousin to what had been the
kingdom of sin and merriment to its south, has been trying to come to terms with
its sudden status as the state's most populous city.
"It's a new Baton Rouge we're living in, isn't it?" said Jeanine Smallwood of
suburban Prairieville, in the middle of a 90-minute drive to work that should
have taken 20.
Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot
house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion
with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees
well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New
Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read,
"Kill the cops."
"Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to."
She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On
reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for
the best.
"People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their
lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the
new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said.
Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more
wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in
fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last
week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a
giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their
own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from
New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns.
Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in
Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a
cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When
push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will."
Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his
life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line
for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with
a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it.
"I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr.
Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I
have some protection."
Many evacuees are staying with family or friends, their campers, S.U.V.'s and
pickups parked on front lawns or circular driveways.
Most people at the broad array of shelters were dazed but appreciative of the
help from local volunteers like the Louisiana State University students, upbeat
and attentive, tending to sick and exhausted evacuees at the triage center on
campus.
But others, particularly those at the main Red Cross shelter at the River Center
convention center downtown, were seething with frustration, not just over the
disaster they were fleeing, but from the sense that they were being treated not
so much like guests as people being warehoused until they could be shipped
elsewhere.
Patricia Perry, a postal employee from New Orleans, said anyone with a wristband
from the River Center shelter was being stereotyped outside it as one of "those
people" - looters, criminals, outcasts.
"It's like a stigma," she said. "All they really want to do is get us out of
town. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I work hard. I pay my taxes. Surely, this state
can find a place for us to live."
Still, many residents, with the sense of intimacy that remains so much a part of
Southern life, took their role as hosts seriously, as if it would be bad
manners, the ultimate sin in the South, to do otherwise.
So when Pam Robertson, manager of a convenience store, asked a customer how he
was doing, it was not dutiful chatter but a real question that begged for a real
answer.
When it came, she took the man's hand in hers over the counter and talked about
her friend Hunter, evacuated from Loyola University, about her upbringing in the
town of Henderson in the heart of Cajun country, about the grid of local streets
here.
She greeted one and all with the same missionary zeal, as if the right words
could somehow undo the disaster of the past week.
And when asked how she was doing, or even when they didn't, she replied: "I'm
tired, but I'm hanging in. It's good. It's all good. God is good. We'll get
through it."
In
Baton Rouge, a Tinge of Evacuee Backlash, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07backlash.html
Hurricane's Toll
Is Likely to Reshape
Bush's Economic Agenda
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - Hurricane Katrina is
about to blow a hole in the federal budget, and it is already jeopardizing
President Bush's agenda for cutting taxes and reducing the deficit.
Administration officials told Republican lawmakers on Tuesday that relief
efforts were running close to $700 million a day, and that the total federal
cost could reach as high as $100 billion.
That would be many times the cost of any other natural disaster or even the $21
billion that was allocated for New York City after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001.
The expenses would come just as Mr. Bush and Republican leaders are trying to
push through spending cuts for programs like Medicaid and student loans, extend
about $70 billion in expiring tax cuts, and reduce the federal budget deficit.
"There is no question but that the costs of this are going to exceed the costs
of New York City after 9/11 by a significant multiple," said Senator Judd Gregg,
Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
White House officials are planning to ask Congress as early as Wednesday for a
second round of emergency financing, perhaps as much as $40 billion, but they
said even that would be a "stopgap" measure while they assessed the full costs.
Though it is still too early for accurate estimates, the costs are all but
certain to wreak havoc with Mr. Bush's plans to reduce the federal deficit and
possibly his plans to extend tax cuts.
On Monday, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, postponed plans to push for a
vote on repealing the estate tax, a move that would benefit the wealthiest 1
percent of households, costing more than $70 billion a year once fully put in
effect.
House and Senate leaders are also grappling with their pre-hurricane plan to
propose $35 billion in spending cuts over the next five years for entitlement
programs like Medicaid, student loans, food stamps and welfare payments.
Those cuts could suddenly prove politically unpalatable to Mr. Bush and
Republican lawmakers, who are trying to rebuff criticism that the federal
government shortchanged the hurricane's poorest victims.
Congressional Democrats are already using the hurricane as a reason to block
Republican tax and spending plans.
"Democrats think this is the worst possible time to be cutting taxes for those
at the very top and cutting the social safety net of those at the very bottom,
and adding $35 billion," said Thomas S. Kahn, staff director for Democrats on
the House Budget Committee.
Budget analysts said the magnitude and unique characteristics of the hurricane
made it unlike any previous natural disaster, resulting in a variety of
extraordinary costs:
¶Shelter for as many as a million people for months.
¶A potentially high share of uninsured property losses that stem from flooding,
which is not covered by private insurers.
¶Education and health care for hundreds of thousands forced to live outside
their home states.
"Katrina could easily become a milestone in the history of the federal budget,"
said Stanley Collender, a longtime budget analyst here. "Policies that never
would have been considered before could now become standard."
Indeed, there were signs on Tuesday that Republicans and Democrats had already
begun to compete with each other over who might be willing to spend more.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic leader, predicted on Tuesday
that costs could total $150 billion. Top Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have
begun to call for "stimulus" measures to buck up the overall economy.
White House officials contend that costs attributable to the hurricane are
separate from Mr. Bush's underlying budget goals, which include cutting the
deficit in half over the next four years and permanently extending most of the
tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003.
Budget analysts also note that natural disasters are essentially one-time costs
that do not affect the government's long-run fiscal health.
"We can afford $100 billion - one time," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of
the Congressional Budget Office. "What we cannot afford is $100 billion in
additional spending year after year."
The problem is that, even without the hurricane, the federal government's
underlying fiscal health is in poor shape. In July, the White House predicted
that surging tax revenues would reduce the deficit this year to $333 billion
from $412 billion in 2004.
But many analysts believe that the tax surge was largely a one-time event and
that overall government spending is still poised to climb rapidly as a result of
the war in Iraq, the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the growing number
of baby boomers who will soon reach retirement age.
Before the hurricane, House and Senate Republicans were preparing to work out
$35 billion in spending cuts over the next five years that would trim Medicaid
payments by $10 billion and make smaller cuts in student loan programs, farm
programs, food stamps, housing and cash assistance to poor families.
Under the budget resolution that Congress passed this spring, Congressional
committees are supposed to spell out the proposed cuts by Sept. 16. House and
Senate leaders had been planning to pass the cuts within a week or so after
that.
Hurricane's Toll Is Likely to Reshape Bush's Economic Agenda, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07deficit.html

Steve Bell
Editorial cartoon
The Guardian p. 22
7.9.2005
left to right :
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as a poodle,
Barbara Bush, George H. W. Bush,
George W. Bush.
Bush Promises to Seek Answers
to Failures of Hurricane
Relief
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
and CARL HULSE
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - Under relentless
political fire over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush on
Tuesday tried to steer the public debate toward progress in the region,
promising to investigate earlier stumbles, as anxious lawmakers returned to the
Capitol pledging inquiries of their own and aid money for the storm victims.
Mr. Bush, in a flurry of meetings at the White House, said he would dispatch
Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast this week to cut through any
bureaucratic obstacles slowing recovery efforts. Members of Congress demanded
answers and awaited a new emergency spending measure from the White House,
calculating the growing cost of the recovery at $50 billion, if not more than
twice that.
Fresh from their summer recess, lawmakers questioned the effectiveness of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and pledged to hold hearings and possibly
enact legislation to address the failures in the response system.
"It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective
initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years and for which
specific dire warnings had been given for days," said Senator Susan Collins,
Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, which will conduct one of the main inquiries.
There will be at least two sets of Congressional hearings, leaders said,
beginning as early as next week, to examine issues like failures in the command
and control structure, shortcomings in the evacuation plan for New Orleans, and
any organizational problems that may have contributed to the slow response.
The hearings will also address whether the government missed critical
opportunities to shore up the levees in New Orleans and whether planning for
future disasters is sufficient.
Lawmakers, at least in the Senate, said it would be too early to consider
whether Mr. Bush would be called to testify.
For the first time since the hurricane hit, Mr. Bush met with leaders from both
parties, capping a day of constant political attention to a crisis that has
exposed fault lines within the Republican Party and threatens to overtake the
entire Congressional agenda. Mr. Bush promised to lead an investigation into
what went wrong, although a White House spokesman quickly qualified the
statement, saying the inquiry would come later to avoid diverting resources from
the recovery efforts.
Mr. Bush also resisted renewed calls to fire Michael D. Brown, the director of
FEMA, who became a lightning rod for attacks last week when he said he was
unaware of a crisis at the New Orleans convention center, news of which had been
televised for days. Instead, Mr. Bush accused critics of playing the "blame
game" and said he would remain focused on the immediate crisis as evacuees
fanned out across the country.
"We've got to solve problems; we're problem-solvers," he said. "There will be
ample time for people to figure out what went right and what went wrong. What
I'm interested in is helping save lives."
At issue in the immediate future is the amount of money the government will
allocate for the recovery and reconstruction efforts. Mr. Bush signed a $10.5
billion spending measure last Friday, and Congressional leaders said they
expected to receive a $40 billion to $50 billion supplemental spending request
this week. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, said the total
bill could reach $150 billion, further squeezing a budget constrained by the
nearly $5 billion spent each month on the Iraq war and the $333 billion federal
deficit.
The $150 billion projection was quickly disputed by Representative Tom DeLay of
Texas, the Republican leader, who suggested that Mr. Reid was "playing politics"
by giving that figure when no official projections were available. But White
House officials have not disputed estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.
Senior administration officials rejected accusations that the federal government
had been slow to respond, detailing progress on the military, education and
social services fronts. Mr. Bush, after meeting with Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings, said the administration was reviewing ways to help states
like Texas absorb the costs of accommodating thousands of children of evacuees
in their public school systems.
At the Pentagon, senior officials pointed to the arrival of forces in the Gulf
Coast in recent days, with more than 41,000 National Guardsmen and about 17,000
active-duty personnel committed to the mission. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised what he described as a more than adequate
military response.
"Not only was there no delay, I think we anticipated, in most cases - not in all
cases - but in most cases, the support that was required," General Myers said at
a news briefing. "And we were pushing support before we were formally asked for
it."
Even so, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he had ordered the military
to conduct a "lessons learned" study on the armed forces' response to the
hurricane to determine whether it could have been more timely.
And Mr. Bush, in the first of several hurricane-related events throughout the
day, made an unexpected pledge to personally lead an inquiry into earlier
failures.
"What I intend to do is lead a - to lead an investigation to find out what went
right and what went wrong," Mr. Bush, after meeting with his cabinet, said in
response to a question about who would be held accountable.
"And I'll tell you why," he continued. "It's very important for us to understand
the relationship between the federal government, the state government and the
local government when it comes to a major catastrophe. And the reason it's
important is, is that we still live in an unsettled world."
Pressed for details about the investigation, Scott McClellan, the White House
spokesman, said it would not begin until the immediate crisis had passed.
Describing it as an "analysis," not an investigation, Mr. McClellan would not
say whether the emergency failures would be examined by an independent
commission, as the Sept. 11 attacks were, or even when the president wanted the
process to start.
"There will be a time to do a thorough analysis," Mr. McClellan said. "Now is
not the time to do that."
Instead, Congress appeared poised to take the lead.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, said she was introducing
legislation to create an independent commission.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the
Government Reform Committee, said his panel would begin hearings on the
government response, a move that came after Senate leaders had announced their
own plans for hearings and that appeared to catch House leaders off guard.
"We are going to look at Mr. Davis's hearing," said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert,
Republican of Illinois. "What we don't want to have happen is that the people
who are on the ground in the Gulf States have to come up here and talk to 13 or
14 different groups."
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who will help lead the
Senate investigation with Ms. Collins, said the federal response to Hurricane
Katrina had shaken the public's confidence in the ability of the government to
protect them.
"Hurricane Katrina was in one sense the most significant test of the new
national emergency preparedness and response system that was created after 9/11,
and it obviously did not pass that test," Mr. Lieberman said.
Some Republican lawmakers said they had tried to impress upon their party's
leaders what they believe are the political risks involved in the disaster
response, fearing that Republicans have exposed themselves to significant
political risk in next year's elections by having appeared not to take the
hurricane and its aftermath seriously at first.
Already, the hurricane has upended the fall legislative agenda. Leaders of both
the House and the Senate have said their chief mission in the coming weeks would
be to provide relief to storm victims and begin rebuilding devastated
communities.
Under pressure from Democrats, the Senate postponed a vote on a proposal to
eliminate the estate tax, while House officials said they expected to delay a
budget bill that would require cuts in health care and education.
Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.
Bush
Promises to Seek Answers to Failures of Hurricane Relief, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07bush.html

Steve Bell
If...
The Guardian > G2
p. 23
7.9.2005
George W. Bush as a cowboy
Police threaten forced evacuation
Wed Sep 7, 2005
12:48 PM ET
Reuters
By Michael Christie
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Police threatened to
force reluctant Hurricane Katrina survivors to leave a ruined and fetid New
Orleans on Wednesday as a political storm grew over the botched response to the
disaster that some say could cost $150 billion.
Troops and police fanned out across town, trying to enforce a mandatory
evacuation order from Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the flooded city was a health
danger without a functioning economy or basic services.
Thousands are feared dead from the hurricane and its aftermath. Teams searching
flooded areas of the city, which is still 60 percent under water, tied bodies to
trees or fences when they found them and noted the location for later recovery.
Nagin said floodwaters threatened those still clinging to the life they knew
before Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast last week, with garbage, oil and waste
floating in stagnant pools inundating the historic city that is now largely
abandoned.
But as in many aspects of the rescue effort, there was confusion about whether
the government could or would force people from their homes.
"We personally will not force anyone out of their homes," said Art Jones, a
senior official in the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security and Emergency
Preparedness. "It's very difficult to force an American out of their home."
State and local police, however, said force would be used if necessary.
"We'll do everything it takes to make this city safe. These people don't
understand they're putting themselves in harm's way," said New Orleans Police
Superintendent P. Edwin Compass.
Cars that had crowded New Orleans streets now were visible poking up through its
flooded thoroughfares. This post-Katrina city buzzed with helicopters landing on
overpasses to drop off rescued people to lines of waiting ambulances.
The skies were thick with sleek and menacing Black Hawks, twin-rotor Chinooks,
orange-colored Coast Guard choppers and others of every stripe. Slow-moving
military transport planes also rumbled overhead, bringing supplies.
"The sounds of New Orleans were jazz, people laughing, people eating a good
meal," Nagin said. "And now the sounds of New Orleans are helicopters and army
vehicles. This is almost surreal."
ECONOMIC COST SOARS
As the scope of the disaster that has driven more than a million people from
their homes became clearer, financial estimates of its cost grew.
The Congressional Budget Office said Hurricane Katrina could cost as many as
400,000 U.S. jobs and slash economic growth by up to 1 percentage point.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the cost of recovery and
relief could be more than $150 billion. Louisiana Homeland Security's Jones said
the storm's cost will exceed $100 billion.
The White House is preparing a new emergency budget request likely to total $40
billion to $50 billion for the recovery, in addition to $10.5 billion approved
by Congress last week.
U.S. President George W. Bush said he would lead an investigation into the
emergency operation which has been criticized for not being prepared for the
long-predicted storm, but he resisted demands for an immediate probe.
"There will be ample time for people to figure out what went right, and what
went wrong. What I'm interested (in) is helping save lives," he said.
Bush's response to the crisis was rated "bad" or "terrible" by 42 percent of
Americans surveyed for a CNN/USA Today Gallup poll released on Wednesday,
compared with 35 percent who said it was "good" or "great." The federal
government's performance received the same ratings, while the response of state
and local officials was viewed negatively by 35 percent and positively by 37
percent.
"IF I'M GOING TO BE MISERABLE"
Out on New Orleans streets, which look like a war zone with thousands of
soldiers and police on patrol, National Guard troops went from house to house,
person to person, trying to convince them to leave.
They explained the dangers of staying put and gave them information about how to
evacuate, but also assured that the city that was crime-ridden and chaotic in
the days after Katrina was now safe.
Florence Castets, appeared nervous as the troops spoke to her in an area near
the Garden District, and she was noncommittal about her plans.
"I don't have any information, though I have felt safer here than going anyplace
else," she said. "The people who knew us left us behind. They were more
concerned about their cars and dogs than us."
The die-hard inhabitants of a city mainly known for jazz and Mardi Gras before
it became a disaster area of Third-World proportions say they fear evacuation to
parts of the country where they have no family or means of support.
"If I'm gonna be miserable, I'd better be miserable right here," said Robert
Johnson, 58, from his rundown house in the city's 9th Ward.
Martha Smith-Aguillard, 72, said she was brought against her will to an
evacuation point at the city's wrecked convention center. Her foot was swollen
after she trod on a rusty nail and she said she needed a tetanus shot.
Nonetheless, she refused to board a government helicopter.
"They manhandled me and paid no mind to what I said. I ain't never been in no
helicopter in my life, or no airplane, and I'm 72, I ain't starting now," she
said.
"I'm not going to get that tetanus shot, so I guess I'll just have to die," she
said, adding, "We're all going to die and if I'm going to die, it's gonna be
right here in New Orleans."
(Additional reporting by Adam Entous in Washington)
Police threaten forced evacuation, R, 7.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-07T164904Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML
Victims face bewildering options
Wed Sep 7, 2005
12:12 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Free housing options for
refugees from Hurricane Katrina include hotel rooms, private homes, cruise ship
staterooms and the world's largest homeless shelter, but where survivors end up
depends on luck and determination.
Texas has evacuated 245,000 people from Louisiana, and thousands more came on
their own and received public shelter. But the standards vary dramatically as
local officials scramble to accommodate one of the greatest flows of displaced
people in U.S. history.
The unprecedented scope of the problem, bureaucracy and an inundation of
information means few Katrina victims know exactly what choices they have. Many
officials are also bewildered.
"Oh, it's confusing, especially if you don't know the place," said Johnny
O'Conner, 65, a retired school maintenance worker from New Orleans who left just
before the storm hit. "You've got to go and roll with the punches."
O'Conner was staying in a hotel in Port Arthur, Texas, near the Louisiana
border, that offered tennis and swimming. He had paid for a week's stay out of
his own pocket and was surprised but happy to learn that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency would pay for a two-week stay.
The hotel's owner said he was unsure whether he would receive government payment
for evacuees he was hosting.
"It's all confusing," Nick Shah said. "We don't know if it is going to work out
for us."
Few of the 16,000 sleeping at the giant Houston Astrodome knew free hotel rooms
were an option. After the squalor and danger of the Superdome in New Orleans,
many said only they were grateful for a clean, well-supplied place to sleep.
But tensions increase over time at large facilities, and on Tuesday officials
reported two cases of attempted rape in Houston shelters.
HOTEL TO SHELTER
Oscar Alegria, 49, an oil pipeline inspector from New Orleans, spent one night
in his car and two nights at a four-star hotel in downtown Houston before
running low on funds and joining 2,000 others at the city's convention center.
"I don't want to be here a long period," he said, sitting on one of a long line
of inflatable mattresses.
At the hotel he had left, guests were advised to save receipts for FEMA
reimbursement. "There ain't nothing fair about any of this," said a displaced
man there who hoped to have the U.S. federal government reimburse his hotel
costs.
Two cruise ships slated to house 2,000 people each off Galveston, on the coast
near Houston, have so far proven unpopular, with some flood victims saying they
have seen enough of water and others reluctant to pack up and move again.
Some refugees may be able to find public housing, but only if they act quickly.
The director of the housing authority in Port Arthur, Texas, Cele Quesada, said
he had put up 72 families, but had only 30 units left.
Mary Broussard, who works for Texas Gas Service, also took in a refugee, a
21-year-old woman the same age as her daughter. "Quickly she became part of the
family," she said. "She cooked dinner for me the other night."
Other families nationwide offered to host people, but survivors must navigate
the Internet to find those offers.
Victims face bewildering options, R, 7.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-07T161253Z_01_MCC757749_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CHOICES-DC.XML
Putting Down New Roots
on More Solid Ground
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY
HOUSTON, Sept. 6 - In her 19 years, all spent
living in downtown New Orleans, Chavon Allen had never ventured farther than her
bus fare would allow, and that was one trip last year to Baton Rouge. But now
that she has seen Houston, she is planning to stay.
"This is a whole new beginning, a whole new start. I mean, why pass up a good
opportunity, to go back to something that you know has problems?" asked Ms.
Allen, who had been earning $5.15 an hour serving chicken in a Popeyes
restaurant.
For Daphne Barconey, Hurricane Katrina disrupted plans for a grand house to be
built on a $150,000 lot that she bought in eastern New Orleans just months ago.
Now, just eight days after the storm, she has a job in a hospital here, a year's
lease on a four-bedroom apartment near the Galleria mall and no plan to return
to New Orleans.
Jason Magee is a professional golfer who says now is the time to move away from
his native New Orleans. "I had been looking for an excuse to leave, and this is
it," he said.
From across the economic spectrum, whether with heavy hearts or with optimism,
the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the wrath of Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans are already putting down roots in new cities. If even a fraction of
them decide not to return, the migration threatens a population crash that could
be nearly as devastating to the New Orleans area as the storm itself.
And city officials know it. After days of asking, then demanding, now
practically begging the residents of New Orleans to leave, they have mentally if
not publicly changed gears and are devising strategy behind the scenes about how
they will accomplish a titanic shift - in effect, a reverse evacuation.
Since its population peaked at almost 630,000 in 1960, New Orleans has been
steadily losing its people. According to the last census, 445,000 people lived
there. But a trickle of people over the decades is quite a different matter from
what the city now faces, a sudden population bust that could subtract up to
250,000 people.
"I look at the situation, and it brings fear," said Rodney Braxton, the city's
chief legislative lobbyist. "If there's one thing that gives me sorrow beyond
the loss of life, it's that."
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, head of the department of urban planning at the
University of California, Los Angeles, underscored the size of the problem. "If
a big chunk of the population doesn't come back, it's going to be horrific for
the city," she said.
In Houston alone, close to 1,200 evacuees moved on Tuesday from the Astrodome
into apartments with six-month leases.
"We know that with each passing day it's going to be harder to bring them back,"
Mr. Braxton said. "But we are going to fight for them."
So far, that fight is only in its infancy, but the first phase is already taking
shape. Kenya Smith, the city's chief of intergovernmental relations, said city
leaders intended to establish New Orleans-run centers in every area where large
numbers of evacuees were known to be living.
The centers would be clearinghouses for information, providing
neighborhood-by-neighborhood details about floodwaters and cleanup efforts,
utilities and phone service.
The centers would also function as registration sites, to keep track of who is
where.
The city intends to establish a toll-free number providing daily updates on
information like the condition of the streets and giving residents opportunities
to communicate with city officials.
Beyond that, Mr. Smith said, plans will have to be tailored to the different
segments of society.
"Large pockets of our people will not have the means to travel great distances
to get back, so we know we will have to help with that," Mr. Smith said.
Incentives are being discussed for evacuees who were better off.
"We intend to make it as easy as possible and to give them something to come
home to," Mr. Braxton said, emphasizing the importance of improved
infrastructure and storm protections. "There will have to be some creative
legislation and ideas."
Mr. Magee, the golfer, says the storm will change the city's demographics.
"The middle class is dislodged now, and in six months, they're going to have to
have a really compelling reason to move," he said.
Some people faithful to New Orleans will return no matter what. Glen Andrews, a
jazz trombonist staying in the Astrodome, on Tuesday echoed the words of Fats
Domino, a New Orleans native.
"I'm going home even if it comes down to walking to New Orleans," Mr. Andrews
said. "It's my life, and I prefer to be in Louisiana, period. And it doesn't
matter what's left there. I'm going to rebuild even if I have to hold a shovel
and a horn at the same time."
But countless others were dissatisfied with their lives in New Orleans and were
already thinking about leaving before the storm hit.
"Honestly, it was bad before," said Ms. Barconey, a 39-year-old nurse, citing
the high poverty rate and poor public education. "It would have to be better
than what it was."
Before the hurricane, the city was making itself better for both the middle
class and the working class.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin had started economic development and building programs valued
at about $4 billion and had pressed for homeownership in the city's poorest
areas.
In fact, many residents had begun to move back to the city's core around the
French Quarter, into newly gentrified areas like the Warehouse District along
the Mississippi River and the Faubourg Marigny.
City officials hope the rebuilding effort will bolster their economy.
"One thing New Orleans was lacking was jobs," said Cynthia Hedge Morrell, a
member of the City Council. "Now the rebuilding is going to bring a lot of good
old-fashioned jobs. Bricklayers, plumbers, woodworkers, contractors. So is it
going to be difficult? Yeah, and they might put off moving back for a while. But
I do believe people want to come back to their home."
Given how she feels now, Ms. Barconey says the makeover will have to be extreme.
"They're going to have to, some kind of way, raise that city above sea level or
I'm not going back. I'm serious. I'm not putting myself in that same
predicament."
If city officials were to take the advice of urban planners, they would already
be putting out strong messages that the destruction would not be repeated once
new levees and drains were built.
"There need to be assurances that where people are rebuilding, no new flooding
will happen," Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris said, adding that officials need to come
together and publicize a master plan for the city.
"Cities that lose population eventually decline, but New Orleans is a city with
such character, that would be hard to imagine unless people totally lose faith
in their government," she said.
After the way she was treated during the evacuation, Ms. Allen says she has lost
that faith. Being evacuated from the Superdome, she sobbed through a cascade of
tears on a Greyhound bus: "Goodbye New Orleans. Bye-bye Louisiana."
Looking back at that moment from a grassy stretch outside the Astrodome on
Tuesday, she said she knew even then that goodbye meant forever.
Putting Down New Roots on More Solid Ground, NYT, 7.6.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07home.html
Across Nation,
Storm Victims Crowd Schools
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON
School districts from Maine to Washington
State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated
Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest
student resettlement in the nation's history.
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms,
teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law
must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless
some provisions of that law are waived.
Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public
education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including
disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco
earthquake and the Chicago fire.
"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been
shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in
American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at
the University of Michigan.
The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton
Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some
students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix;
Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City;
Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for
their arrival.
The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be
well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000
private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard
and Plaquemines Parishes.
President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked
the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that
Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states
absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might
be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private
donations to schools enrolling displaced students.
"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of
homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses
carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some
7,000 headed for Kansas.
Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida
Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.
The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137
students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.
"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door
and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way
has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she
said.
The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The
Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is
about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.
Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by
local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child
Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency
measures that could be controversial.
The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked
her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in
the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large
numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.
Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her
to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the
Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.
Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers
unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster
recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No
Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.
But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive
provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores
on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known
as making adequate yearly progress.
"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing
under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the
provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing
and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.
Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers
whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her
spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that
individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be
more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.
"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.
Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal
law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the
urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that
include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were
expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.
Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless
the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would
add tensions to the resettlement crisis.
"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores
are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly
you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but
also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law
will say you run a terrible school."
The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated
issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education
Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management
companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll
students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its
companies.
The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the
department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve
evacuees wherever they are."
"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or
shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these
students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment
caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the
federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.
Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of
the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a
draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07child.html
In Nursing Home,
a Fight Lost to Rising
Waters
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By GARDINER HARRIS
CHALMETTE, La., Sept. 6 - They nailed a table
against one window, ran a heavy electric wheelchair with a table on top against
another and pushed a couch against a door. These failed defenses are still in
St. Rita's nursing home, as are at least 14 swollen, unrecognizable bodies.
St. Bernard Parish officials say that 32 of the home's roughly 60 residents died
on Aug. 29, more than a week ago.
It is a measure of the enormity of the disaster that has struck southern
Louisiana that no one has removed many of the bodies, and local officials say
there are no immediate plans to do so. The flood victims still lie where they
died - draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor
in several inches of muck.
The home, about 20 miles southeast of downtown New Orleans, is still surrounded
by three feet of murky water. Eight vehicles are parked in front, covered in
debris and mud.
Indeed, officials suspect that there may be hundreds of similar, though smaller
scenes of death that will become apparent only after the water recedes and they
are able to search every house in the region.
Many evacuees have told stories of near escapes, of busting out attic windows or
axing through the roof to reach safety. The stories that will never be told are
of those who tried and failed to make those escapes.
St. Rita's nursing home whispers this story.
Ricky Melerine, a St. Bernard Parish councilman, said the water in his area rose
at least three feet from 10 to 10:15 that Monday morning. And it rose faster
still after that.
Ronald Nunez, a local resident, said several men tried to save St. Rita's
residents by floating some out on mattresses. Others were able to walk and float
on their own to a nearby school, Mr. Nunez said.
And someone had time to put up a fight against the tide.
Nails were pounded through a table. Dressers were thrown against windows.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, perhaps in
hopes of evacuation. They simply ran out of time.
There are signs in the home that the water rose to the roof. Three inches of
muck still cover the floors. Tadpoles wriggle in doorways. The stench is
nauseating.
The story of St. Rita's leads locals here to voice the same frustrations they
have about the entire disaster.
"Why didn't they evacuate?" Mr. Nunez asked. "Why?"
Mr. Nunez also said, with some bitterness, that his parish got only sporadic
help from state and federal authorities.
St. Bernard's Parish has five major nursing homes with roughly 65 patients each,
said Henry Rodriguez Jr., the parish president. There are another six smaller
facilities, he said. Almost all but St. Rita's were evacuated before the storm.
Steve Kuiper, vice president of operations for Acadian Ambulance, said he was
told that St. Rita's had an evacuation plan that depended on another nursing
home. Acadian, by far the largest ambulance provider in the state, used
helicopters to evacuate many of the parish's neediest medical cases after the
storm hit. But Mr. Kuiper said he never heard from St. Rita's.
"They didn't think this would ever happen," Mr. Melerine said. "They just didn't
evacuate."
The failure at St. Rita's is particularly difficult to explain. The home is in a
depression in the ground. The nearby road, which was covered with four or five
feet of water, sits at least five feet above the home's floor. The home appears
in retrospect to be particularly vulnerable to flood. Efforts to reach its
management late Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Military and private helicopters began ferrying people out of St. Bernard Parish
almost as soon as the storm hit. The Coast Guard spent much of the day of the
storm landing people on a berm above the Mississippi River near downtown
Chalmette, which is some of the highest ground around.
Mr. Nunez said he helped establish a shelter there. Water was running so fast
down the nearby road that it nearly swept some of those seeking shelter away.
Mr. Nunez said he had to tie himself to a tractor to save some people from the
current.
"We ran a little over 400 people through that camp," Mr. Nunez said.
Dozens of boats are still on the side of the road in and around Chalmette, most
of them washed there by the storm, and others stranded there after use by
rescuers.
Janie Fuller, an Acadian paramedic, helped deliver a baby in the town jail and
then managed to get a helicopter to evacuate mother and child. Ms. Fuller got
another woman out who seemed to be suffering internal bleeding by commandeering
an air boat and then a pickup truck to get her to a landing zone for a National
Guard helicopter.
Still, the parish is only now getting the full attention of the authorities, who
initially focused on the tens of thousands stranded in the Superdome and the
convention center in New Orleans. For parish residents, this is a badge of honor
as well as a source of quiet anger.
As a result, there are myriad stories of heroism and rescues in St. Bernard
Parish. But there is also St. Rita's.
"I just can't understand how you don't evacuate," Mr. Melerine said.
In
Nursing Home, a Fight Lost to Rising Waters, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07chalmette.html
Amid One City's Welcome,
a Tinge of Backlash
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Last week came the
rumors - of riots at Wal-Marts, of break-ins at homes, of drug gangs from New
Orleans roaming the streets of its more sedate neighbor 75 miles up Interstate
10.
Today came the reality - of a dozen or more relatives crowded under one roof, of
hours stuck in traffic trying to get to school or work, of frustration and fear
about what kind of city Baton Rouge will be with at least 100,000 evacuees and
rescue workers added to the 227,000 residents it had before the storm hit.
Make no mistake. The overwhelming response of people in Baton Rouge to Hurricane
Katrina has been one of compassion and sacrifice with every church in town, it
seems, housing or feeding evacuees.
But there have also been runs on gun stores, mounting frustration over
gridlocked roads and an undercurrent of fear about crime and the effect of the
evacuees.
After the chaos of the storm, which did some damage here, and a long weekend,
Tuesday was the first day most residents returned to work and school. Before the
evacuation, blacks made up about half the population of Baton Rouge and almost
70 percent of New Orleans, and in conversations in which race is often explicit
or just below the surface, voices on the street, in shops, and especially in the
anonymous hothouse of talk radio were raising a new question: just how
compassionate can this community, almost certainly home to more evacuees than
any other, afford to be?
"You can't take the city out of the yat, and you can't take the yat out of the
city," said Frank Searle, a longtime Baton Rouge resident, using a slang term
for New Orleanians derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at?"
"These people will not assimilate here," Mr. Searle said. "They put up with the
crime in New Orleans, and now it's staring them in the face, but up here that's
not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they
have to. This is the South. We will take care of it."
For a week Baton Rouge, the state capital, home of Louisiana State University
and a place that sees itself as a less raucous cousin to what had been the
kingdom of sin and merriment to its south, has been trying to come to terms with
its sudden status as the state's most populous city.
"It's a new Baton Rouge we're living in, isn't it?" said Jeanine Smallwood of
suburban Prairieville, in the middle of a 90-minute drive to work that should
have taken 20.
Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot
house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion
with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees
well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New
Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read,
"Kill the cops."
"Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to."
She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On
reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for
the best.
"People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their
lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the
new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said.
Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more
wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in
fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last
week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a
giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their
own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from
New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns.
Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in
Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a
cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When
push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will."
Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his
life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line
for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with
a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it.
"I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr.
Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I
have some protection."
Many evacuees are staying with family or friends, their campers, S.U.V.'s and
pickups parked on front lawns or circular driveways.
Most people at the broad array of shelters were dazed but appreciative of the
help from local volunteers like the Louisiana State University students, upbeat
and attentive, tending to sick and exhausted evacuees at the triage center on
campus.
But others, particularly those at the main Red Cross shelter at the River Center
convention center downtown, were seething with frustration, not just over the
disaster they were fleeing, but from the sense that they were being treated not
so much like guests as people being warehoused until they could be shipped
elsewhere.
Patricia Perry, a postal employee from New Orleans, said anyone with a wristband
from the River Center shelter was being stereotyped outside it as one of "those
people" - looters, criminals, outcasts.
"It's like a stigma," she said. "All they really want to do is get us out of
town. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I work hard. I pay my taxes. Surely, this state
can find a place for us to live."
Still, many residents, with the sense of intimacy that remains so much a part of
Southern life, took their role as hosts seriously, as if it would be bad
manners, the ultimate sin in the South, to do otherwise.
So when Pam Robertson, manager of a convenience store, asked a customer how he
was doing, it was not dutiful chatter but a real question that begged for a real
answer.
When it came, she took the man's hand in hers over the counter and talked about
her friend Hunter, evacuated from Loyola University, about her upbringing in the
town of Henderson in the heart of Cajun country, about the grid of local streets
here.
She greeted one and all with the same missionary zeal, as if the right words
could somehow undo the disaster of the past week.
And when asked how she was doing, or even when they didn't, she replied: "I'm
tired, but I'm hanging in. It's good. It's all good. God is good. We'll get
through it."
Amid
One City's Welcome, a Tinge of Backlash, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07backlash.html
Water Returned to Lake Pontchartrain
Contains Toxic Material
September 7, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
and ANDREW C. REVKIN
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - While the human
and economic toll of Hurricane Katrina continued to mount, New Orleans was
beginning to pump back into Lake Pontchartrain the floodwaters that had
inundated the city.
But this is not the same water that flooded the city. What started flowing back
into the lake on Monday and continued spilling into it Tuesday is laced with raw
sewage, bacteria, heavy metals, pesticides and toxic chemicals, Louisiana
officials said on Tuesday.
Whether or not the accelerating pumping of this brew from city streets into
coastal waters poses a threat to the ecosystems and fisheries in the brackish
bay remains to be seen, the officials said.
They added that they could do little more than keep testing and count on the
restorative capacity of nature to break down or bury contaminants.
Though the state of the lake was a prime issue, it was just one of a host of
problems identified in the storm-ravaged region on Tuesday by Louisiana and
federal environmental officials.
For example, the officials said that although two large oil spills, from damaged
storage tanks, were under control, thousands of other smaller spills continued
to coat floodwaters in New Orleans with a rainbow sheen.
The first samples of the city's floodwaters were taken on Saturday by the
Environmental Protection Agency, and results were expected later in the week,
officials said.
"It's simply unfeasible" to try and hold the pumped water somewhere to filter
out pollution, said Michael D. McDaniel, the Louisiana secretary of
environmental quality.
"We have to get the water out of the city or the nightmare only gets worse,"
said Dr. McDaniel, who is a biologist. "We can't even get in to save people's
lives. How can you put any filtration in place?"
Some scientists outside government tended to agree that the risk of long-term
damage to the coastal waters was not high. One reason is that the lake is fed by
several rivers and flushed by tides through its link to the Gulf of Mexico.
There will probably be an "initial toxic slug" entering the lake but that will
be diluted and degraded by bacteria, said Frank T. Manheim, a former geochemist
for the United States Geological Survey who teaches at George Mason University
and was a co-author of a 2002 report on pollution issues in the lake.
"I think the lake has withstood has some big hits," he said, including an
oxygen-sapping algae bloom after a 1997 flood.
He said that most of the long-lived industrial pollutants that can accumulate in
organisms and work their way up the food chain have largely been phased out.
Overall, though, it was becoming evident that just the flooding of New Orleans
had created environmental problems that could take years to resolve, state
officials said.
Each of the estimated 140,000 to 160,000 homes that were submerged is a
potential source of fuel, cleaners, pesticides and other potentially hazardous
materials found in garages or under kitchen sinks, officials said.
The E.P.A. on Tuesday estimated that more than 200 sewage treatment plants in
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama were affected, with almost all of the plants
around New Orleans knocked out of action.
Hundreds of small manufacturers or other businesses using chemicals or fuels,
many with storage tanks held in place by gravity instead of bolts, are probably
leaking various chemicals and oils, officials and independent experts said.
The E.P.A. and the Department of Health and Human Services issued a joint
statement on Tuesday warning people that "every effort should be made to limit
contact with floodwater because of potentially elevated levels of contamination
associated with raw sewage and other hazardous substances."
The statement urged anyone exposed to the water to wash thoroughly with soap and
water and alert medical personnel about open cuts. "Early symptoms from exposure
to contaminated flood water may include upset stomach, intestinal problems,
headache and other flu-like discomfort," the statement said. Officials pointed
to a short list of developments they called encouraging: the two largest known
oil spills were declared under control, with one slick drifting out into the
Gulf of Mexico and away from the state's ravaged coastline, where it will
probably degrade over time.
As for the lake, "The wonderful thing about nature is its resilience," Dr.
McDaniel said. "The bacterial contaminants will not last a long time in the
lake. They actually die off pretty fast. The organic material will degrade with
natural processes. Metals will probably fall and be captured in the sediments.
Nature does a good job. It just takes awhile."
Kenneth Chang contributed reporting from New York for this article.
Water
Returned to Lake Pontchartrain Contains Toxic Material, NYT, 7.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/national/nationalspecial/07lake.html
Police Report
Progress in New Orleans
as City Is
Drained
September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN
and CHRISTINE HAUSER
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Louisiana
officials today offered their first assessment of the ecological and
environmental devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and the police said that
search and rescue efforts were gaining ground as authorities tried to drain more
water from the flooded city. With fires raging in some buildings and houses and
the city in lockdown, the authorities said today that they have made 150 arrests
this week as they tried to bring some order to the streets.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin reported that more citizens were evacuated from flooded
buildings, delirious and dehydrated, many of them senior citizens who had no
access to their medication.
President Bush and Congressional leaders vowed today to find out what went wrong
in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
Louisiana officials, commenting on the environmental aspects ofthe hurricane's
aftermath, said that 140,000 to 160,000 homes had been submerged or destroyed;
60 to 90 million tons of solid waste must be cleaned up; and 530 sewage
treatment plants were inoperable. They warned that it would take years to fully
restore clean drinking water.
Two developments were encouraging: a pair of major oil spills were declared
under control, with one of them drifting out into the Gulf of Mexico and away
from the state's ravaged coastline, and 170 sources of radiation, ranging from
hospitals to pipe-welding plants, have been secured, the officials said.
The overall picture presented by Michael D. McDaniel, the Louisiana secretary of
environmental quality, consisted of untold hazards from nearly 7,000 underground
storage tanks still submerged in water, widespread destruction of wildlife and
degradation of the state's wetlands, marshes and coastline.
Dr. McDaniel, who is a biologist, acknowledged that the soupy basin that is New
Orleans was filled with bacteria and other contaminants, but said the extent of
biological and chemical hazards would not be clear under the federal
Environmental Protection Agency completed laboratory tests.
"In addition to the oil and gasoline-type compounds, I expect we'll see some
traces of truly toxic materials - things like pesticides, perhaps metals," he
said. "We have homes with hazardous materials in them. We expect to see some
nutrients obviously, as we flooded a lot of lawns and garden areas."
Scientists have already begun to warn that pumping billions of gallons of
brackish water from New Orleans back into Lake Pontchartrain could have harmful
long-term consequences.
Army engineers have patched up two levees that had been breached by the storm
and cautiously continued today to pump water out of New Orleans. The Army Corps
of Engineers began the pumping on Monday.
Dr. McDaniel agreed that the hazards were unknown, but said there were no
alternatives. "We have to get the water out of the city or the nightmare only
gets worse," he said. He added later, "We can't even get in to save people's
lives. How can you put any filtration in place?"
In a telephone interview, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers, John Hall,
said that there was a pump operating at the 17th Street canal station, but that
the station was operating at well below capacity out of concern for the
fragility of the repairs to the flood-wall. "We can't pump very fast right now;
it's a trickle," Mr. Hall said.
There was another pump operating at a station on the city's industrial canal.
But authorities wanted to concentrate on the 17th Street station because it is
the biggest pump station in the city.
"It might well be that we wanted to get the one that could do the most drainage
work," he said. "If we can get this one operating, we've got the largest single
piece of muscle in the entire New Orleans system."
Mr. Nagin, the mayor, said that the two pumps were starting to have a
"significant impact" on the water levels. Instead of having 80 percent of the
city under water, "I would estimate we have 60 percent of the city under water,"
he said.
Mr. Bush, still trying to counter the impression that his administration was
late in reacting to the Gulf Coast calamity, said Vice President Dick Cheney
would visit the region on Thursday to assess. The president sidestepped a
question on whether he intended to replace anyone who has been responsible for
the disaster response. "What I intend to do," Mr. Bush said, "is lead an
investigation into what went right and what went wrong."
Mr. Bush comforted victims on Monday in Poplarville, Miss., and Baton Rouge,
La., but he found himself ensnared in a dispute with Louisiana's Democratic
governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who learned of Mr. Bush's trip from news
reports.
The president's trip, an effort to calm the region and part of a major White
House campaign to stem the political damage from the hurricane, came as rescue
teams in New Orleans searched for thousands of residents who remained in the
city, many having ignored pleas to evacuate.
Today, the city's No. 2 police official, W. J. Riley, said they were doing
search and rescue in grids, and have covered about 75 percent of the city. But
there are still people out there, some of whom can walk out in the three or four
feet of water surrounding them but "for whatever reasons, some of them are still
there," he said. "At this point we're not forcing anyone out of their homes."
He said the rescuers circulating in boats had not stocked up on food and water
to supply provisions to those who wanted to stay. "If the Salvation Army can get
it to them, we'll allow them to get it to them," he added.
As has been true for days, the death toll was assumed to be disastrously high,
but estimates remained little more than guesses - perhaps educated, perhaps not.
Officially, the Louisiana toll climbed to 71., said the figure might well reach
10,000.Army engineers said that after having dumped hundreds of bags filled with
cement, sand and pieces of ruined roadways, they had closed the breach in the
levee at the London Avenue Canal. Late Monday afternoon, state officials said
that another crucial levee, on the 17th Street Canal, had also been patched up.
"With those barriers at least temporarily restored, engineers began draining the
flooded streets and sending the water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but
carefully, using portable pumps set up near the lake on the 17th Street canal.
Gregory E. Breerwood, a city engineer, said, "We intend to take it slowly so we
don't overtax the pumps themselves, because they have not been in service for a
while."
On the environment impact, Dr. McDaniel also said today that he believed the
lake would eventually recover. "The bacterial contaminants will not last a long
time in the lake," he said. "They actually die off pretty fast. The organic
material will degrade with natural processes."
West of the city, in Metairie, residents were permitted to return on Monday, if
only for a day, to salvage what they could from their flooded houses.
In Baton Rouge, Governor Blanco greeted Mr. Bush as he arrived, but only after
her press se
The trip on Monday was Mr. Bush's third survey of the region in the past week.
He was in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., on Friday, and he flew over the area in
Air Force One as he returned from an extended vacation on Wednesday.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush did not go to
New Orleans Monday because he had visited it on Friday. On that visit, however,
he did not go to the Superdome or the convention center, where tens of thousands
of largely poor and black victims had been desperate for food and water for
days, and some older evacuees had died in their wheelchairs. Mr. Bush did speak
at the New Orleans airport and visit the repair work under way at the 17th
Street Canal, where he met with workers, some of whom had lost their homes.
Mr. McClellan also said Mr. Bush steered clear of New Orleans Monday because he
did not want to disrupt continuing relief efforts.
Social services officials in Louisiana have said that about 114,000 people had
taken refuge in shelters stretching from West Virginia to Utah. The largest
number, 54,000, remained in Louisiana, but almost as many were in Texas.
Officials also said Monday that they had received 90,000 applications over the
last three days for food stamps from hurricane victims. Typically, they said,
they process 1,300 applications a day.
Sewell Chan reported from Baton Rouge, La. for this article, and Christine
Hauser from New York.
Reporting was contributed by David Stout and Elisabeth
Bumiller from Washington, Clyde Haberman from New York, Michael Luo from Baton
Rouge, Campbell Robertson from Poplarville, Miss., and Joseph B. Treaster from
New Orleans.
Police Report Progress in New Orleans as City Is Drained, NYT, 6.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06cnd-storm.html
Bush and Congress
Announce Inquiries
on Government
Response
September 6, 2005
The Hew York Times
By DAVID STOUT
and CLYDE HABERMAN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 - President Bush and
Congressional leaders vowed today to find out what went wrong in the federal
response to Hurricane Katrina, with Mr. Bush declaring that "bureaucracy's not
going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people."
Mr. Bush, still trying to counter the impression that his administration was
late in reacting to the Gulf Coast calamity, said Vice President Dick Cheney
would visit the region on Thursday. "He will go down to assess our recovery
efforts," Mr. Bush said at a cabinet meeting. "He will help me determine whether
or not we're meeting these goals."
The president sidestepped a question on whether he intended to replace anyone
who has been responsible for the disaster response. "What I intend to do," Mr.
Bush said, "is lead an investigation into what went right and what went wrong."
"It's very important for us to understand the relationship between the federal
government and the state government and the local government when it comes to a
major catastrophe," he said.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, the chairwoman and the ranking minority member of
the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said hearings
would be held. "Government at all levels failed," said Senator Susan Collins,
Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the panel, who appeared with the ranking
Democrat, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.
"It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective
initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which
specific, dire warnings had been given for days," Senator Collins said.
Mr. Lieberman called the situation "a moment of national crisis."
"In some sense, not just the Gulf Coast was attacked but America's
self-confidence in the aftermath of the way government responded to this
crisis," he said. "And this is no time for politics."
"The obvious fact is that Hurricane Katrina was an enormously powerful and
destructive act of nature," Mr. Lieberman said. "It certainly wasn't caused by
any government. But governmental failures in preparing for and responding to
Hurricane Katrina allowed much more human suffering and property destruction to
occur than should have. That is the sad and stunning fact."
Senate leaders had said earlier that hearings would be held, so today's
announcement by the leaders of the homeland security panel was not a surprise.
It came as criticism over the federal response continued unabated and as members
of Congress, just back from recess, began to consider hurricane-related
legislation. Congress has already approved more than $10 billion in aid. Mr.
Bush described that as "a down payment," and there was talk in the Capitol today
of a second installment that might be several times bigger.
President Bush returned to the affected region on Monday, and Army engineers
patched up two levees that had been breached by the storm and cautiously began
pumping water out of New Orleans. Mr. Bush was to meet at the White House today
with representatives from national voluntary and charitable groups, and this
afternoon make a statement in the Rose Garden on efforts to help students and
school districts displaced by Katrina.
Mr. Bush comforted victims on Monday in Poplarville, Miss., and Baton Rouge,
La., but he found himself ensnared in a dispute with Louisiana's Democratic
governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who learned of Mr. Bush's trip from news
reports.
"There's a lot of work to be done," Mr. Bush told a group of mostly black
victims at a makeshift shelter, the Bethany World Prayer Center, in Baton Rouge.
He said that Americans' response to the disaster had been "amazing" and that
"this country is going to be committed to doing what it takes to help people get
back on their feet."
The president's trip, an effort to calm the region and part of a major White
House campaign to stem the political damage from the hurricane, came as rescue
teams in New Orleans searched for thousands of residents who remained in the
city, many having ignored pleas to evacuate. The city's No. 2 police official,
W. J. Riley, said his officers were trying to convince people that staying
behind was pointless because "this city has been destroyed, completely
destroyed."
As has been true for days, the death toll was assumed to be disastrously high,
but estimates remained little more than guesses - perhaps educated, perhaps not.
Officially, the Louisiana toll climbed to 71. The mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray
Nagin, said the figure might well reach 10,000.
But there was some positive news. Army engineers said that after having dumped
hundreds of bags filled with cement, sand and pieces of ruined roadways, they
had closed the breach in the levee at the London Avenue Canal.
Late Monday afternoon, state officials said that another crucial levee, on the
17th Street Canal, had also been patched up.
With those barriers at least temporarily restored, engineers began draining the
flooded streets and sending the water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but
carefully, using portable pumps set up near the lake on the 17th Street canal.
Gregory E. Breerwood, a city engineer, said, "We intend to take it slowly so we
don't overtax the pumps themselves, because they have not been in service for a
while."
West of the city, in Metairie, residents were permitted to return, if only for a
day, to salvage what they could from their flooded houses.
In Baton Rouge, Governor Blanco greeted Mr. Bush as he arrived, but only after
her press secretary called to alert her at 6 a.m. as she waited on a plane to
take off from Baton Rouge for Houston. The press secretary, Denise Bottcher,
said in an interview that she had first learned that Mr. Bush would be in Baton
Rouge from news reports late Sunday and early Monday, even though CNN had been
reporting the president's trip to an unspecified location in Louisiana as early
as Saturday.
"We're so busy, I can't sit down to watch TV," Ms. Bottcher said, adding. "Why
should I get that news from CNN?"
Ms. Bottcher said she then called the White House Monday morning, "and they
extended an invitation."
Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said the White House reached out to Ms.
Blanco's office on Sunday and made contact with her Monday morning.
Ms. Blanco and Mr. Bush have been at odds over the deployment of the National
Guard in Louisiana, and both sides pointed fingers. On Friday night, Ms. Blanco
refused to sign an agreement proposed by the White House to share control of
National Guard forces in the state with federal authorities. "She would lose
control when she had been in control from the very beginning," Ms. Bottcher said
on Sunday.
The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, published an open letter to
Mr. Bush on Sunday that called for the firing of every official at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and
surrounding parishes have been pumped dry," said the newspaper, which endorsed
Mr. Bush for president in 2000 but made no endorsement in 2004.
At the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, the president's first stop of
the day Monday, some evacuees from the hurricane ran up to meet with Mr. Bush,
but many hung back and looked on. One of them, Mildred Brown, who had been at
the shelter since Tuesday, told The Associated Press: "I'm not star-struck; I
need answers. I'm not interested in hand-shaking. I'm not interested in photo
ops. This is going to take a lot of money."
One evacuee from New Orleans, Richard Landres, a lumberyard worker, was more
positive about Mr. Bush. "I think he's doing what he can do," Mr. Landres said,
according to a White House pool report.
Mr. Bush was flanked as he spoke by Mayor Kip Holden of Baton Rouge and T. D.
Jakes, a conservative African-American television evangelist with a megachurch
in Dallas who has been courted by the White House as a partner in reaching out
to the black vote.
"I want to thank my friend T. D. Jakes for rallying the armies of compassion to
help somebody like the mayor," Mr. Bush said.
Later in Baton Rouge, Mr. Bush spoke for an hour and a half with Ms. Blanco and
members of Louisiana's Congressional delegation in a meeting that Ms. Bottcher
described as "very positive" and that other participants called blunt. The
elected officials said Mr. Bush mostly listened.
Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican who represents New Orleans, said
afterward that while the tone of the meeting was polite, "there was a lot of
frustration."
"It was not hostile," Mr. Jindal said. "It was honest."
The trip was Mr. Bush's third survey of the region in the past week. He was in
New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., on Friday, and he flew over the area in Air Force
One as he returned from an extended vacation on Wednesday.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush did not go to
New Orleans Monday because he had visited it on Friday. On that visit, however,
he did not go to the Superdome or the convention center, where tens of thousands
of largely poor and black victims had been desperate for food and water for
days, and some older evacuees had died in their wheelchairs. Mr. Bush did speak
at the New Orleans airport and visit the repair work under way at the 17th
Street Canal, where he met with workers, some of whom had lost their homes.
Mr. McClellan also said Mr. Bush steered clear of New Orleans Monday because he
did not want to disrupt continuing relief efforts.
"Today, he wanted to visit citizens of New Orleans who have been evacuated and
are in need of continued assistance, as well as volunteers who are helping
them," Mr. McClellan said in an e-mail message.
Monday afternoon, Mr. Bush spoke at a community college to residents of
Poplarville, a small town about 40 miles inland that was badly hit by tornadoes
accompanying the hurricane, then took a walking tour of a suburban street.
Branches and trees littered the sides of roads, and electricity was still out,
with water coming back slowly, but the damage was nothing like the destruction
Mr. Bush saw on Friday in Biloxi.
"Out of this despair is going to come a vibrant coast," Mr. Bush told the crowd
at the Pearl River Community College. "I understand if you're saying to
yourself, 'Well, it's hard for me to realize what George W. is saying because
I've seen the rubble and I know what has happened to my neighbors.' But I'd like
to come back down here in about two years and walk your streets and see how
vital this part of the world is going to be."
Some residents said Mr. Bush's visit to Poplarville had lifted their spirits.
"He said the worst was going to be over," said Dawn Stuit, 48, a real estate
agent, who had spoken to the president on the street and said that he had kissed
her cheek. She said she was feeling better Monday because her electricity would
be restored soon. "I think the president visiting had something to do with the
power coming back on," she said.
Other residents viewed the president's visit with anger. "If it takes them a
week to figure out that people need food and water, maybe they need to step back
and fire themselves," said Robert Duke, 43, waiting in a gas line in
Poplarville. "Some of them need to go to jail over this."
In New Orleans, the city took a few slow steps on the arduous journey toward
recovery. Power was even restored in some neighborhoods.
Mayor Nagin, who had raged against the federal government days ago for what he
called its slow response to the crisis, struck a more positive tone, despite his
estimate of the large number of dead. "We're making great progress now," he said
on the "Today" program on NBC. "The momentum has picked up. I'm starting to see
some critical tasks being completed."
After days of looting and reports of murders and rapes, the New Orleans police
and military troops asserted control. "We continue in lockdown," said Mr. Riley,
assistant police superintendent. "I feel the city is very secure," he said.
"Chaos is moving to being organized chaos. It's better now."
A major issue, he said, is clearing the city of remaining residents to prepare
for the cleanup. "Our officers are telling people there's absolutely no reason
to stay," Mr. Riley said. "There are no homes to go to, there's no hotels."
Social services officials in Louisiana sai d Monday that about 114,000 people
had taken refuge in shelters stretching from West Virginia to Utah. The largest
number, 54,000, remained in Louisiana, but almost as many were in Texas.
Officials also said that in the last three days they had received 90,000
applications for food stamps from hurricane victims. Typically, they said, they
process 1,300 applications a day.
Long-term problems facing people along the Gulf of Mexico were raised by former
Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. As in the aftermath of the Asian
tsunami, they were asked by President Bush to help raise money for evacuees.
"Recovery is going to take years," former President Bush said in Houston as he
and Mr. Clinton announced the creation of a new fund.
Mr. Clinton touched on the need to find jobs for people who had left their
homes. "One of the things we have to ask is: What could we do to give incentives
for people to get jobs where they have to relocate," he said. "A lot of these
people will be out of their homes a year or more."
David Stout reported from Washington for this article and Clyde Haberman
from New York. Reportingwas contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington,
Michael Luo from Baton Rouge, La.,Campbell Robertson from Poplarville, Miss.,
and Joseph B. Treaster from New Orleans.
Bush
and Congress Announce Inquiries on Government Response, NYT, 6.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06cnd-bush.html?hp
Bush resists
immediate probe
into Katrina
response
Tue Sep 6, 2005
1:15 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W.
Bush, facing demands for an investigation into what went wrong in the initial
response to Hurricane Katrina, resisted any immediate probe on Tuesday into what
has become the worst U.S. humanitarian crisis ever.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and other Democrats have demanded
formation of a commission similar to the one that investigated the September 11,
2001, attacks, to determine how federal, state and local authorities bungled the
relief effort in the first days after the hurricane struck.
Much of the anger, some of it also from leading Republicans, has been directed
at Bush for a slow federal response to a catastrophe that may have killed
thousands in New Orleans and along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast.
Bush, after a Cabinet meeting devoted to the myriad challenges posed in the wake
of the crisis, said he wanted to save lives and solve problems before assessing
blame.
"I think one of the things that people want us to do is to play a blame game,"
Bush told reporters. "We've got to solve problems. We're problem solvers. There
will be ample time for people to figure out what went right, and what went
wrong. What I'm interested (in) is helping save lives."
He said he would lead an investigation to find out what "went right and what
went wrong" in order to improve coordination between federal, state and local
authorities because of the possibility of future crises.
"It's very important for us to understand the relationship between the federal
government, the state government and the local government when it comes to a
major catastrophe," Bush said.
"And the reason it's important is, is that we still live in an unsettled world.
We want to make sure that we can respond properly if there's a WMD (weapons of
mass destruction) attack or another major storm. And so I'm going to find out
over time what went right and what went wrong," he added.
Continuing a string of visits to the region by top officials, Vice President
Dick Cheney will travel to the disaster zone on Thursday, Bush said.
While calling some of the relief efforts unacceptable, Bush has not publicly
singled out anyone for criticism although there has been some finger-pointing
between state, federal and local authorities.
Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been
the subject of particularly scathing attacks and there have been calls for him
to resign.
U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi who lost his coastal home in
the storm, said Brown's job is in jeopardy.
"If he doesn't solve a couple of problems that we've got right now he ain't
going to be able to hold the job, because what I'm going to do to him ain't
going to be pretty," Lott said on CBS.
Visiting the devastated Gulf Coast last week, Bush expressed confidence in the
FEMA head, saying: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan did not go quite that far on Tuesday.
"The president is appreciative of the efforts of (Homeland Security) Secretary
(Michael) Chertoff and our undersecretary and all of those at FEMA who have been
working around the clock to save and sustain lives and we appreciate their
efforts," he said.
Asked if Bush supported an investigative commission, McClellan replied: "The
president wants to make sure that we take a look at what happened and how the
response efforts were undertaken and we'll make sure there's a good thorough
analysis done but now is the time to remain focused on the most important
priorities and that is the people in need."
Bush expressed sympathy with the evacuees and essentially agreed with civil
rights leader Jesse Jackson that the survivors should not be considered
refugees.
Jackson has complained that some news organizations have referred to the storm
survivors, many of them poor and black, as refugees.
"The people we're talking about are not refugees. They are Americans," Bush said
while receiving an update on the contributions of volunteer and charity
organizations.
(Additional reporting by Patricia Wilson)
Bush resists immediate probe into Katrina response, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T171543Z_01_MCC662050_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BUSH-DC.XML

Utility Crews Help Turn Lights Back On
in
Parts of the Gulf Region
NYT
6.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06utility.html
Utility Crews Help
Turn Lights Back On
in
Parts of the Gulf Region
September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By BARNABY J. FEDER
JACKSON, Miss., Sept. 5 - Randall W. Helmick,
the man whose job it is to get the lights back on in New Orleans and many other
parts of Louisiana and southern Mississippi, had finally reached his limit.
So on Friday afternoon he ordered the televisions turned off in the temporary
command center for Entergy, the power company for 1.1 million households and
businesses that lost electricity in Hurricane Katrina. The news reports were not
helping Mr. Helmick's 100-plus-member team concentrate on coordinating the
efforts of thousands of repair workers scattered over hundreds of square miles.
"The focus of the news coverage was on the disaster in New Orleans, and it was
depressing and distracting people," Mr. Helmick said. "There was nothing we
could do to get the power on in New Orleans, and I saw it draining people's
energy."
This week the TV's are back on, but so are many more lights - over half of
Entergy's affected customers by Monday evening, mainly in places well away from
New Orleans. And even in New Orleans itself, the company had restored some power
by nightfall Monday, including to the Convention Center, the warehouse district
and the docks where cruise ships tie up. Electricity was also flowing to some
parts of the French Quarter, Harrah's Casino and a few hotels near Canal Street.
Entergy sent its first work crews into the city on Sunday to see how much could
be restored using equipment that had not been flooded and the underground part
of the network, made to withstand flooding.
But no one should expect electricity soon elsewhere in New Orleans, said Mr.
Helmick, who works behind a plain table adorned with a makeshift sign, "Storm
Boss."
"It will be extremely slow going because the rest is underwater or reliant on
overhead distribution lines that were heavily damaged," he said. "Now we face
some key decisions on whether to focus more resources on the city or the
surrounding areas."
Working from an Entergy training center in Jackson, 180 miles north of New
Orleans, Mr. Helmick does not want or expect his colleagues to ignore the plight
of the company's home city, where Entergy's 22-story headquarters building near
the Superdome is a prominent landmark. After all, he and about 1,600 Entergy
employees, normally based in or near New Orleans, had to evacuate - leaving
homes, relocating families - the weekend before Hurricane Katrina struck. Mr.
Helmick's family is now in Baton Rouge, La., but some of his colleagues have
moved theirs as far away as Atlanta.
The best thing Entergy could do for New Orleans, Mr. Helmick said, was to
restore service as quickly as possible to cities like Jackson and Baton Rouge
that have been absorbing refugees. That recovery approach follows traditional
utility practice: focus on restoring vital public services where possible and
otherwise rebuild by expanding outward from the parts of the power grid still
functioning.
Mr. Helmick says he thinks of himself as an air traffic controller rather than a
field general. To restore Entergy's power grid as rapidly as possible, the
efforts of its distribution companies in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and
Texas most be coordinated with the repair of transmission lines and substations.
The amount of power Entergy generates at its plants must be carefully balanced
with the network's ability to deliver it. And the effort requires management of
outside resources like the thousands of temporary repair workers from other
utility companies or from contractors who specialize in disaster recovery.
Although bristling with phones and PC's, Mr. Helmick's improvised command center
belies the years of thought and practice behind Entergy's response. Not only had
the company rehearsed its hurricane plan in April, as it does every year, but it
had specifically practiced for a storm landfall near New Orleans.
On Saturday, Aug. 27, the day before the storm bore down on New Orleans, more
than half the employees in the city were told via e-mail and Web notices not to
come to work on Monday and to take whatever steps were necessary to protect
their families.
Most of the rest were told to leave the city but stay in touch. The core group
of storm managers went to Jackson while other senior managers were dispatched to
Baton Rouge and Little Rock, Ark.
But last spring's drills did not anticipate several realities, including the
flooding in New Orleans, the civil unrest and the delays in obtaining thousands
of workers from other companies, who were still repairing the damage Katrina had
caused in Florida. At no time did the company dream it would become more than
temporarily homeless itself, and have to determine what to do with thousands of
displaced employees.
Last Sunday, Entergy acknowledged that it may be a corporate refugee for months
and announced that J. Wayne Leonard, the chief executive, and other senior
managers would establish temporary headquarters 10 miles west of here in
Clinton, Miss. Entergy is moving to the posh campus that was the headquarters of
the telecommunications giant WorldCom before it collapsed in an accounting
scandal.
Mr. Leonard vowed to return eventually to New Orleans but said that he had no
idea when that would be possible.
In some respects, Entergy has never performed better. As of Monday evening, the
company had reconnected 575,000 customers - more than twice as many customers as
it handled in July after a tropical storm, Cindy. The reconnected include vital
oil refineries and nearly all of its major commercial customers north of New
Orleans. But Katrina's impact was so much more extensive than its predecessors
that more than 500,000 customers are still without power.
Those still without power include customers in rural areas where days of work
may add only a few users, those too flooded to receive power and those like the
refineries downriver from New Orleans where Entergy workers must traverse
treacherous marshes.
Within New Orleans, where Entergy is also the natural gas utility, the company
is just beginning the painstaking and potentially hazardous task of inspecting
and repairing its gas distribution network. The system is functional but is
likely to have developed potentially deadly leaks.
In Jackson, where 20 percent of Entergy customers still lack power, hundreds of
maintenance crews converge each night on the sprawling parking lot around the
Coliseum and the adjoining exhibition center.
Inside the exhibition hall, not far from where the Red Cross provides food and
clothing to refugees, Entergy's caterer serves dinner for thousands. Buses ferry
the workers to the hotels, church campgrounds and other facilities in which
Entergy houses the repair crews. During the weekend, more than 100 men were
sleeping on cots in abandoned office cubicles of the largely empty WorldCom
campus.
Entergy has hired more than 10,000 workers from other utilities and contractors,
all of whom must be trained to work on its network. So far, according to
Entergy, the only serious casualty has been an employee of Air2, a contractor
based in Timonium, Md., who was crushed last week while handling 75-foot
transmission poles.
The workers often arrive in convoys, like the 47 repair vehicles from
FirstEnergy, a utility holding company in Akron, Ohio, that pulled into the
Coliseum parking lot Saturday. The group arrived from Florida, where it had
spent nine days repairing storm damage.
Local Entergy officials like Haley Fisackerly have been scrambling for fuel and
other resources required to keep the crews working. On Friday, Mr. Fisackerly
learned that a local contractor had photocopied an Entergy letter, which
authorizes fuel priority for the contractor's firm, and given it to family
members to help them jump gas lines. That led to a hasty redesign of the
authorization form to thwart such finagling.
The need to prevent theft once fuel has been acquired is one of many reasons
Entergy has found itself requiring far more security workers than anticipated.
"We're all running on adrenaline," said Mr. Fisackerly. "People realize there's
a worse disaster farther south, so we are trying to fend for ourselves."
According to out-of-state repair workers, that awareness has also made Entergy's
customers in this region some of the most grateful they have encountered. "One
guy came out and said he wanted to give me a great big hug," said Randy Myers, a
contract line repairman from Wyalusing, Pa. "That's not the reception we get on
Long Island."
Utility Crews Help Turn Lights Back On in Parts of the Gulf Region, NYT,
5.6.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06utility.html

Storm Puts
BellSouth's Adaptability to the Test
NYT
6.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06telecom.html
Storm Puts BellSouth's
Adaptability to the
Test
September 6, 2005
Reuters
By KEN BELSON
GULFPORT, Miss., Sept. 3 - As Hurricane
Katrina hit this coastal town with its full fury, C. B. Hales Jr., the director
of BellSouth's facilities in the region, received a plea from one of the
managers riding out the storm with him: Come upstairs immediately, the brick
wall protecting the main generator was giving way.
Mr. Hales and eight colleagues, who had been hunkered down in the basement of
the communications center, ran to the rooftop room. With winds of 130 miles an
hour turning shingles, tin and wood into missiles, they furiously patched the
wall with plastic tarps, plywood and a cardboard science project made by one
worker's son.
"We grabbed what we could to protect the engine," Mr. Hales said, standing on
the sun-baked roof several days later as workers stacked bricks and the
generator roared. "If that generator failed, we'd have been toast."
With electricity out across much of the six counties in Mississippi that Mr.
Hales' team covers, the generator now powers BellSouth's splintered
telecommunications system in the coastal region. It keeps the computers, phones
and other critical equipment at the central switching office here operating.
While crucial, the generator is just one piece of the complex puzzle that
BellSouth needs to solve before it can fully restore its communications network.
It took three days for BellSouth, the main telecommunications company serving
the storm-devastated region, to restore the crucial fiber lines that carry phone
calls and data in and out of the area. Until then, Mr. Hales, his workers and
residents nearby had little communication with the outside world.
"When we're not communicating, they're not communicating," said Roy Craig, an
engineer who helped Mr. Hales save the generator.
After the storm passed on Wednesday, 1.75 million BellSouth customers had either
spotty service or none, the company said.
Of that total, 750,000 were in the most damaged areas along the Mississippi
coast and southern Louisiana, most of them without any access to communications.
[As of Monday, about 650,000 customers out of that original group had service
restored, leaving 1.1 million still suffering. Only about 120,000 of the 590,000
BellSouth customers in the six-county Gulf Coast District had working service,
the company said.]
The company said it expected repairs to take as much as six months in the most
damaged areas.
Over all, BellSouth expects to spend at least $600 million to repair its network
and restore service across the affected states. But Jeff Batcher, a company
spokesman, warned that the estimate was made "without the opportunity to survey
all the damage," suggesting the cost could rise further.
Service in the coastal region is particularly spotty, in part because some of
the fiber lines so carefully spliced together were severed again by the removal
of fallen trees and the repairing of power lines. The generators powering
communications equipment have been running out of fuel, and BellSouth, like so
many other companies, has struggled to find more for its generators and its
trucks.
Company executives said that government officials even commandeered one of the
company's tankers that was ferrying fuel to Mississippi.
Then there are the logistics of coordinating BellSouth employees. Hundreds of
employees are homeless; about 200 are still unaccounted for. The company has set
up a tent city on the outskirts of Gulfport that dozens of employees and their
families now call home. BellSouth has established five more like it - three in
Louisiana and two in Mississippi.
Mr. Hales, whose home near the beach was destroyed, and several other managers
are sleeping on air mattresses in their offices. Even those whose homes still
function are waiting in endless lines to get gas so they can report to work.
BellSouth, whose nine-state territory stretches from Florida in the east to
Louisiana in the west and north to Kentucky, is no stranger to hurricanes. It
has contingency plans and emergency response teams on standby. Many employees,
including Mr. Hales, are veterans of hurricanes stretching back to Camille,
which hit in 1969.
But Katrina was the worst ever. The company has had to abandon many of its
operations in New Orleans and the immediate area, probably for months.
Conditions along the Mississippi coast, while ruinous, are at least tenable. The
police kept potential looters at bay in the initial chaos and the streets have
dried out, so essential work can be done. Hundreds of BellSouth two-worker teams
have fanned out across the region to assess the damage.
A couple of switching stations near the border with Louisiana were destroyed.
Other offices are standing, but the equipment was ruined. Machines that have
since dried are likely to corrode in the coming weeks because salt water washed
through them.
The damaged equipment pales besides other grim news workers are reporting. One
team out to repair a damaged fiber optic cable came across six bodies.
The extent of the damage to the company's aerial and buried lines is far from
clear. Surveyors like Jay Murphy, a 36-year veteran, are going street by street
to inspect poles, lines and switch boxes. Mr. Murphy and his partner, Ellen
Stephens, stood on a Biloxi side street where the power company had removed the
electricity transformer from a pole where phone and electric cables dangled.
Mr. Murphy, whose own home was filled with mud - "It's like King Tut's tomb in
there" - said a crew would have to restring a phone line 1,200 feet to the next
service box. Not a hard task, he explained, but it cannot be done until "every
foot of Biloxi" is examined to determine what needs to be fixed first.
On a map rolled out on his pickup truck, Mr. Murphy had traced red ink along the
handful of streets he and Ms. Stephens covered that day. By his estimate, only
one-eighth of the city had been inspected.
Managers are only just collating information about the extent of the damage to
the company's network. Teams in districts from Mobile, Ala., in the east to
Baton Rouge, La., in the west relay reports and, as they do, BellSouth
undertakes a kind of telecommunications triage, pushing certain projects to the
top of the list, like repairing lines to hospitals and fire stations.
Helping cellphone companies connect their towers to BellSouth's switching
centers is another priority. To provide mobile phone service, cellphone
providers route calls from their towers over local and long-distance networks to
towers near those who will receive the call. Some of the towers in the region
were swept away in the storm, while others lost connection with wider networks.
Still others are running on backup power.
Not unexpectedly, BellSouth has been inundated with requests from federal and
state agencies rushing to the region. For example, officials of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, asked BellSouth to install more than 1,000
phone lines in the Mississippi Coast Coliseum, a few blocks from the shore in
Biloxi.
Engineers ran over to the building to inspect equipment. By the time they
determined it was operable, FEMA had decided to move into the Imperial Palace
casino and hotel farther inland. [On Sunday BellSouth installed 1,200 phone
lines; FEMA wants 2,800 more.]
BellSouth is also racing to restore service to banks, which rely on data lines
so they can clear paychecks for customers needing cash. For now, many banks are
clearing transactions manually.
Apart from the highest priorities, BellSouth is working from the fringes of the
damaged zone inward, fixing the easiest projects first. In Mobile, which
sustained less damage than the Mississippi coast, Chris Henkin, a technician,
was busy all week reattaching phone lines knocked down by wind and trees. Since
Tuesday, he has started his rounds at 7 a.m. and finished around 9 p.m.,
completing about a dozen projects a day.
Like most BellSouth employees, he is now on a 13-day shift and will take only
one day off before starting another shift.
Despite the ordeal, Mr. Henkin, who joined BellSouth after Hurricane Andrew hit
southern Florida in 1992, says he has never been prouder of what he does,
especially helping older people left alone during the storm and without family
nearby.
"Now, the customers are saying, 'Thank you, thank you,' instead of, 'Why weren't
you here yesterday?' " he said with a smile.
Mr. Henkin is about to get more help. BellSouth is mobilizing to bring in
hundreds of current and former employees from outside the area. Before they
arrive, though, it has to determine what areas need attention most. As
important, BellSouth must find them transportation, food and accommodations, all
in short supply.
Some will bunk in one of the circus-size tents BellSouth set up on a baseball
field outside Gulfport. There, the company has set up 400 cots, toilets,
showers, a makeshift cafeteria and a communications center where, on Saturday
evening, the Internet connection went down because of another break in the fiber
lines.
With hundreds of thousands of refugees in the region, keeping BellSouth's own
workers and their families going is a huge task. Standing in a tent filled with
pillows, diapers, donated clothing and other sundries, Karen Rhyne, who is
coordinating efforts at "BellSouth City," said the company handed out "tons of
tarps and coolers" to employees still living at home. Homeless employees and
their families are moving in, many relying on interest-free loans that will be
deducted from their paychecks later.
And Wayne Mayes, a project manager who arrived from Kentucky Aug. 30, has spent
a frustrating week just trying to get suppliers on the phone.
"The biggest problem has been the communications," Mr. Mayes said. "All week
long, we've been missing each other, back and forth, back and forth."
Storm
Puts BellSouth's Adaptability to the Test, NYT, 6.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06telecom.html

Monte Wolverton
The Wolvertoon
Cagle
5.9.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/wolverton.asp
New Orleans floods recede,
political fight
heats up
Tue Sep 6, 2005
12:16 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
and Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Floodwaters that
swamped New Orleans slowly receded on Tuesday after engineers plugged breaks in
levees and pumped water to drain the historic city of the stagnant pool left by
Hurricane Katrina.
Black smoke billowed across the sky from several building fires, the latest
safety threat after Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29,
possibly killing thousands of people.
Despite government pledges to finally begin collecting the dead floating in
flooded streets and hidden away in devastated homes, the official death toll in
Louisiana still stood at only 71.
In neighboring Mississippi, officials said 170 people were confirmed dead, but
some said the toll could top 1,000 there.
More than a million people may have been driven from their homes -- many perhaps
permanently -- with hundreds of thousands taking refuge in shelters, hotels and
private homes across the country following one of America's worst natural
disasters.
New Orleans, a historic city and longtime tourist mecca, has been largely
abandoned by its residents, but the streets are increasingly filled with troops,
police and news media.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Monday plugged a major gap in the levees
that protect New Orleans from surrounding waters and began pumping out of the
flooded city.
Flood levels in some areas were said to have dropped a foot by Tuesday morning,
but the corps has said it will take weeks to dry the city out.
Firefighters said the flooding prevented them from getting to many fires that
were breaking out in the city.
They said that because there was no electricity, people were using candles for
light in the old, wooden buildings that make up many New Orleans neighborhoods.
"Of course we're using candles. What else we gonna do? We got no electricity,"
said Junior Jones, 71, whose house in central New Orleans was on fire.
He said he had not evacuated. "I'm sick, in a wheelchair. I could hardly walk.
Where am I going to go?"
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
As the waters fall, rescuers are able to reach more and more buildings in the
search for the living and the dead.
They went on foot, in boats and helicopters to get people who have been stuck in
their homes for eight days.
National Guard helicopters dropped down into neighborhoods and waited for
survivors to come to the choppers.
Once filled, the aircraft flew them to safety, then returned again and again to
the same place until there were no people left to take away.
Security checkpoints were set up in many areas as order returned to what had
been a scene of lawless chaos that shocked the nation and the world and touched
off a political crisis for President George W. Bush.
Soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division marched through town in formations
of 12 in what they said was a show of force to the criminal gangs that ran wild
in the streets, looting and shooting, in the days after Katrina.
Bush made a second post-hurricane visit Monday to Louisiana, where he huddled
with Gov. Kathleen Blanco and visited storm survivors in Mississippi.
His spokesman said the president did not visit the Superdome and convention
center in New Orleans, scenes of death and despair for tens of thousands of
evacuees, because he did not want to disrupt recovery efforts.
The New York Times said the Bush administration was orchestrating a campaign to
deflect blame to state and local authorities, which White House communications
director Dan Bartlett denied.
Blanco agreed, but said the federal government had responded poorly to the
storm.
"The federal effort was just a little slow in coming. I can't understand why.
Those are questions that are yet to be answered," she said on CNN.
U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican from Mississippi who lost his coastal home in
the storm, said Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown's job
is in jeopardy.
"If he doesn't solve a couple of problems that we've got right now he ain't
going to be able to hold the job, because what I'm going to do to him ain't
going to be pretty," Lott said on CBS.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada backed calls for a commission,
like the one that examined the September 11, 2001, attacks, to study how the
hurricane response went wrong.
Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president, told the CBS "Early Show" there
were people still at risk in his community.
"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy
needs to stand trial before Congress today," he said." "So I'm asking Congress
please investigate this now.
"Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a
caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."
U.S. oil prices fell on Tuesday as industrialized countries prepared to release
oil from emergency stocks and some of the U.S. refineries began to resume
operations.
(Additional reporting by Jim Loney in Baton Rouge,
Adam Tanner
and Jason Webb in Houston)
New
Orleans floods recede, political fight heats up, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T161625Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML

Patrick Chappatte
Cartoons on World Affairs
Cagle
5.9.2005
About a million in US
still without power
after Katrina
Tue Sep 6, 2005
1:47 PM ET
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nearly 1 million
electricity customers remained without electricity eight days after Hurricane
Katrina pummeled the U.S. Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to
area utilities and the U.S. Department of Energy.
More than half the customers in Louisiana, or 588,000 homes and businesses, were
still without power, while Mississippi had about 382,000 customers with no
service.
Katrina made landfall in southern Florida as a Category 1 hurricane on August
25-26, then crashed ashore in Louisiana on August 29 as a Category 4 storm
packing winds of 140 miles per hour. It left more than 4.5 million homes and
businesses without power.
Entergy Corp., the hardest hit electric company, had about 462,000 customers out
in Louisiana and 41,000 out in Mississippi.
Most of New Orleans, however, remained without power. Crews from Entergy started
to return to the city over the weekend for the first time since the hurricane
hit to assess the situation, according to a report by the DOE.
Entergy also reported extensive damage to its natural gas distribution system
serving 147,000 customers in New Orleans. The company said it would have to shut
off gas service to many parts of the city to repair the damage but preserve
flows to the power generators running the pumps to get the water out of the
flooded areas of the city.
Southern Co.'s Mississippi Power subsidiary had about 119,000 customers still
without service. The company expects to restore power to all customers by
September 11.
The utilities in Florida, which restored power to customers last week, continued
to urge customers to conserve energy due to the tight but improving natural gas
supplies used to fuel power generation facilities.
Entergy's subsidiaries own and operate about 30,000 MW of generating capacity,
market energy commodities and transmit and distribute power to 2.6 million
customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Southern's subsidiaries own and operate more than 39,000 MW of generating
capacity and provide power to more than 4 million customers in Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi and Florida.
OIL RESTORATION EFFORTS
The Gulf Coast electric companies restored full power to the Colonial Pipeline,
which supplies gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and
Northeast, by Monday afternoon, according to pipeline officials. The pipeline is
now at 100 percent of pumping capacity.
The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) has been operating at almost full
capacity but Entergy has not yet restored power to the Clovelly storage
facility. The LOOP expects to be at full capacity when Fourchon gets power,
which should occur in about seven days, according to the DOE report.
Tankers are making crude deliveries to the LOOP, which is making deliveries to
the Capline, a crude oil pipeline serving the Midwest. The Capline is running at
over 80 percent of capacity, according to the DOE.
Three refineries with major damage in Louisiana remain without power, including
facilities owned by ConocoPhillips in Belle Chasse, Exxon Mobil Corp. in
Chalmette and Murphy Oil Corp. in Meraux.
All of the other refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi still shut due to the
hurricane have access to power. Even with access to power, however, it will
still take some refineries weeks to resume operations.
About
a million in US still without power after Katrina, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T174754Z_01_MCC655355_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-UTILITIES-KATRINA-OUTAGES-DC.XML

Don Wright
The Palm Beach Post, FL
Cagle
31.8.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/donwright.asp
Health workers
say they were ready for
Katrina
Tue Sep 6, 2005
12:24 PM ET
Reuters
By Maggie Fox,
Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal health workers
deployed to Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina hit disputed criticisms that the
government was not prepared to deal with disaster, saying their agencies, at
least, were ready.
Teams started preparing days before the hurricane actually hit, gathering
supplies, assigning doctors, nurses, paramedics and pharmacists and arranging
the logistics needed for rescue and aid effort.
Victims, politicians and media have all criticized the federal government for a
sluggish response to Katrina, which may have killed thousands along the Gulf
coast and forced more than a million from their homes.
"The surgeon general canceled everybody's leave. We were sort of aware that this
was going to be a critical need," said Capt. Mike Milner, New England regional
health administrator for the uniformed U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) based
in Boston and a member of the Health and Human Services Department's emergency
response team.
Milner was sent to Alexandria, Louisiana, northwest of New Orleans, to help
organize a 1,000-bed field medical shelter.
"I believe we had our act together," he said in a telephone interview. "We were
building some teams already way before we saw the storm land."
But the medical teams had to wait for Katrina to actually hit before they knew
where to go, and then they had to go where local and federal emergency
management officials told them to.
No teams were sent into New Orleans itself, where refugees packed the Convention
Center and Superdome stadium after levees broke and most of the city flooded.
HOTBEDS AND 12-HOUR SHIFTS
USPHS Capt. Charles McGarvey has been at an aid center set up at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge with a 38-member team since just before Katrina hit
last Monday.
"We have been pretty much at it ever since, with 12-hour shifts," he said.
Another 82 officers have since arrived at the makeshift clinic at LSU's
basketball stadium and auditorium.
They were not only caring for the acutely ill, but dipping into the Strategic
National Stockpile of drugs to provide care for evacuees who had to leave behind
their own medications and supplies.
"It's pretty rough down here," McGarvey said.
The staff, not only uniformed public health personnel but employees of the
National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
even the Indian Health Service, were themselves living like refugees.
"Half of my officers are at a tent city put up for them. Half are in the
auxiliary basketball court in basement of this complex," he said. "Those
officers are hotbedding," he said, referring to a military practice in which
several people share a single bunk or cot by sleeping in shifts.
McGarvey said local residents have helped make things bearable by delivering
home-cooked meals and pizza.
McGarvey said his operation was now expanding and would be sending medical staff
to New Orleans to see to both immediate needs and set up for the long term.
"The issue in next couple of days is probably going to be to prevent the spread
of diseases in that particular area," McGarvey said.
Health workers say they were ready for Katrina, R, 6.9.2005,
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T162446Z_01_EIC658987_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-HEALTH-DC.XML
New Orleans Mayor
Seeing 'Rays of Light'
The New York Times
September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:22 p.m. ET
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- With a major levee break
finally plugged, engineers struggled to pump out the flooded city Tuesday as
authorities braced for the horrors the receding water is certain to reveal.
''It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again,'' the mayor
warned.
Mayor Ray Nagin said after an aerial tour that about 60 percent of the city was
under water, down from 80 percent during the darkest hours last week.
''We are starting to see some significant progress. I'm starting to see rays of
light,'' he said.
Nagin said it would take three weeks to remove the water and another few weeks
to clear the debris. It could also take up to eight weeks to get the electricity
back on.
Still, he warned that what awaits authorities below the toxic muck would be
gruesome. A day earlier, he said the death toll in New Orleans could reach
10,000.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, began sending paratroopers from the Army's storied 82nd
Airborne Division to New Orleans to use small boats, including inflatable Zodiac
craft, to launch a new search-and-rescue effort in flooded sections of the city.
Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, division commander, said about 5,000
paratroopers would be in place by Tuesday.
The Army Corps of Engineers began pumping the water out after closing a major
gap in a key levee that burst during Hurricane Katrina and swamped 80 percent of
the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city.
Efforts to evacuate holdouts were stepped up, with boat rescue crews and a
caravan of law enforcement vehicles from around the country searching for people
to rescue.
''In some cases, it's real easy. They're sitting on the porch with their bags
packed,'' said Joe Youdell of the Kentucky Air National Guard. ''But some don't
want to leave and we can't force them.''
Nagin warned: ''We have to convince them to leave. It's not safe here. There is
toxic waste in the water and dead bodies and mosquitoes and gas. We are pumping
about a million dollars' worth a gas a day in the air. Fires have been started
and we don't have running water.''
Early Tuesday, fire broke out at a big house in the historic Garden District --
a neighborhood with lots of antebellum mansions. National Guardsmen cordoned off
the area as firefighters battled the blaze by helicopter.
At the same time, the effort to get the evacuees back on their feet continued on
several fronts.
Patrick Rhode, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said
evacuees would receive debit cards so that they could begin buying necessary
personal items. He said the agency was going from shelter to shelter to make
sure that evacuees received cards quickly and that the paperwork usually
required would be reduced or eliminated.
''We're eliminating as much red tape as humanly possible,'' Rhode said on ABC's
''Good Morning America.''
The Air Force late Monday concluded its huge airlift of elderly and serious ill
patients from New Orleans' major airport. A total of 9,788 patients and other
evacuees were evacuated by air from the New Orleans area.
Local officials bitterly expressed frustration with the federal government's
sluggish response as the tragedy unfolded.
''Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And
bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today,'' Aaron Broussard,
president of Jefferson Parish, said on CBS' ''The Early Show.''
''So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they
have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring
idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.''
In addition to help from other Louisiana and Alabama departments, a Canadian
task force of firefighters and police arrived four days after the storm, St.
Bernard Fire Chief Thomas Stone said.
''If you can get a Canadian team here in four days, U.S. teams should be here
faster than that,'' Stone said. Pointing to two large oil refineries, ''When
they're paying $5 to $6 a gallon for gas, they're going to realize what this
place means to America.''
The frustrations were also felt along the Mississippi coast, where people who
have chosen to stay or are stuck in demolished neighborhoods scavenge for
necessities.
Some say they will stay to rebuild their communities. Others say they would
leave if they could get a ride or a few gallons of gasoline. But all agree that
-- with no water or power available, probably for months -- they need more help
from the government just to survive.
''I have been all over the world. I've been in a lot of Third World countries
where people were better off than the people here are right now,'' retired Air
Force Capt. William Bissell said Monday. ''We've got 28 miles of coastline here
that's absolutely destroyed, and the federal government, they're not here.''
The scope of the misery inflicted by Katrina was evident Monday as President
Bush visited Baton Rouge and Poplarville, Miss., his second inspection tour by
ground.
''Mississippi is a part of the future of this country and part of that future is
to help you get back up on your feet,'' Bush told 200 local officials.
While in Louisiana, Bush tried to repair tattered relations with the state's
Democratic governor, Kathleen Blanco, while also praising relief workers. Blanco
played down any tension.
''We'd like to stop the voices out there trying to create a divide. There is no
divide,'' she said. ''Every leader in this nation wants to see this problem
solved.''
Meanwhile, former Presidents Bush and Clinton got smiles, hugs and requests for
autographs when they met with refugees from Hurricane Katrina -- but it was
Bush's wife who got attention for some of her comments.
Barbara Bush, who accompanied the former presidents on a tour of the Astrodome
complex Monday, said the relocation to Houston is ''working very well'' for some
of the poor people forced out of New Orleans.
''What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas.
Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality,'' she said during a radio
interview with the American Public Media program ''Marketplace.'' ''And so many
of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this
is working very well for them.''
The two ex-presidents, who teamed up during a fund-raising effort for victims of
last year's Asian tsunami, announced the creation of the Bush-Clinton Katrina
Fund.
''We're most anxious to roll up our sleeves and get to work,'' said former
President George H.W. Bush. ''It will take all of us working together to
accomplish our goal. This job is too big for any one group.''
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a public health
emergency for Texas, saying it would speed up federal assistance to help almost
240,000 storm evacuees -- the most of any state.
In New Orleans, Deputy Police Superintendent W.J. Riley estimated that fewer
than 10,000 people were left in the city. Some simply did not want to leave
their homes, while others were hanging back to loot or commit other crimes,
authorities said.
Nagin said the city had the authority to force residents to evacuate but didn't
say if it was taking that step. He denied reports that the city will no longer
hand out water to people who refuse to leave.
The leader of troops patrolling New Orleans declared the city largely free of
the lawlessness that plagued it in the days following the hurricane. He lashed
out at suggestions that search-and-rescue operations were being stymied by
random gunfire and lawlessness.
''Go on the streets of New Orleans -- it's secure,'' Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore
said to a reporter. ''Have you been to New Orleans? Did anybody accost you?''
In neighboring Jefferson Parish, some of its 460,000 residents got a chance to
briefly see their flooded homes, and to scoop up soaked wedding pictures and
other cherished mementos.
''I won't be getting inside today unless I get some scuba gear,'' said Jack
Rabito, a 61-year-old bar owner whose one-story home had water lapping at the
gutters.
Associated Press writers Melinda Deslatte and Robert Tanner contributed to
this report.
New
Orleans Mayor Seeing 'Rays of Light', NYT, 6.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Hurricane-Katrina.html
Bush, Congress
to Investigate Response
September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:20 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush
and Congress pledged separate investigations into the widely panned federal
response to Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday as Senate Democrats said the
government's share of relief and recovery may top $150 billion.
''Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the
people,'' Bush said after meeting at the White House with his Cabinet on storm
recovery efforts.
''Governments at all levels failed,'' Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said at the
Capitol. She announced that the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee would hold
hearings, adding, ''It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and
the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for
years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days.''
Stung by criticism, Bush called congressional leaders to the White House for a
meeting, their first since the hurricane spread death and destruction on a
fearsome scope along the Gulf Coast and left much of New Orleans under several
feet of floodwaters.
Congress formally returned from a five-week summer break during the day,
signaling that the hurricane would take top billing on the agenda in the coming
weeks.
The response ''needs to be first and foremost,'' said Majority Leader Bill
Frist, R-Tenn., although he, like Bush, also stressed the GOP goal of confirming
John Roberts as the next chief justice by the time the Supreme Court convenes on
Oct. 3.
Congress approved $10.5 billion as an initial downpayment for hurricane relief
last week, and Senate Democrats were consulting among themselves in advance of
the White House meeting.
One official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was possible Democrats
would request as much as $50 billion as a next installment.
''I believe that the recovery and relief operations will cost up to and could
exceed $150 billion. FEMA alone will likely require $100 billion in additional
funding,'' Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said in a statement
issued after he talked with relief officials and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. An
aide to Reid, Rebecca Kirszner, added, ''Our priorities right now are targeted
assistance for health care, housing and education.''
Apart from the investigation announced by Collins and Sen. Joseph Lieberman,
D-Conn., the Senate Energy Committee arranged hearings on gasoline prices. The
hurricane disrupted oil production and distribution in the Gulf of Mexico, and
gasoline prices that had already been rising spiked sharply last week in some
areas of the country.
For his part, Bush told reporters he was sending Vice President Dick Cheney to
the Gulf Coast region on Thursday to help determine whether the government is
doing all that it can.
The president has traveled to the storm-affected region twice since late last
week.
''What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and
what went wrong,'' Bush said. ''We still live in an unsettled world. We want to
make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass
destruction) attack or another major storm.''
But Bush said now is not the time to point fingers and he did not respond to
calls for a commission to investigate the response.
''One of the things people want us to do here is play the blame game,'' he said.
''We got to solve problems. There will be ample time to figure out what went
right and what went wrong.''
Bush was devoting most of his day to the recovery effort. After the Cabinet
meeting, he was gathering with the congressional leaders, representatives of
charitable organizations and with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to talk
about assistance for displaced students and closed schools.
McClellan said the president also was increasing what he described as a sizable
personal contribution to the Red Cross and also was sending money to the
Salvation Army.
Meanwhile, Bush objected to references to displaced Americans as ''refugees.''
''The people we're talking about are not refugees,'' he said. ''They are
Americans and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow
citizens.'' The president raised the subject during a meeting with service
organizations that are helping with the relief effort.
In another development, the commander of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division said
that its paratroopers plan to use small boats, including inflatable Zodiac
craft, to launch a new search-and-rescue effort in flooded areas of central New
Orleans.
In a telephone interview from his operations center at New Orleans International
Airport, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said his soldiers' top priority is
finding, recovering and evacuating people who want to get out of the flooded
city.
There has been heavy criticism of the government's response to the hurricane,
and city and state officials. Bush did not respond directly when asked if anyone
on his disaster response team should be replaced.
The president said that he and his Cabinet members were focused on planning in
several areas of immediate need -- restoring basic services to affected areas,
draining the water from New Orleans, removing debris, assessing public health
and safety threats and housing for those displaced by the storm. He said it was
important to get people's Social Security checks delivered to them.
Earlier, McClellan rejected suggestions that the poor, and particularly blacks,
had been abandoned when New Orleans was evacuated.
''I think most Americans dismiss that and know that there's just no basis for
making such suggestions,'' McClellan said.
Bush, Congress to Investigate Response, NYT, 6.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Katrina-Washington.html
Many Helping Hands Offered
to Louisiana Orchestra's
Players |