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History > 2005 > USA > 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

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

 

From spare harp strings to violin repairs to a place to live and practice, offers of help from around the country are pouring in to the musicians of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Other orchestras, mostly regional ensembles where the pool of available musicians is small, are lending a hand, too. Many have offered temporary jobs or the prospect of auditions to the Philharmonic's 66 players, who have scattered around the country. All but one of the musicians had safely left the city or were already elsewhere for summer engagements, members of the orchestra said yesterday. The remaining player, Burton Callahan, a violinist, had been preparing to board an evacuation bus over the Labor Day weekend.

"It looks like he may have made it," said David Rosen, a cellist in the orchestra, who spoke from his parents' home in Santa Monica, Calif. "He's not answering his phone. That's a good sign." He said Mr. Callahan continued to receive phone calls through the week despite the absence of service in most of the city.

Drew McManus, a classical music consultant and commentator, opened up his blog (www.artsjournal.com/adaptistration) as a clearinghouse for the Louisiana musicians. He said he had verified the whereabouts of about 35 of them.

The condition of the Orpheum Theater, where the orchestra is based, was not clear, but the central business district of New Orleans where it is located was flooded. Yesterday the orchestra management was trying to set up shop in Baton Rouge, the state capital, and was posting information on another Web site, groups.google.com/group/LPO-family. Job offers were posted there, too, including one from a charter school outside Phoenix looking for a music teacher.

"There's just tons of support out there," said Karen Sanno, a Louisiana Philharmonic violinist who drove for 18 hours to her parents' home in Chicago as Katrina was closing in. "It's really amazing."

But maybe not surprising. The orchestra world is close-knit, with musicians forming networks as early as music camps, which then solidify through summer festivals, conservatory training and the tramp from orchestra to orchestra over the years.

"I think everybody is reaching out to those they identify with the most closely," Ms. Sanno added. "They can imagine the situations."

The McManus site lists scores of offers, including housing and jobs. One poster offered extra harp strings. A violinmaker in Maine offered free repairs or instrument loans. The conductor of a community orchestra in Andover, Mass., offered housing and contacts with Boston-area freelancers.

A composition software company held out jobs demonstrating its product. A horn-playing couple in Keller, Tex., offered to line up students for wind players. A Brooklyn College faculty member proposed the opportunity of teaching master classes there.

Daniel L. Baldwin, a composer in Oklahoma, said he did not have much money but could offer a room and the chance of a recital. In a telephone interview, he said he could try to use his connections at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva.

"I know if it was me down there I would need and want some help," he said.

Many of those offering housing made it clear that there was space and tolerance for practicing. The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra advertised substitute jobs for five violins, a cello and a double bass throughout the season, with the promise that members would put Louisiana Philharmonic musicians up in their homes.

Other institutions offering work or auditions included the Washington National Opera, Shreveport Symphony, Tuscaloosa Symphony, Illinois Symphony, Alabama Symphony, Baton Rouge Symphony and Memphis Symphony. By Monday, at least three players already had offers of playing or teaching work.

"Musicians understand exactly how difficult it is to get even a low-paying job to begin with," Mr. McManus said.

The Louisiana Philharmonic has a resilience all its own. After the New Orleans Symphony collapsed amid heavy debts, the players in 1991 formed the Louisiana Philharmonic. For several years, they worked for a pittance while paying off the debt. The orchestra had made its way back to health, with a budget of $4 million, about 75 concerts a year and a new music director starting in 2006, Carlos Miguel Prieto.

It is one of the few professional American orchestras run by the players themselves.

"It's a very strongly bonded family," Mr. Rosen, the cellist, said.

But now, like every aspect of life in New Orleans, the Louisiana Philharmonic's future lies in doubt.

Ken Kussman, the orchestra's operations manager, said it might be possible to set up operation outside the city, possibly at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner, La., where the orchestra plays five concerts a year.

"There is that spirit of wanting to keep it going," said Mr. Kussman, who was staying at a corporate apartment in Texas and planned to leave yesterday for Baton Rouge. "The problem now is the logistics of everything." Speaking of orchestra members, he continued, "At least before they could gather in one room and argue about it."

"I think it will survive," he added. "I don't know what form it will survive in. We just don't know what New Orleans will be like when this is all over. What will the population be like? How many people will return? It's been a very searing experience."

Many Helping Hands Offered to Louisiana Orchestra's Players, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/arts/music/06orch.html

 

 

 

 

 


Crawfish Étouffée Goes Into Exile

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON
and JULIA MOSKIN

 

Hurricane Katrina has devastated one of the nation's most distinctive culinary cultures.

As restaurateurs and diners around the country worked to organize fund-raisers and find jobs for industry refugees, the people who ran many of the best-known restaurants in the United States struggled to find out what, if anything, was left of the vibrant New Orleans restaurant scene.

Nearly 10 percent of the New Orleans labor force, about 55,000 people, worked in the city's estimated 3,400 restaurants.

Most of the city's best-known restaurants are in the French Quarter, Uptown and in the Garden District, which remained relatively dry. But there were still reports of fires, looting and other damage. Restaurants in the Central Business District and in the Bucktown section were flooded and more seriously damaged.

But whether or not restaurants were damaged, reopening them will be difficult. "We're kind of assuming that even in places like the French Quarter, even if they don't have water damage, they're not going to have customers for a long time," said Don Luria, president of the Council of Independent Restaurants of America, which is helping to find jobs for thousands of workers. "I think a lot of these people are not going to be returning to New Orleans for a long time, if ever."

Some restaurateurs are vowing to continue. "We have been instructed by the matriarchs that we will rebuild," Brad Brennan, of the family that owns the famed Commander's Palace and eight other restaurants, said from his office at Commander's Palace Las Vegas. "There was no hesitation."

The matriarchs are Mr. Brennan's aunt, Ella Brennan, and his mother, Dottie Brennan, who was evacuated to Houston, where the family also has a restaurant.

Mr. Brennan said it was too soon to know the extent of the damage, but all of the 800 employees of the Brennan restaurants were accounted for.

Chuck Subra Jr., executive chef and co-owner of La Côte Brasserie in the Warehouse District, stayed at the restaurant and the adjoining Renaissance Hotel until Wednesday afternoon, before leaving for New Iberia, about 110 miles to the west.

"We're picking up the pieces and moving on," he said, "but I definitely think New Orleans will be back. I'll be back with it."

John Besh, co-owner of Restaurant August and the Besh Steakhouse at Harrah's casino, both in the Central Business District, drove evacuees to his family home in North Carolina last week then returned last weekend with supplies, said Simone Rathle, his publicist.

The chef of the steakhouse, Alon Shaya, said that on television on Sunday he and Mr. Besh had seen the Subway sandwich shop next to August burning, but they could not see if the restaurant was damaged. Mr. Besh, he said, could not get into New Orleans, so yesterday he served red beans and rice to evacuees and emergency workers in Slidell.

Other chefs abandoned their homes and restaurants entirely. Frank Brigtsen of Brigtsen's Restaurant has lived his entire life in New Orleans, but has decided to settle in Shreveport, La, almost 300 miles to the northwest. "We won't have a livelihood, because the city won't be able to support it," Mr. Brigtsen said. "There's a chance it might resurrect itself, but there's not going to be tourism for many years."

Over the weekend, many of the top restaurant owners and chefs had been accounted for through friends, publicists and other chefs. Many logged on to the Southern Foodways Alliance Web site, where the Southern food historian and writer John T. Edge spent Sunday compiling a list of chefs and other members of the alliance who had been accounted for.

But many chefs and restaurant owners were still seeking word on Sunday on the whereabouts of their waiters, line cooks and dishwashers - people who lived paycheck to paycheck and were less likely to have cars or money to evacuate. "They are going to desperately need to find other employment pretty quick," Tom Weatherly of the Louisiana Restaurant Association said.

The restaurant association, along with the James Beard Foundation and the Southern Foodways Alliance, which are culinary associations, and OpenTable.com, an online restaurant service, are contacting restaurateurs around the country to set up a job bank they hope will provide jobs in as many as 3,000 restaurants. Information about the job bank can be found at jamesbeard.org and www.southernfoodways.com. The rest of Louisiana's restaurant industry, which generates $5.2 billion in sales a year and is the largest private employer in the state, was also trying to absorb the hurricane's blow.

Restaurants in nearby cities were overloaded with evacuees and short on food. Warehouses of major food suppliers like Sysco were damaged, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was buying up huge parts of the remaining food supply, Mr. Weatherly said. For food lovers, the loss of a city that produced chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse and taught a nation how to eat gumbo, po' boys and étouffée, is incalculable.

New Orleans "is our spiritual and cultural culinary home," the Southern author and cook Nathalie Dupree said in an e-mail message.

"We don't know if the descendants of the great African-American and Creole cooks will return," Ms. Dupree said. "We don't know where those dishwashers and waiters and sauce chefs will go while the great chefs rebuild their restaurants, or if they will ever be back."

Pableaux Johnson contributed reporting for this article.

    Crawfish Étouffée Goes Into Exile, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06restaurant.html

 

 

 

 

 


'Prison City' Shows

a Hospitable Face

to Refugees From New Orleans

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

 

HUNTSVILLE, Tex., Sept. 5 - And so they found refuge here, beside the red brick walls of the Texas death house.

Many called it heaven.

With emergency shelters stretched tight from New Orleans to Houston, eight buses carrying more than 300 survivors of the flood ended up here in the proud "prison city" of Texas, 80 miles north of Houston, where every third or fourth resident lives behind bars, in seven prisons that confine 9,000 to 15,000 inmates.

The First Baptist Church, which backs up on Huntsville's oldest prison unit, including the nation's busiest execution chamber, was ready with cots, showers, fresh clothes and hot food. And prison trusties in white uniforms to clean and cook.

"They're very thankful that we're here to help," said Shannon Smith, 33, who is serving 10 years for aggravated assault for beating his wife while he was a drug addict.

Some evacuees said they felt blessed and had no fear of the inmates.

"We went to the Astrodome first and they didn't let us in - thank you, Jesus," said Rose West, 67, who was rescued from a housing project but is missing members of her family.

The setting might be unusual, but with thousands of makeshift accommodations being pressed into service across the state and country, hardly extraordinary. On Tuesday, several thousand evacuees are scheduled to be taken aboard cruise ships in Galveston and housed in relative luxury, although the swimming pools, spas and casinos, which require special staffing, will be closed, officials said.

"These folks will have food and a damn small room a block from downtown, and I'm sure they'd also like some work," said A. R. Schwartz, a former Democratic state senator from Galveston, who helped coordinate the use of the cruise ships, the Ecstasy and the Sensation of Carnival Cruise Lines. "It might be time for a Roosevelt-style public works program."

On the way to Galveston, they will pass through a palm-fringed district with ornate mansions that are some of the few structures to survive the Great Storm of 1900. Only the body count in New Orleans will determine whether Hurricane Katrina surpasses that storm, which killed 6,000 to 12,000 people, as the deadliest natural disaster in United States history.

The numbers being officially housed in shelters are vastly overshadowed by those being put up by hotels, relatives and friends, churches and private organizations. About a quarter-million evacuees have ended up in Texas, officials have said, though some are already being flown to other states.

It was hitting home, too, Mayor Bill White of Houston said. "My in-laws - my wife was born in Louisiana - and they have a network of people here and all up and down the city, and they have folks in their house, and that's happening all over the place," Mr. White said.

In Huntsville, 14 prison trusties helped the Red Cross and church volunteers. The trusties are minimum-security offenders allowed out under guard supervision to help with community projects.

"I have no problem with that," said Jaqulyn Francis, 49, robbed by the flood of her job serving food in the workers' cafeteria of the Hotel Intercontinental in New Orleans, as well as her home and everything she owned. "It's a blessing for them to volunteer."

Her grown son was missing, too.

Mike Carlson, an investigator for the Walker County district attorney's office and a deacon at First Baptist, said he thought little of seeing offenders in the shelter. "This is Huntsville," Mr. Carlson said. The trusties are forbidden to interact with the evacuees.

With 70,000 male felons released every year steps from the church, pastors try to greet them all and offer help. The clergy also ministers to the families of death row inmates.

Many evacuees said they were overwhelmed by their welcome in Huntsville, starting when Pastor David Valentine boarded each of the arriving buses at 1 a.m. Friday to announce: "I guess you've been in hell. Welcome to heaven."

The pastor, who said the bus was reeking when it arrived, told his guests that Huntsville was "the safest place you'll ever be."

The journey was an ordeal, many said. Kathy Hunter, 44, said she walked across a Mississippi River bridge with her luggage to reach the Superdome and when she finally boarded a bus with her bags, was ordered off because it was too crowded.

She was put on another bus, with her bags and wallet still on the first bus. She said she never saw her things again.

"Can you write this down?" she asked. "Kathy Hunter wants her son to contact her at the First Baptist Church in Huntsville." His name, she said, is Warren Bell.

She said a stranger stopped her on the street in Huntsville the other day, asked whether she was from New Orleans and gave her $20.

Latora Faggin, 28, with four boys ages 3 to 11, said that a police officer took her two older sons horseback riding and to a McDonald's and that an officer was taking them swimming on Monday afternoon.

Other people said they had been taken to the hallowed Texas institution of a Friday night high school football game.

Ms. Faggin said police officers in New Orleans told her she could not take her bag, which had all her money - $48 and some quarters - on the bus to Houston.

The Astrodome was too crowded, she said, and they were diverted to a shelter in Conroe, north of the city. "They were only able to take four more but there were 12 of us," she said, "so they brought us here."

Now, Ms. Faggin said, her family was so happy that they were determined to stay in Huntsville.

"That makes two of us," said Kevin Williams, 42, who overheard her. He said he had been separated from his wife, Evelyn, and 13-year-old daughter, Kachanda, at the Superdome when the women and children were evacuated first. "She didn't want to leave me, but I said, 'baby, you go; wherever you go I'll find you.' "

Mr. Williams said he left on a later bus that took them, with no food, to Dallas. There, he said, his luck changed. A stranger named Raul Gardner presented him and two companions with a paid-for Alamo rental car, which they drove to Houston.

The other two dropped him off at the Reliant Center near the Astrodome where, he said, a volunteer named Steve found an Internet posting saying that his wife and daughter had been taken to Huntsville. Steve drove him there, and gave him $100.

Mr. Williams found his family at the shelter.

"The people in Texas, their heart is as big as the Lone Star State," he said.

 

Simon Romero contributed reporting from Galveston, Tex., for this article, and Maureen Balleza from Houston.

'Prison City' Shows a Hospitable Face to Refugees From New Orleans, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06texas.html

 

 

 

 

 


Scouring the Neighborhoods

in a Personal Appeal to Holdouts

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times

By JERE LONGMAN

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 5 - As a Navy helicopter flew over her house on Monday morning, Garnette Williams yelled, "Come down, come down," but her voice was drowned by the chop of rotor blades.

Ms. Williams, 42, her boyfriend, Carl Lewis, 52, and a family friend, Nick West, 51, decided it was finally time to leave, a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated this city. They stopped anyone they could find on the deserted Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, in the Uptown area, to signal that they wanted out.

"We tried to stick it out, but now we've got no food, no water," said Mr. West, who is self-employed. "We're starting to rot."

While engineers began to pump water from New Orleans, the nearly abandoned city continued to empty Monday. The National Guard, the New Orleans police and other law enforcement officials began scouting door to door, encouraging the remaining people to leave but not yet ordering them to do so.

By afternoon, some 1,150 people had been evacuated in the previous 24 hours, compared with 3,000 the day before, according to the Louisiana National Guard.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, said in an interview on Sunday night that he believed that fewer than 1,000 law-abiding citizens remained and that he hoped the city could essentially be emptied by Tuesday. But the New Orleans police said Monday that about 10,000 people remained in the city.

W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, said Monday that there were about 4,000 National Guard troops, regular Army soldiers and police officers and sheriffs from around Louisiana and elsewhere in the country on the city's streets.

Mr. Riley described the central business district as being "locked down." Soldiers and police officers have taken up positions on street corners, he said, and police cars and military vehicles are cruising the streets.

On Monday morning, Lt. Key McGuire of the Cochran, Ga., Police Department, stopped to offer water and medicine to the three stranded on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. Then National Guard troops from Oklahoma arrived and pointed toward a checkpoint where Ms. Williams, Mr. Lewis and Mr. West could catch a ride to the Convention Center for evacuation. They grabbed a couple of bags and began walking down the litter-filled street.

Before they left, Ronnie Johnson, 37, rode by on a bicycle and asked for baby formula for his son, Ronnie Jr., who was born Aug. 27, two days before the hurricane hit. A flooded car and a tangle of mishaps had kept the family in town, but Mr. Johnson thought the need to leave their home on Josephine Street was getting urgent.

"All our food has maggots," Mr. Johnson said. "It's unsanitary. I told my wife to go on ahead while I checked on my brother. But she's afraid we'll get separated and I won't see her for five or six months."

Sgt. Dan Anderson of the New Orleans police said he was seeking to evacuate the elderly and the trapped and also looking to scavenge tires from a large Dodge truck. The department needed gasoline and tires, he said, explaining, "We're getting a lot of flats."

Norman Carter, 36, a contractor who spoke with Sergeant Anderson on an Uptown street, said he was reluctant to leave for fear that his family's home would be looted.

"My dad told me to stay and watch the house," Mr. Carter said. "That's the bottom line. I'm not leaving until they assure me everyone is out of New Orleans and my parents' home will be safe."

More than 400 troops from the Oklahoma National Guard began to fan out through a sector of about three miles by two miles that included the Garden District, to help willing residents leave. Fifty-six people were helped from a parking garage near St. Charles and Josephine on Sunday night, while another 85 gathered for evacuation at St. Charles and Napoleon, according to Maj. David Parker, executive officer of the First Battalion of the 279th Infantry of the Oklahoma National Guard.

Residents were being allowed to take their pets, Major Parker said, because the authorities did not want the city to fill with roaming packs of abandoned dogs. "They are going to get mean and hungry," Major Parker said.

A more difficult task will come later, he said, when rescue of the living changes to a search for the dead and mandatory evacuations begin.

"We'll get guidelines on whether to use sheer force or coercion of some kind," he said, adding that the guardsmen would be aware that residents had suffered a devastating interruption in their lives.

Several bodies could still be seen lying in or near Uptown streets. The authorities have said their primary mission is to rescue the living and that they do not yet have enough morgue space to begin collecting the dead.

At least one woman, Elvira Smith, 65, known as Vera, was given an improvised burial on Saturday after she was killed on Tuesday by a hit-and-run driver, according to her companion, Max Keene.

"Here Lies Vera, God Help Us," said a spray-painted tarp covering an above-ground crypt made of paving stones at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street. A neighbor, Patrick McCarthy, and a stranger, John Lee, helped bury Ms. Smith, and several people gathered Saturday for an impromptu prayer service.

Ms. Smith was a kind-hearted woman who loved dogs, "big wigs and shopped too much," Mr. McCarthy, 57, a retired air-conditioning and refrigerator mechanic, said Monday.

The bodies left on the streets were emblematic of the hurricane relief effort, Mr. McCarthy said angrily, adding, "If you need a metaphor of failure, this is as good as any."

At least one bar in the French Quarter, Johnny White's Sports Bar and Grill, was open for business on Monday. A customer there, James LaLande, said he planned to stay unless he was forced to evacuate. He said that much of the last week had been terrifying, especially at night when abandoned dogs howled for food and water.

"All night you hear dogs barking," he said. "It keeps you awake because it breaks your heart."

Near the intersection of St. Charles and Napoleon, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sought to rescue about 150 pets left behind during the evacuation of Memorial Hospital. Three people and their dogs were also rescued from the hospital parking garage, police said.

In the same area, a woman in her 90's reluctantly agreed to leave her home, whose first floor was flooded, but grew upset because police officers did not shut a second-story window after they rescued her.

"Her first floor was gone and she was worried about rain getting in the second story," said Capt. Eddie Hosli of the New Orleans police. "Her whole life was in there. That's what makes it so sad."

 

Alex Berenson and Joseph B. Treaster contributed reporting for this article.

Scouring the Neighborhoods in a Personal Appeal to Holdouts, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06orleans.html

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina death toll

may be 10,000

as Bush vows help

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
10:38 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
and Paul Simao

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Victims of Hurricane Katrina returned to pick through their battered homes on Monday and President George W. Bush promised to fix bungled rescue efforts after a disaster in which the mayor of New Orleans said as many as 10,000 may have died.

Rescuers in boats, helicopters and military vehicles went house to house looking for stranded survivors of one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States.

A full week after Katrina crashed into the U.S. Gulf coast and ravaged one of America's most popular cities, the home of jazz and Mardi Gras, no one knows how many people perished.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said "it wouldn't be unreasonable" for the death toll to rise to 10,000, although he admitted he had no idea of the exact number.

While authorities allowed people to temporarily return to their homes in areas outside New Orleans, police pleaded with people who have not yet abandoned the city itself to get out.

"There are no jobs. There are no homes to go to, no hotels to go to, there is absolutely nothing here," Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley said. "We advise people that this city has been destroyed, it has completely been destroyed."

Forensic experts prepared a warehouse for the grim task of identifying victims when they are finally recovered.

Some are not hard to find as swollen bodies float in the streets but officials fear thousands more are hidden in homes across New Orleans, the home of jazz and Mardi Gras and one of America's most popular cities before Katrina tore it apart,

In suburban Jefferson Parish, stunned residents got a first look at Katrina's damage to their homes when it struck with 140 mph (225 kmh) winds and a massive storm surge.

They were greeted by a panorama of toppled trees and street signs, and spacious middle-class homes that had been flooded with several feet of water.

"I try to be upbeat but it's devastating. I may lose my house because I may not be able to make my payments, and I don't know when I'm going to work again," said Mark Becker, 48, at his Metairie home.

Storm winds had ripped two holes in his roof and caused the ceiling to collapse in a bedroom and kitchen.

Others said the damage could have been worse. They said their homes were mostly intact and salvageable.

Many of those going back brought guns or friends or both for protection in case they encountered looters.

The Jefferson Parish government told its residents not to stay in their homes, but to gather items they needed and leave again by nightfall because there was no power or clean water.

BUSH UNDER FIRE

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began pumping water from the flooded city after closing a major gap in the levees which burst during Hurricane Katrina and allowed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to rush through.

Draining the entire city could take 80 days or more, but the Corps was working to plug another major breach in the levees, spokesman John Hall said.

Bush, who has faced fierce criticism for the slow relief response, visited dozens of Katrina victims being cared for at a prayer center in Baton Rouge and promised the country would "do what it takes" to help people get back on their feet.

It was the second trip to the ravaged region in less than a week for Bush, already suffering from the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, largely because of the Iraq war.

He has admitted the early relief effort was "unacceptable" and promised on Monday to make changes as needed.

"If it's not right, we're going to fix it, and if it is right, we're going to keep doing it. And this is just the beginning of a huge effort," Bush said.

Former President Bill Clinton joined the growing criticism of the government response. "Our government failed those people in the beginning. There is no dispute about it," he told CNN.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune called on Bush to fire every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "We're angry, Mr. President," the newspaper said in an open letter.

Former President George H.W. Bush, said he didn't like to see his son under fire but that it was part of the job.

"The president can take it," he said. "It goes with the territory."

The official death toll in Louisiana stood at 59 but officials said it would climb dramatically in coming days.

A warehouse in a Louisiana town is being set up to handle thousands of corpses. Rows of stainless steel gurneys await the first bodies and the concrete floors are covered with plastic sheets to contain fluids that could pose a biohazard threat.

Temporary morgues were being set up around the region and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children posted photographs of more than two dozen children who had lost touch with their families during the disaster on its Web site (http://www.missingkids.com/).

 

REGAINING CONTROL

Police and troops were regaining control of the city after days of murder, rape and looting that horrified America and the world.

But New Orleans Police Department Deputy Chief Warren Riley said only about 1,000 of the force's 1,641 officers were accounted for and that many had had gone looking for missing relatives but others had apparently deserted.

At least 240,000 evacuees had flooded into neighboring Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry said the state could handle no more and asked that any more be airlifted to other states.

Two cruise ships based in Galveston, Texas, were expected to start boarding evacuees later on Monday. They both have a capacity for 2,600 people.

Not all New Orleans residents wanted out. "They'll have to drag me out by my feet," said Mike Reed, 49, as he swept debris from the streets of the city's historic French Quarter, which experienced light flooding compared with other neighborhoods.

At least two French Quarter bars -- Molly's and Johnny White's -- have been serving customers in the week since the storm. "That's our job. That's just what we do," said Molly's owner, Jim Monaghan.

    Katrina death toll may be 10,000 as Bush vows help, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-06T023900Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Some residents refuse

to leave New Orleans

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
6:28 PM ET
Reuters
By Ned Randolph

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Many residents of New Orleans who live in the few areas on high ground that escaped flood waters say they will defy official requests for them to abandon their homes.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has said it will take as long as three months or more before vast stretches of fetid water can be drained from the city and services restored and it would be unhealthy for residents stay in their homes.

Large swathes of this historic city are dry, but Nagin wants remaining residents to leave those too.

"It's an issue of safety. A major concern is the toxic water, and the mosquitoes are ready to fly," he said, adding they could spread disease by feeding on decaying corpses and biting the living.

Remaining residents who refuse to leave will be "persuaded" by National Guards soldiers, Nagin said.

Many of the historic landmarks survived dry and relatively unscathed: the French Quarter and Warehouse District, the Victorian Garden District, the Central Business District and much of Uptown.

And, as of Sunday, an enclave of residents planned to stick it out indefinitely.

A woman in an oversized T-shirt, who wouldn't give her last name, was walking down Napoleon Avenue away from the boats and toward her house, which she had no intention of leaving.

"I've stockpiled," said Elizabeth.

"My ancestors built that levee," she said, referring to the barrier which gave way under the force of Hurricane Katrina last week and let in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

"I know the grounds. I know the low ground and the high ground. That's why I sit on the high ground," she said waving toward the Mississippi River.

"I'm an individualist, and that's it," she said. "Martial law cannot make me a prisoner."

 

PEOPLE STILL AROUND

Charles Wendell, who owns a kite shop on Magazine Street, said he and his partner chose to stay behind because of their pets -- five dogs, two cats and two parrots. They rescued two other puppies abandoned by evacuees.

"They've been taking people away on boats, and then let loose lots of wonderful animals that are just running around," said Wendell, who was walking down Prytania Street with his partner, both without shirts, and two new-found puppies on a leash.

"That's why we didn't go. My pets are my life. ... I know it sounds crazy," he said.

Though he has no running water or electricity, he said they find swimming pools to bathe in and food where it's available.

"We got some cheese and smoked salmon, and fruit that's going to go bad anyway," he said.

"There are lots of people still around," he said. "Just because they say we have to evacuate -- because there's no food or water -- we know all that. But we don't want to be told we have to leave."

Only two blocks away from Wendell toward Lake Pontchartrain began the standing water that stretches throughout most of the city.

But another resident had had enough and was giving up.

Security guard Ira Bennett said he and five co-workers had waited at a truck stop in the Gentilly area of town for four days. They had water, but the heat was too much, he said.

Three co-workers left the day before. Bennett and two others were taken to Napoleon Avenue where they slowly walked up the street for a ride out of town.

He said he was going "where ever they bring me. I can't take no more of this. We tried to stick it out, but it's too hot."

The 9th-Ward native said he had lost his home underwater, but aimed to return.

"I'm coming back ... New Orleans is my home."

    Some residents refuse to leave New Orleans, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-09-05T222913Z_01_ROB580856_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-HIGHGROUND-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Bush Makes Return Visit;

Two Levees Secured

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and CLYDE HABERMAN

 

As criticism raged over the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush returned to the region yesterday, and Army engineers resealed two levees that had been breached by the storm and cautiously began pumping water out of New Orleans.

Mr. Bush comforted victims 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 of them 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 yesterday. 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 yesterday afternoon, state officials said that another critical levee, on the 17th Street Canal, had also been repaired.

With those barriers sealed, engineers began draining the flooded streets and sending the water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but carefully. 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 the Baton Rouge airport 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 yesterday, 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 yesterday 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 yesterday morning.

Ms. Blanco and Mr. Bush have been at odds over the deployment of the National Guard in Louisiana, and both sides have engaged in finger-pointing. 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 on Sunday to Mr. Bush 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 yesterday, a number of 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 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," he said. "It was honest."

The trip was Mr. Bush's third survey of the region in the past week. Mr. Bush 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 last Wednesday.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bush did not go to New Orleans yesterday because he had already visited it on Friday. On that visit, however, Mr. Bush did not go to the Superdome or the convention center, where tens of thousands of largely poor and black victims had been desperate for days for food and water, and some older evacuees had died in their wheelchairs. Mr. Bush did speak at the New Orleans airport and visit the repair work underway at the 17th Street levee, where he met with workers, some of whom had lost their homes.

Mr. McClellan also said that Mr. Bush steered clear of New Orleans yesterday 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.

Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Bush spoke at a community college to residents of Poplarville, a small town about 40 miles inland that was badly hit by the tornadoes thrown out by 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 that 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 yesterday because she had electricity again. "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, the Police Department's assistant superintendent. "We want to make sure that looters have a very serious force to address."

"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 said yesterday 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."

 

Michael Luo contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La.,

for this article,

and Campbell Robertson from Poplarville, Miss.

    Bush Makes Return Visit; Two Levees Secured, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06bush.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Houston Finds Business Boon After Katrina

NYT

6.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06goldrush.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Houston Finds

Business Boon After Katrina

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By SIMON ROMERO

 

HOUSTON, Sept. 5 - Perhaps no city in the United States is in a better spot than Houston to turn Hurricane Katrina's tragedy into opportunity. And businesses here are already scrambling to profit in the hurricane's aftermath.

Oil services companies based here are racing to carry out repairs to damaged offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico; the promise of plenty of work to do sent shares in two large companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, soaring to 52-week highs last week. The Port of Houston is preparing for an increase in traffic as shippers divert cargoes away from the damaged ports of Pascagoula, Miss., and New Orleans.

Owners of office space here are witnessing a surge in leasing as New Orleans companies, including that city's oldest bank, scramble to set up new headquarters in Houston, helping to shore up its sagging property market. With brio that might make an ambulance-chaser proud, one company, National Realty Investments, is offering special financing deals "for hurricane survivors only," with no down payments and discounted closing costs.

All this, of course, is capitalism at work, moving quickly to get resources to where they are needed most. And those who move fastest are likely to do best.

Meanwhile, even small businesses and cheap hotels are benefiting from the population surge, which could total up to 250,000 people. Some hardware stores have sold out their entire supply of gasoline cans and generators to people preparing for an eventual return to the devastated region.

"It feels like the only things left in south Louisiana are snakes and alligators," said John E. Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, a hedge fund that operates out of a skyscraper downtown. "Houston is positioned for a boom."

Long known for its commercial fervor, Houston is the largest city in the South and has a metropolitan population of more than four million. It has one of the nation's busiest ports and remains unrivaled as a center for the American energy industry.

Halliburton, for instance, moved its headquarters to Houston from Dallas in 2003, joining dozens of companies based here that provide services for oil and natural gas producers.

Halliburton differs from many oil services companies in that it also does significant business with the federal government. The company, which has contracts in Iraq, has a contract with the Navy that has already kept it busy after Hurricane Katrina. The company's KBR unit was doing repairs and cleanup at three naval facilities in Mississippi last week.

Halliburton was also planning to go to New Orleans to start repairs at other naval facilities as soon as it was considered safe to do so, Cathy Mann, a spokeswoman, said.

Executives at other Houston companies said they were wasting little time in carrying out repairs in the Gulf of Mexico, where at least 20 offshore rigs and platforms are believed damaged or destroyed. Tetra Technologies, which repairs or decommissions old platforms in the gulf, had employees in a helicopter the day after the storm passed to survey the damage.

"I always hate to talk about positives in a situation like this, but this is certainly a growth business over the next 6 to 12 months," said Geoffrey M. Hertel, Tetra's chief executive. By Friday, Tetra had been able to send an 800-ton barge it owns, the Arapaho, to the gulf to be used for platform repairs, Mr. Hertel said.

Some here are wary about seeming too gleeful in light of New Orleans's misery. Houston officials were quick to point out on Friday that they were making a convention center downtown available to evacuees from the disaster zone, potentially forcing some events to be canceled. And the Port of Houston Authority tried to soften the blow to other ports as it started to receive shipments diverted from Louisiana and Mississippi.

"We sincerely hope that these great gulf coast ports can get back to work as soon as possible," the port said in a statement last week.

But the new business is obviously welcome. "We're getting inquiry calls since the beginning of the week," Felicia Griffin, a spokeswoman for the port, said on Friday. "We're prepared to do whatever is necessary to meet the needs of our customers."

If the storm works to Houston's benefit, it would not be the first time a natural disaster of extraordinary size sparked some economic dynamism here. The hurricane of 1900 in nearby Galveston, which killed more than 6,000 people and almost leveled the most thriving commercial city in Texas, paved the way for Houston, located 50 miles inland, to emerge as a regional center for shipping and the refining of oil discovered in East Texas fields.

The displacement of companies to Houston from New Orleans is an abrupt acceleration of a trend that has been going on for decades. Many large companies, particularly those in the energy business, have made that move over the years, leaving New Orleans more dependent on tourism and other service industries.

A surge of business activity in Houston this time around might lift the fortunes of a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of Enron and two decades of job cuts in the energy industry, which has shrunk as production of oil in Texas and the United States has declined.

Rising oil and natural gas prices in the last two years have strengthened the finances of Houston's largest energy companies, but have done little to improve employment prospects in the city, where the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in July, compared with 5 percent nationally. During the last oil boom in the 1970's, 150,000 jobs were created in the business of oil field equipment, according to Barton Smith, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.

However, since the 1980's, about 130,000 of those jobs have been lost as oil and natural gas exploration migrated farther away from Houston, largely to countries in West Africa, the Middle East and Asia - and companies were able to produce oil field equipment more cheaply abroad. Houston remains essential for energy research and is the undisputed center for energy deals and finance, but those activities employ relatively few people.

Partly as a result, Houston has one of the most moribund big-city real estate markets.

"There are many instances of companies coming to Houston for temporary space," said Louis B. Cushman, vice chairman of Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate company here. In its own offices, Cushman has finally been able to sublease some extra space to a business of 8 to 10 people that had been in New Orleans. Mr. Cushman said his firm had found offices for two companies that had already decided they were not going back.

One company that has temporarily exchanged New Orleans for Houston is Whitney Holding, the parent company of Whitney National Bank, founded in 1883 and one of the oldest banks in New Orleans. Another New Orleans oil exploration company, Energy Partners, said in a statement last week that it was also making Houston its temporary headquarters. Other companies are following suit.

"It's exploding," said Stephen D. DuPlantis, senior managing director at CB Richard Ellis. "When I talk to owners of office buildings, they say people are not even negotiating. As tragic as it is for New Orleans, it is a boon for Houston."

Dwaine Ofczarzak, the general manager of Buffalo Hardware, an independent store near central Houston, has seen out-of-towners who seem to be preparing to leave and some who are settling in.

On Friday, Mr. Ofczarzak sold out his supply of five-gallon gasoline cans to people from Louisiana. But some shoppers were coming in to get keys made for their new homes and talking about enrolling their children in local schools. "I have friends who've already done that," he said.

The newcomers may take some getting used to. "Everybody is still pretty much in awe," Mr. Ofczarzak said. "And with everybody coming in the buses, it hit home."

Damon Darlin contributed reporting from New York for this article and Maureen Balleza from Houston.

    Houston Finds Business Boon After Katrina, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/business/06goldrush.html

 

 

 

 

 

In Small Town,

Huge Morgue Takes Shape

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

 

SAINT GABRIEL, La., Sept. 5 - After the wind, after the flood, after countless bodies are fished from muddy bayous or lifted off street corners or carried down from roofs or attics, the road ends here.

At a warehouse next to the modest city hall in this ragged town just past where the sprawl of Baton Rouge gives way to farmland, refrigerated trucks on Sunday began the task of bringing what is expected to be thousands of bodies to the temporary mortuary set up to process victims of Hurricane Katrina.

All day long on Monday, trucks bearing equipment and supplies and sometimes victims clattered down the narrow street just over the railroad tracks to what is called the Disaster Portable Mortuary Unit. There a staff of 100 workers - morticians, forensic pathologists, anthropologists, medical examiners, coroners, fingerprint technicians, radiologists, dental technicians and others - will identify bodies and prepare them for burial.

No one knows how long it will take or how many bodies to expect.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans warned on the NBC program "Today" that "it wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000" dead in the city.

Capt. Marlon Defillo, spokesman for the New Orleans police, said city officials did not expect to have even a rough estimate of the number of dead until the end of this week.

"It's not going to be low," Captain Defillo said.

So far only 23 bodies have been brought to the mortuary, and the official death toll for Louisiana stands at 71. Officials said the low count was due mostly to the arduous recovery process and the desire for accuracy. But some also said there was no way to make any kind of reliable projection, so the estimate of 10,000 deaths could turn out to be way off base.

Whatever the number, nearly all bodies will come here, where officials say they are committed to what seems an almost impossibly contradictory mission - handling with dispatch the victims in a death toll that could rival that of any natural disaster in American history and treating each body with the knowledge that it was someone's father, someone's mother, someone's child.

"Our goal is to do everything we can under the circumstances to treat each body with as much dignity and respect as we possibly can," said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, which is managing the mortuary operation with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "We're trying to treat them all as individuals."

Mobile units in New Orleans began collecting bodies from streets and flooded areas on Monday and going house to house in some neighborhoods to look for the dead. Until now, bodies had been left to rot in the streets while rescuers focused on searching for survivors.

Some corpses were tied to road signs and electricity poles so they would not float away, but many have decomposed beyond recognition.

Mr. Johannessen said bodies would first be taken to collection sites where preliminary information would be gathered to help identify them, including where they were found and any documentation or personal effects found with them.

They will then be put in body bags, loaded onto refrigerated trucks and sent to this town of 5,300 just south of Baton Rouge, home to two prisons and the only long-term treatment facility for Hansen's disease, or leprosy, in the continental United States.

The mortuary facility is about the size of football field and had been used by businesses to store merchandise. It can process about 140 bodies a day and is set up to accommodate 1,000 bodies, but it can be upgraded to handle "in excess of 5,000," Mr. Johannessen said. He said he expected that the facility would be able to handle whatever need arose.

Mr. Johannessen said bodies taken to the center, many of which have been decomposing in toxic water for a week, would first be decontaminated so they can be handled safely.

Then officials will begin gathering forensic data, including dental X-rays, photographs, fingerprints and DNA samples, in an effort to identify bodies. Medical records, including information like pacemaker serial numbers or evidence of artificial hips or knees, will be compiled into a profile of each victim and stored in a database made accessible to families looking for missing people. Relatives will not be allowed to visit the bodies at the mortuary, Mr. Johannessen said.

The state is looking for burial space, and victims not immediately identified will be buried there. Officials said families could later move bodies to family plots.

Local residents, who were not told about the facility in advance, had mixed reactions to its presence. Chief Keith Ambeau of the police department acknowledged that some residents had expressed fears about health, odors and the stigma of a giant mortuary operating, perhaps for months, next to a residential area.

"It's human nature to have some concerns about bringing in dead bodies," Chief Ambeau said. "People are going to worry about disease, contamination. But I've been saying all morning, my office is right here. I'm not going to put myself in danger. I think for the most part people are compassionate here. Their hearts go out to those people. New Orleans is only 75 miles away. Those are our brothers, our sisters, our loved ones."

But at a house just a few hundred yards from the mortuary, three residents shuddered at the thought, with one woman expressing concerns about safety and property values.

And echoing the issues of class and race brought up by the tragedy, she asked why it was put in her neighborhood, its residents largely, but not entirely, black and lower income. The per capita income in the town is $8,952, compared with $16,912 for the state and $21,587 for the nation.

"You look around this neighborhood for yourself," said the woman, who is black and did not want to be identified. "You look at what color lives here. What their economic situation is. There's plenty of empty land in Louisiana. Why put it here?"

A few houses closer to the site, Paula Chong, who has two grown children and lives with a baby granddaughter, said she would prefer the mortuary to be elsewhere but believed it would be safe.

"We just need to turn to God," Ms. Chong said. "All I ask is that they be careful and do everything in accordance with the law."

Besides, she said, in the extended family that is south Louisiana, it is a facility that she may need, too.

Counting her missing cousins, Ms. Chong said: "I've got, what, 4, 5, 9 or 10 still missing? Lots of my cousins. So why would I complain when I still have family of my own missing?"

    In Small Town, Huge Morgue Takes Shape, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06morgue.html

 

 

 

 

 


Double Trap for Foreign Workers

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

 

BILOXI, Miss., Sept. 5 - Like so many other people here, Pedro, a landscaper from Chiapas, Mexico, is desperately trying to get out of Biloxi. He wants to take his wife, Anna, who is eight months pregnant, someplace cleaner and safer, wherever that might be.

But aside from being low on gas like everyone else, Pedro, who would not give his last name because he is undocumented, is nervous about traveling in a city swarming with police officers and National Guard troops.

Bran Dize, a prep cook from Spanish Town, Jamaica, near Kingston, worries that Hurricane Katrina may suddenly have made him an illegal immigrant because, he said, his guest worker visa requires him to work at a casino - the Beau Rivage - that, for all practical purposes, no longer exists.

Hurricane Katrina has left its victims feeling vulnerable and uncertain, but for many noncitizens trapped here, the anxiety is especially acute because they worry that they will jeopardize their legal status if they try to leave.

There are worries, too, about those who may not have survived the storm. The Mexican government has opened two mobile consulates in the affected areas, one in Mobile, Ala., and the other in Baton Rouge, La., to begin looking for tens of thousands of their citizens reported missing. The authorities in Mexico estimated that 145,000 Mexicans live in the area. At a tense meeting on Friday with immigration officials from the Jamaican government, a group of about 40 Jamaican guest workers from the Grand Casino, the Beau Rivage and the Casino Magic fired a battery of tough questions.

"Will we get paid for the remaining three months left in our contracts?" one woman asked from the back of the crowd gathered at the Fairview apartments here. "We don't have plane tickets back to Jamaica," another said. "Who will pay for these?"

Solid answers were in short supply. "I'm looking into this right now, but you have to be patient," said Barbara Dacosia, who oversees the 950 or so Jamaicans who work in casinos along the Gulf Coast in a nine-month guest worker program. "We're going to do some practical things, and we're going to do some tropical things, and that means we're going to pray."

Much like these immigrants, the city of Biloxi, defined over the past century by its transient culture of summer vacationers, sailors and gamblers, is at a standstill. Boats have been washed ashore. The number of visitors has dropped to zero from 10 million a year. The floating casinos have sunk. And movement is difficult.

"We tried to get gas, but when we got to the counter with our container, the man waved his hand and said no," Pedro, the Mexican landscaper, said in Spanish. "We couldn't say anything because we thought he might get mad and call the police."

José, also a Chiapas native who did not want to give his last name because he is undocumented, said that the only people he knew outside of Biloxi lived in Denver. But aside from having less than $20 left, he said he was also unsure whether he could make it that far without getting caught by the immigration authorities.

Like the many immigrants who came to the area as cheap labor to help rebuild Biloxi after Hurricane Ivan, José arrived in the area in September 2004 looking for contract work. "If I get a chance to get out of here, I'm going," he said. "This is all I know."

Ian Nelson, a Jamaican guest worker who for the last six months had been a housekeeper for the Grand Casino, said he would also rather not stay in the country. But as the only source of income for his parents in Jamaica, Mr. Nelson said he hoped the casino would find work for him in another state.

"I doubt they are going to help us," he said, "because no one from the company has even checked to see if their workers who are stranded here are O.K." About 344 Jamaican guest workers were in Biloxi, based at the three casinos in the city, said Ms. Dacosia, the chief liaison for the Jamaican Central Labor Organization. It is not clear whether they will be returned home without pay or placed in other jobs, she said.

Mr. Nelson said he had never felt more trapped in his life.

"I have come and gone under the work program for the past four years and never had troubles with the program," he said. "But I paid for my own plane ticket and now I am here and I don't know if I will get the work and money that I was promised."

    Double Trap for Foreign Workers, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06immig.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heather Spicer with her boyfriend, Nils Breckoff,

at her home in Jefferson Parish,

where residents were allowed to return

for brief home inspections on Monday.

 

Photograph: Jim Wilson

The New York Times

5.9.2005

 

Residents of a Parish Encountering Lost Dreams

NYT        6.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06parish.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Residents of a Parish

Encountering Lost Dreams

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN

 

METAIRIE, La., Sept. 5 - They parked the van at the water's edge, some three blocks from the house, and plunged into the swamp. Knee-deep, Nils Breckoff dumped his cellphone into a blue plastic tub and hoisted it onto his shoulder. At thigh level, Heather Spicer hesitated, watching her boyfriend's waist disappear a few steps ahead.

"It's going to be up to my armpits," Ms. Spicer said.

"If you want me to go, I'll go," Mr. Breckoff said.

"No," she said. "I have to see my house."

So the couple crossed the street that had become a river, and soon stood waist-deep inside the living room that had become a lake, with Stephen King novels, tennis balls, and a pink souvenir candle from Cape Cod floating around the furniture. The file drawer containing Ms. Spicer's insurance papers was submerged, as was the cedar chest in the corner.

"My daughter's baptism dress is down there," she said as she pulled a portrait of 7-year-old Veronica down from atop the half-drowned desk. "It's the same dress I was baptized in."

Methodically filling the blue tub with clothes, framed photographs and the sodden papers, Ms. Spicer was one of thousands who took slow steps toward recovery on Monday morning, as residents of Jefferson Parish were allowed to return home for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit.

At the parish line on the highway, a wooden welcome sign had been knocked back at an awkward angle, but was still standing, an apt metaphor for how these sprawling suburbs south and west of New Orleans survived the storm.

Some arrived to find mold growing on the ceiling and on their children's toys. Some had trees through their roofs, some no roofs at all. Driveway basketball hoops were flattened onto driveways, patio awnings dropped onto patios, utility poles stood at 45-degree angles, cars bobbed like boats or were crushed by debris. And then there were the lucky ones who discovered nothing much worse than a refrigerator full of rotten food.

"My big tree that I love so much is still standing," Gene Stevens, 50, said of the swamp cypress in the front lawn of the home she has lived in since 1983. "Inside, everything there, high and dry, thank God. The anxiety of not knowing was almost worse than finding something when you got back."

Surrounded by the same lake, river and canal as neighboring New Orleans, Jefferson Parish escaped the horrors that befell the city, in part because of the way the wind blew and the levees broke, in part because many of its 450,000 better-off residents evacuated earlier.

Now, parish officials are rushing toward recovery, giving people four days to visit their property under a dusk-to-dawn curfew, then asking them to get out of the way as they try to rebuild the infrastructure. At first, they estimated it would take at least 90 days to make the 300-square-mile area inhabitable, then 45; Monday, the parish president, Aaron Broussard, said lights might be on and toilets flushing within three weeks. School officials, though, have said schools will not open before Dec. 1, and the only business that seemed open here on Monday morning in Metairie, the parish seat, was a Texaco station with a hundred cars in the queue.

"This is not the world that you knew from the Jefferson Parish that you left," Mr. Broussard warned in a radio interview broadcast as the first residents rolled in at 6 a.m. "Go back to the movie 'Wizard of Oz.' Dorothy's hugging Toto. We're not in Kansas anymore."

Mr. Broussard urged drivers to be extra careful, because with emergency personnel otherwise occupied, "if you get in a wreck, no police is coming to pull you from a wreck. God forbid if you get injured, no ambulance is coming to get you."

He told his exiled constituents to collect their valuables and children's school clothes, document damage with disposable cameras, and bury spoiled food since trash collectors would not come any time soon.

So there was Justin Boudreaux, 25, digging a big hole in the median along Bonnabel Boulevard, just behind a World War I Memorial stone.

"Doing it by the memorial, see, we'll always remember this," laughed a neighbor, Harriet Cross, who supplied latex gloves and disinfectant for the communal food funeral.

"I get here this morning and there's four birds of paradise blooming in the yard," said Ms. Cross, who had little damage to the house where she has lived 47 of her 50 years, but is worried her flower shop next door will wither while the city is deserted. "So it will come back."

Many residents left their far-flung temporary homes in the wee hours expecting checkpoints to be choked, but when the magic hour of 6 a.m. arrived, police officers did not ask for identification, as the flashing road sign promised. The lines stretched back two miles on Airline Highway, six on Interstate 10, but the traffic moved in a steady stream.

Drivers were welcomed with spray-painted road signs - "Generators for Sale, Saws, Supplies" on one side, "Hotel Closed" at the Ramada a little ways down. At Prestige Auto Sales, torn American flags drooped from bent poles. A few traffic lights worked, and soldiers were stationed at other intersections, though they did little more than wave people through.

On Homestead Avenue, a stoic man sprayed the inside of a fridge with bleach on the curb outside No. 1205, and a crying woman emerged from No. 1217 carrying a parakeet in a cage.

On Transcontinental Boulevard, Stephanie Clouatre-Davis could only take small items from the town home where feces-flecked water covered the floor and mold dripped from the ceilings, because a huge fallen tree blocked the path out. The Fisher-Price kitchenette given to Ms. Clouatre-Davis's daughter, Emma, when she turned 2 on Aug. 28 was knocked over on the soggy carpet, its Mylar "Happy Birthday" balloon still attached.

"The mold is the worst thing for me," said Ms. Clouatre-Davis, 30, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in English and lost file cabinets full of notes for her dissertation to the mold. "All my books - that's like my life."

At least she could park a pickup out front to cart things away.

Across town, Ms. Spicer and Mr. Breckoff, who have been dating four months and who had left town on separate trips before the hurricane, unprepared, practically had to swim to even see what was left to take.

Ms. Spicer had just agreed before the storm to sell the three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,700-square-foot home on Crestmont Drive for $360,000, but they had not closed. "I have a feeling I'm not going to," she said as she trudged toward it.

Out front, the fig tree she planted while pregnant sagged from the storm. In the guest bedroom, a mattress was a raft. Antique green velvet chairs were tipped backwards in the living room, and a carton of orange juice floated in the kitchen. Everything above waist level - Veronica's pink fifth-place ribbon from a horse show, Ms. Spicer's sewing machine - survived intact, but how to get it out through three flooded blocks?

Ms. Spicer, a certified public accountant whose small New Orleans firm disappeared in the disaster, took suits off hangers and stuffed them into a garbage bag. Mr. Breckoff filled another with Veronica's things. A large wooden jewelry box, a couple pairs of black heels, a straw cowboy hat. Pictures, take the pictures.

"How much do you think you can carry?" she asked.

"As much as I have to," he said. "Get what you need, baby. I'll make as many trips as you need."

    Residents of a Parish Encountering Lost Dreams, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06parish.html

 

 

 

 

 

A Hospital Takes in

the Tiniest of Survivors

 

Published: September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN

 

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 5 - Jazmyn Anderson yawned and flexed her tiny, rail-thin arms. Weighing 1 pound 41/2 ounces, she is one of the tiniest and frailest of Hurricane Katrina's survivors, airlifted here to Woman's Hospital of Baton Rouge last week from a New Orleans hospital as part of a chaotic evacuation of newborns.

The hospital was the clearinghouse for 121 babies rescued from hospitals in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes last week. Nearly all of the babies were newborns and most, like Jazmyn, were premature.

Many have since been discharged or transferred elsewhere, but 37 remained at Woman's Hospital on Monday afternoon, most of them in a neonatal intensive care unit that hummed with the sound of ventilators and cardiac and respiratory monitors. The unit usually has about 60 premature babies at any one time; on Monday, doctors and nurses were caring for 95 babies.

As of Monday afternoon, the hospital had not established contact with parents of about 10 of the 37 infants, but officials said they were hopeful that all of the babies would eventually be reunited with their families.

Jazmyn Anderson was born 11 weeks premature on Aug. 27 at University Hospital in New Orleans, two days before the hurricane hit. She arrived here on Aug. 30; her mother is at a shelter nearby. She is so tiny her head fits into the palm of a nurse's hand. Inside an incubator, she breathed on her own, but an intravenous tube that delivered nutrients was attached to her belly button.

Dr. Steven B. Spedale, the chief neonatologist at Woman's Hospital, said that he felt grateful for the chance to look after the babies but that the evacuation had not gone smoothly.

"The biggest frustration I've had is getting the babies here," Dr. Spedale said. "When the levees broke, hospitals that thought they had weathered the hurricane suddenly had to deal with flooding, and the evacuations had to kick in. That's what really triggered the onslaught of patients."

University Hospital in New Orleans, part of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, ended up having the largest number of babies that required evacuation, but it took more than a day to determine that because of disorganization and the lack of telephone and electrical service, Dr. Spedale said.

The State Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness had designated Woman's Hospital to coordinate the evacuation of infants, and the State Department of Health and Hospitals had authorized Dr. Spedale to get whatever resources he required.

Even so, the employees of Woman's Hospital had to navigate a maze of bureaucracy, contacting the State Wildlife and Fisheries Department, the Louisiana National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers to secure transportation for the infants. In a series of telephone calls with Dr. Spedale, Dr. Brian Barkemeyer, the chief neonatologist at University Hospital, described the conditions.

"He had no electricity, no ability to do laboratory work, no ability to do X-rays, which is very important for premature babies because we have to verify that IV catheters and endotracheal tubes are placed correctly," Dr. Spedale said.

The episode ended midmorning on Thursday, when Dr. Barkemeyer told Dr. Spedale that two helicopters had arrived but that he was not sure whether the Coast Guard, the Army or a private ambulance agency had sent them. He could say only that they were "big green helicopters," so Dr. Spedale assumed they were from the Army.

"The military was evacuating all patients to the airport and there adult patients were getting triaged and placed on military transport planes and getting flown out," Dr. Spedale said. "We did not want that to happen to the babies because they would not have been equipped at the airport to care for them."

The 29 babies evacuated from University Hospital were taken to Woman's Hospital by helicopter and ambulance. Despite the disorder, Dr. Spedale said he was not aware of any deaths of infants or pregnant women associated with the evacuations.

"We've had mothers who were evacuated deliver prematurely," he said, "but we have not yet seen babies with infections related to the conditions the mothers were in."

    A Hospital Takes in the Tiniest of Survivors, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06babies.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Some Now at the Breaking Point,

Officers Tell of Pain and Pressure

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
and JOHN DeSANTIS

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 5 - Sgt. Jeff Sandoz, clad in black SWAT team fatigues with an assault gun nearby, took a break on Monday afternoon for a cheeseburger, his first hot meal in a week, in the breezeway at the shuttered Harrah's casino on the edge of the French Quarter.

Rescuing people from rooftops and attics and chasing looters since Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, the discomforts have piled up, Sergeant Sandoz acknowledged. His shoulder was bruised on Wednesday when his police cruiser was rammed by someone running a stop sign on one of New Orleans's nearly deserted streets. He has been catching about three hours of sleep a night, curled up in the back seat of his patrol car, and showering with a garden hose.

He did not want to talk about the blisters or funguses and rashes that have erupted - after days of wading in polluted water in wet boots and dirty socks - on the feet of most everyone in the eight-man tactical unit he commands.

The last week has been a series of nonstop rescue missions, shootouts in the night and forays into foul-smelling shelters in response to gunshots and reports of rape for Sergeant Sandoz and the others on the New Orleans police force. And like most everyone else in New Orleans, police officers have been traumatized by the loss of homes and family members.

Morale on the police force is in tatters. About 500 officers - a third of the force and far more than previously estimated - have dropped out of the daily lineup. Some of them may still be in houses cut off by the storm or may have simply gone off to help their families and will eventually return. But most of the missing officers have either told their superiors that they were quitting or simply walked off the job. Two officers have shot themselves to death.

Sergeant Sandoz and his urban commandos, one of the city's toughest, most elite units, have absorbed much of the violence in stride. Unlike some other officers who have succumbed to the pressure and those who have begun five-day vacations, the sergeant said he was not going anywhere except into the streets to do his job.

"You just suck it up and drive on," he said. "I'll be here as long as they need me. I'm not running away from anything."

Still, he reserved judgment, as did many others, of the officers who have abandoned the force or collapsed.

Sergeant Sandoz and his commandos have been tested by the long hours and the nagging inconveniences, like shortages of gasoline for their cars and other supplies. They expressed concerns, like many others, about the security of their jobs in a city that is taking steps to shut down for repairs. They wonder whether they will be paid for the overtime that they are logging under near-battlefield conditions.

Trying to lift spirits, the Police Department is giving every officer a five-day vacation over the next two weeks as the military steps in to replace them. Those who want to go to Las Vegas are being given plane tickets and hotel rooms for them and their families. Their breaks are beginning with physical examinations in Baton Rouge, the state capital, 75 miles north of New Orleans, inoculations against water-borne disease and other necessary medical treatment. After their breaks, the officers will start receiving psychological counseling.

Many officers said Monday that they are grateful for the breather but that they had no interest in going to Las Vegas.

"There's nothing in Las Vegas for me," said Officer Darryl Scheuermann, 41, a SWAT team member. "I'm going to see my family. I miss my wife and my dogs."

In one week, some officers have seen more violence than in a lifetime. Officer Brian French ducked sniper bullets while ferrying 50 women and children to a shelter in a commandeered rental truck.

Lt. Julie Wilson watched a fellow officer and friend being shot by looters attacking a convenience store. Lt. Billy Ceravalo and Lt. Brian Weiss lost their police station in the flooding, then used their hands and oxygen pumps to keep hospital patients alive for hours while begging for help.

Some officers stayed in their homes as the hurricane swept over New Orleans and were forced to climb onto roofs with their families as floodwaters rose. Their pleas for help poured in over emergency radios.

"We were hearing officers on the roofs of their houses begging for someone to help them," Lieutenant Wilson said.

One officer, she said, "told me he was trapped in water up to his chest."

"I tried to get somebody out to him," she continued, but "we haven't heard from him since. I don't know if he is alive or dead."

Lieutenant Wilson's 11-year-old son, Daniel, was shipped off to neighbors. But for most of the week she had no idea where he was and worried that he feared for her as well. Now, the promise of a vacation in Las Vegas does not make her feel better.

"It's a really nice gesture," she said. "But I just want to be able to get one night's sleep without hearing helicopters. I don't think I need five days off from this, just a couple of nights."

Officer Brian French, 25, a native of Ohio, joined the New Orleans Police Department because he wanted a chance to do "real police work."

Although he has heard city and state officials criticize the federal government as not coming fast enough, Officer French also questioned why local officers were not mustered sooner for special duty.

"They told us not to come in on Sunday, the day of the storm, to come in the next day to save money on their budget," he said.

But he never made it to work on Monday, at least not to the station house.

Officer French, 25, moved his family into a hotel. The hotel flooded, and looters attacked a nearby gasoline station. He went out into the storm, grabbed the looters and handcuffed them to a railing at the hotel. But, worried that they might die in the rising waters, he let them go.

He kept his family in the hotel for several days. But they began running out of water, and one evening shooting broke out.

For several days, Officer French rescued survivors from flooded homes. One he saved was Officer Willie Gaunt, who has since resigned.

The city's police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, hustled to position boats and cars before the hurricane and afterward directed rescues and charged after looters.

"We had no food," Mr. Compass told reporters on Monday. "We had no water. We ran out of ammunition. We had no vehicles. We were fighting in waist-deep water."

Mr. Compass has been accused of poorly planning for the hurricane. But he and other city officials said they were simply overwhelmed by a crisis that no municipality could handle. The disaster was compounded, they said, when federal officials in Washington ignored their cries for help for several days.

Immediately after the hurricane, he said, "we had to use so much of our manpower to fight" criminals that some rescues were delayed.

"I had officers in boats who were being shot at as they were pulling people out of the water," he said.

On Monday afternoon at Harrah's casino, as armored cars, fuel trucks, police cars and ambulances covered the casino's ramp and spilled into the street, Officer Russell Philibert, 38, turned to Sergeant Sandoz's unit for help. He needed a bulletproof vest. His was lost when he escaped in shorts and sneakers as water gushed into his house.

Shortly before he fled his house, he had received a radio message from another officer who lived nearby and was trapped in his attic by floodwaters in the middle of the storm. With the wind howling, he broke a window in that officer's house and dragged him to safety.

Officer Philibert said his unit had now taken shelter in a Wal-Mart. The SWAT team has moved into an elementary school on high ground, where some officers can sleep on cafeteria tables and kindergarteners' nap pads. Even the urban commandos acknowledged the strain of what they had seen.

"I might have trouble sleeping, thinking about all the horrific stuff," said Officer Robert Haar, 35. "But I'm so exhausted I just pass out."

 

Michael Luo contributed reporting

from Baton Rouge, La., for this article.

With Some Now at the Breaking Point, Officers Tell of Pain and Pressure, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06police.html

 

 

 

 

 


In Throes of a Diaspora,

Two Families Bind

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By JANE GROSS

 

CUMMING, Ga., Sept. 4 - Their 4-year-old daughter, Laurel, had complained of missing only two things, Leslie and Jaime Mixon said, since the family evacuated their Louisiana home two days before the storm hit: a playmate and the contents of her dress-up chest, especially a Cinderella costume and a cardboard sword.

The tow-headed little girl found both here this weekend at the home of Shannon O'Lear, her husband, Alex McKinney, and their own 4-year-old daughter, Hayes, who were offering shelter to one of the refugee families pouring into American cities and small towns in a diaspora that rivals any this nation has ever seen.

The Mixons had come to this woodsy acreage, with its meandering creek and menagerie of cats, dogs and horses, to inspect a newly renovated two-bedroom basement apartment, with a separate entrance, that Ms. O'Lear and Mr. McKinney had posted online, one of thousands of impromptu invitations from families, primarily Southerners, for total strangers to live rent-free in their homes.

Similar offers popped up last week on Internet sites like Craigslist and MoveOn.org, which reports that 142,522 refugees have been invited to strangers' homes. Neither the Red Cross nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency was willing to endorse the grass-roots effort or distribute the listings, fearing liability if guests turned out to be predatory or had medical or emotional problems unknown to their hosts.

But generosity trumped caution. From a Memphis family came the warning that their household included an "unpredictable" teenage son but reassurance that there were plenty of retail jobs nearby. A family from Allen, Tex., told prospective guests that they were far from public transportation but could offer daily rides to the train. In Stone Mountain, Ga., a young couple who had made contact with a family of five said there would be no problem welcoming them even though they included an elderly woman with dementia and incontinence.

The Mixons had expected to squeeze in with relatives who had a pair of tiny houses in this town outside Atlanta, and they agonized over whether to accept the hospitality of Mr. McKinney and Ms. O'Lear "when so many people are worse off." But within moments of the Mixons' arrival, Laurel and Hayes were fast friends, playing dress-up, jumping rope and, curled up in the same overstuffed chair, watching cartoons. Ms. O'Lear even offered to home-school Laurel, as she did Hayes, to allow the Mixons to avoid the search for a temporary prekindergarten.

"There's no turning this down, if only for Laurel," said Jaime Mixon, her hesitation quickly evaporating.

Ms. O'Lear, 38, had ignored relatives and neighbors who told her she was taking a crazy risk in giving strangers an apartment she could rent for $800 a month. All she wanted in reassurance was a driver's license, establishing that a guest family indeed came from the flood zone.

"I don't think criminals drove all the way to Atlanta so they could rob us," she said, noting the sad reality that for the most part, only those who could afford cars had gotten out in time. "Anyway, we've always done things against the grain."

The Mixons, from Metairie, a New Orleans suburb, had been staying here with one of Mrs. Mixon's brothers, Steve Overmeir. Her elderly parents, Ruby and Fred, who had also fled Metairie, were living nearby with another brother, John, and his wife and daughter. Soon to arrive were the remaining three Mixon siblings: Kathy, along with her grown son, both currently boarding with nine other relatives in Chattanooga, Tenn., in a house where remnants of the storm had knocked out power; Ann, with her grown daughter and fiancé, crammed in with scores of friends and relatives in Eunice, La.; and Kerry, who is driving a camper down from her home in Washington to accommodate the overflow.

Mrs. Mixon, the baby of the clan at 37, figured that if her family moved out of Steve's three-bedroom bungalow that he shared with a roommate, perhaps with Ann's daughter and fiancé in tow, her parents could move there and Ann, hobbled from recent back surgery, could take their place at John's single-story three-bedroom house, since she could not climb stairs. There were two ways to accomplish that: accept the offer of Ms. O'Lear and Mr. McKinney or live in Kerry's R.V.

Mrs. Mixon considered and reconsidered. How could she "in good conscience" accept a free apartment with cable television, vases of freshly picked zinnias in every room and a kitchen stocked with coffee and grits when others were needier? She even had a house to go home to someday, or so it seemed from satellite photos on the Internet.

That is not to say the Mixons had nothing to worry about. They have been granted a four-month grace period on their mortgage, but will owe the back payments in one lump sum by the first of the year. A duplex rental property is uninhabitable, leaving them with no income and another mortgage to pay. Mr. Mixon hopes his business, selling diving equipment to crews working the oil rigs, will survive; otherwise, he may have to return to offshore diving, the dangerous occupation he gave up when Laurel was born.

Mrs. Mixon and her mother shared this information with Ms. O'Lear while others of the two families toured the apartment, complete but for a showerhead. The visitors admired the perennial garden and the family cars, powered by recycled cooking oil. Hayes and Laurel paraded in and out, dressed as a witch and a devil and then as ballerinas.

Midway through the dance recital, Ms. O'Lear disappeared upstairs to take a telephone call from Assunta Jackson of New Orleans. A few days before, the Jackson family - a middle-aged couple and their two grown children, two dogs with them - had expressed interest in the apartment and had made an appointment to see it. But they had never shown up - perhaps, Ms. O'Lear speculated, because they are African-American and leery of living with a white family here in Forsyth County, where it is "unusual to see a black person."

So Ms. O'Lear was thrilled to hear Mrs. Jackson's voice, but only for an instant. Mrs. Jackson explained that her father, left behind in a New Orleans veterans' hospital, had died there of dehydration. Her mother, by his side as he lay unattended, had been evacuated to a hospital in Arkansas, but Mrs. Jackson had no idea where. Overcome by grief and anger - "The government killed my daddy," she wailed - Mrs. Jackson said she was headed home, hoping to bury her father and find her mother.

Now it was Ms. O'Lear who was sobbing, clinging to her husband as the family of refugees swallowed her in their embrace. At 9 a.m., these families had been strangers. Had it not been for their children, they most likely would have stayed that way, parting company in an hour or two. Instead, it was midafternoon. Laurel and Hayes had abandoned ballet for karate. And another family, which none of them had ever met but all of them cried for, was bound for New Orleans, 600 miles away, on a tragic errand.

There was no need to discuss details. In the next week or so, depending on whether they made a trip to Metairie to secure their home and gather possessions, the Mixons expected to move in. Laurel could watch a "Brother Bear" video with Hayes instead of scenes of destruction on television, and there were many costumes for the girls to share. Both families would gather at Steve Overmeir's house for a dinner of "drunken salmon," grilled in a marinade of Crown Royal whiskey.

It was time for the Mixons to pile back into their van and find a Red Cross office that might be issuing checks, a discount store for toiletries and a church of their liking. Laurel wept behind the tinted windows. Hayes waved. Both mothers reassured their children that they would see each other soon.

"This woman is awesome," Mrs. Mixon said as she hugged Ms. O'Lear like a sister.

The praise brought fresh tears to Ms. O'Lear's eyes, but also a quick demurral.

"I'm just a person," she said.

    In Throes of a Diaspora, Two Families Bind, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06diaspora.html

 

 

 

 

 

Clinton Is an Unexpected Partner

in the Hurricane Effort

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and JOHN M. BRODER

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 - As President Bush and administration officials fanned out across the Gulf Coast in the White House's campaign to deal with criticism that they had failed in managing the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, there was one unexpected face in their crowd on Monday: former President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Clinton was at Reliant Center next to the Astrodome in Houston, where about 3,800 homeless New Orleans residents had decamped, standing next to former President George Bush as they announced the creation of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to help hurricane victims. After that, the two former presidents, along with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, toured the shelter, while President Bush visited storm-struck areas of Mississippi and Louisiana, providing a flow of television images suggesting a concerned White House on the march.

Mr. Clinton's visit to the Houston shelter on Monday is the latest time the former president has come to the current president's aid in his second term, from early in the year when Mr. Bush was criticized for his slow response to the tsunami, to initially defending the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina at the White House last week, to praising the credentials of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., Mr. Bush's choice for the Supreme Court. And it offered what many Democrats described as a vivid, if slightly disconcerting, insight into the complicated and increasingly transactional relationship between the Bush and Clinton families.

While officials in both parties said they had no doubt that both men were first and foremost intent on helping Americans, they also took note of the web of political benefits spun by this burgeoning alliance. It helps Mr. Bush during the roughest time of his presidency, Mr. Clinton as he tries to establish himself as a respected and admired former president and Mrs. Clinton as she potentially prepares to run for president in 2008.

For President Bush, Mr. Clinton's agreement to a request by the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to join former President Bush in their second fund-raising project could hardly have been better timed. One of the crucial elements of a White House strategy to help Mr. Bush recover from the rounds of criticism he received in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans was to present him as above politics, and to avoid any kind of political entanglements with Democrats.

"It definitely helps Bush," said Douglas Sosnik, who was White House political director under Mr. Clinton. "Given what has happened to Bush in the last six or seven days, there is not a single aspect of this crisis at all that can be positive to Bush. So anything he can do to get politics out of this - given how vulnerable he is politically - the better for him."

At the same time, the political benefits for the former president and Mrs. Clinton were at least as striking. Mr. Clinton has been engaged in a campaign to establish himself as a respected force in American life after a rather messy departure from the White House, using his foundation for prominent work in the fight against AIDS in Africa.

He is also trying to be less polarizing than he was when he left the White House, an effort to become less of a political weight if, as expected, Mrs. Clinton runs for president, friends said. The presence of Mr. Clinton next to Mr. Bush will make it that much harder, some Democrats said, for Republicans to attack the Clintons.

"Isn't it interesting that Bush realizes he's in trouble and he has to phone President Clinton for cover?" said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic leader from California. "Bush is standing next to President Clinton for cover. You've got all these photos of President Clinton with both Bushes. It's hard for a Republican in the national arena to be attacking the Clintons with these kind of images out there."

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Clinton's spokesman, Jay Carson, said of Mr. Clinton's involvement: "In a time of crisis like this, it is President Clinton's nature to do everything he can to help victims. His involvement is tied to nothing other than to help the tens of thousands of victims of the hurricane."

Still, the situation was complicated Monday. Mr. Clinton seemed to be struggling to be diplomatic in talking about the administration's response to the hurricane damage. He told CNN that "we failed once, but we don't want to fail a second time." But at times he seemed to be following the political directions of the White House in deferring questions about the past and turning them into questions about the future.

"It's an appropriate thing to look into, but not at this time - they're still finding bodies there," Mr. Clinton said in Houston.

By contrast, Mrs. Clinton was fierce in denouncing the administration, particularly for budget cuts it made to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"It was basically taken apart and denied funding," she said. Mrs. Clinton, in an interview, disputed the suggestion that her husband was joining hands with Mr. Bush and Mr. Bush.

"He is no longer in politics," she said. "He is a former president with an enormous amount of influence and just as during the tsunami, he is willing to serve his country. He has expressed strong feelings about the way this has been handled. My role is different. I'm on the front lines dealing with these issues day to day."

 

Adam Nagourney reported from Washington for this article,and John M. Broder from Houston.

    Clinton Is an Unexpected Partner in the Hurricane Effort, NYT, 6.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06clinton.html

 

 

 

 

 

Destruction on Peninsula

Illustrates Danger of Living

at Earth's Edge

 

September 6, 2005
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

 

VENICE, La., Sept. 5 -Before Hurricane Katrina, people around here took pride in living at what they called the end of the world: far from New Orleans in miles and in spirit, at the bottom of a narrow peninsula that juts into the Gulf of Mexico as if in dare.

The only main road, Route 23, meandered past marinas and oil refineries, little shops and the occasional church, in small, distinct towns: Happy Jack and Sunrise, Buras and Boothville, and then pretty much just Venice, where people who worked long shifts - seven days on, seven days off - hopped helicopters to oil platforms somewhere out in the gulf.

The local boast about being at the end of the world no longer smacks of hyperbole, now that the hurricane has wiped the smile off the face of Happy Jack and all its neighbors. These towns remain mostly submerged, deserted and dead quiet, though the destruction easily conjures a hurricane's furious howls.

Few if any houses survived; those not still under water were flattened in place or thrown acres away. Hundreds of pleasure boats, fishing vessels and small ships were indiscriminately dry-docked, tossed onto embankments, into swamps, even onto the state highway. Oil refinery tanks crumpled into balls; bits and pieces of homes scattered like confetti; downed telephone wires snaked off into uselessness; and virtually no living thing was around, save for stranded livestock, crying seagulls and a few dogs looking for masters.

There is no visible National Guard presence, no smaller version of the hectic recovery taking place farther north. This is partly because the hurricane essentially severed the area from the rest of Louisiana; the view by helicopter, the only way to get here other than by boat, shows impassable Route 23 submerged then dry, submerged then dry.

Another reason, the law enforcement officials here say, is that two days before last Monday's hurricane, they went door-to-door, telling people it was time to go. Most people obliged, they say, fleeing to a high school in Belle Chasse, to a relative's home in Folsom, to safe places in Alabama and Mississippi. Residents here know that when it comes to hurricane season, defiance can be fatal.

Now, sheriff's deputies from the local parish of Plaquemines are looking for people, alive or dead, on the levee banks and in the darkness of all those upturned boats. "We still have people out here hiding from us," Deputy Sheriff Timmy Arceneaux said Monday. "But when they get tired of no food and water, they'll be found."

From the sky, it is hard to imagine anyone still living in Lower Plaquemines: amid the black, oil-slick waters lapping against the doors of the Family Dollar store or near the Buras water tower with steel legs buckled beneath it, or among those small yellow atolls - the rooftops of school buses that will not be transporting children anytime soon.

Setting ground in Venice only reinforces the twinned senses of devastation and isolation. The hurricane hit with such force that it dragged large fishing vessels across Route 23, scarring the pavement, and twisting two pumps in front of a gasoline station's skeleton into grotesque bows.

Broken gasoline lines churn the water with bubbles. A few stacked sandbags suggest an aborted attempt at shoring up. The air reeks of diesel fuel and the sea and dead things. A few miles north, in the town of Empire, there was movement, human movement: sheriff's deputies from Plaquemines Parish, surveying the damage, chasing ghosts of people reluctant to leave and steeling themselves to look for the dead in those upturned boats.

At that moment, they were marveling at the clump of boats, including two massive fishing vessels, the Sea Hawk and the Sea Falcon, now plopped smack in the center of Route 23. "Someone was camping out here," Deputy Sheriff Arceneaux said, standing in the clump's large shadow. "We found some beer and potato chips."

He started walking north on a deserted stretch of Route 23 called the Empire Bridge, accompanied by his oil rigger of a son, Ryan, and Lt. Steve Zegura. They pointed out how the hurricane had twisted the bridge, bending it west toward the bay. They noticed this because the Lower Plaquemines area is, was, their home.

Deputy Sheriff Arceneaux, a weathered 44, used to live in a trailer at the northern end of the bridge. It is destroyed, he said, along with the neighboring One-Stop convenience store. He pointed straight ahead, where the highway slid back again underwater. That green house in the middle of the submerged road is owned by his cousin, he said, and it used to be 200 yards to the east.

He looked around at what had been his town and pointed out pieces of the community's jigsaw puzzle that had been moved and shoved to form a different puzzle altogether. The Delta Marina used to be east of Route 23, and now it was west. The severely damaged civic hall over there - "They had weddings and dances and all kinds of stuff" - used to be on Highway 11, only Highway 11 is now nowhere to be seen.

"And this," he said, nodding toward what looked like a lake, "this was a trailer park."

He stopped talking, and then there was no sound other than the howl of either a dog or a coyote. It served as a reminder that animals outnumbered humans here.

Lieutenant Zegura, 44, squat, and wearing rubber boots that he called "Cajun Reeboks," started talking. How he was born and raised with Timmy Arceneaux. How Timmy was with him when he was shot 10 years ago in Sunrise. How word had come to the Zegura family that the hurricane may have killed a nephew of his in Slidell.

How an Empire man - Charlie Martin, wasn't it? - died; some Mexican fishermen found his body floating near their boat, and they laid it out on dry land. And how another local man survived the hurricane clinging hands and feet to a telephone pole.

More silence on a highway without traffic, in a town without the hum of motorboats, the lazy buzz of Labor Day, the sound of children. Not to worry, the three local men said. Lower Plaquemines will rise again.

"Next year we'll be fishing," Lieutenant Zegura said.

His lifelong friend, Timmy Arceneaux, agreed. "Redfish," he said. "Flounder. Speckled trout."

Then again it got quiet.

Destruction on Peninsula Illustrates Danger of Living at Earth's Edge, NYT, 6.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/national/nationalspecial/06peninsula.html

 

 

 

 

 

Murder and rape - fact or fiction?

 

Tuesday September 6, 2005
Guardian
Gary Younge in Baton Rouge


There were two babies who had their throats slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome. And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre.

In a week filled with dreadful scenes of desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some stories stood out.

But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated and may yet prove to be apocryphal.

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre.

New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward."

And while many claim they happened, no witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward.

Nor has the source for the story of the murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian found no corpses.

During a week when communications were difficult, rumours have acquired a particular currency. They acquired through repetition the status of established facts.

One French journalist from the daily newspaper Libération was given precise information that 1,200 people had drowned at Marion Abramson school on 5552 Read Boulevard. Nobody at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the New Orleans police force has been able to verify that.

But then Fema could not confirm there were thousands of people at the convention centre until they were told by the press for the simple reason that they did not know.

"Katrina's winds have left behind an information vacuum. And that vacuum has been filled by rumour.

"There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre," wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.

"You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact," said one Baltimore-based journalist.

"But nobody is doing that."

Either way these rumours have had an effect.

Reports of the complete degradation and violent criminals running rampant in the Superdome suggested a crisis that both hastened the relief effort and demonised those who were stranded.

By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting.

The local mayor responded accordingly.

"We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans," Kip Holden was told the Baton Rouge Advocate.

"We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people."

The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that "scarcely any of it was true - the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter".

"There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes."

Similarly when the first convoy of national guardsmen went into New Orleans approached the convention centre they were ordered to "lock and load".

But when they arrived they were confronted not by armed mobs but a nurse wearing a T-shirt that read "I love New Orleans".

"She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when she saw the guns," wrote the LA Times.

"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted.

"We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle cell!"

Murder and rape - fact or fiction?, G, 6.9.2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563532,00.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empty, ruined and desperate

· Military takes over as ghost city faces new horrors

· Police shoot dead five people carrying guns

The Guardian        p. 1

Monday September 5, 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/05/
hurricanekatrina.usa7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Appears to Have Avoided

Massive Oil Supply Problems

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By VIKAS BAJAJ

 

As Americans began heading home from the Labor Day weekend, gasoline stations today continued to report spot shortages, but the country appeared, at least as of this afternoon, to have avoided the massive supply problems that some had feared.

Throughout the weekend, station attendants and analysts said they saw unrelenting demand from drivers who were worried they would find themselves stranded, were panicked by rumors about service stations closing early, or both.

Officials said they continued to make progress in resuming the production and distribution of gasoline and other fuels, which was severely disrupted by Hurricane Katrina last week. But they noted that most refineries and oil production in and along the Gulf of Mexico remained shut down for the seventh day in a row.

Gasoline demand was heaviest along busy thoroughfares between big population centers and vacation destinations, often knocking out several gasoline stations along heavy traffic routes for hours to days at a time.

"It could three or five stations on one stretch running out, that's a fairly real situation that is happening," said Justin McNaull, a spokesman for AAA, formerly known as the American Automobile Association.

Mr. McNaull added that his group had not received any reports of motorists stranded in tourist destinations unable to return home because they could not refuel. "The challenge that gas station operators are having now is not knowing when the next shipment is coming and how much they will be getting," he said.

Rauf Baber, manager of a BP Amoco station in Coney Island, Brooklyn, said he was able to get a special delivery of gasoline late Sunday night after running out earlier in the day. Though he had 6,000 gallons of gasoline this morning, he was still expecting another load this evening.

"People went crazy to fill up, that's why we ran out," Mr. Baber said. "The BP company, they have plenty of gas."

Another Amoco station in Bronx was not quite so lucky. "We ran out about half an hour ago, and people are still coming in looking for gasoline," an attendant who would only give his first name, Jose, said this morning. "We ran out for a while last week, too. We're hoping to get a delivery today."

Rumors that service stations were closing at 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. appeared to have needlessly sent many motorists on refueling trips, said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. "It wasn't as good as I hoped, but it wasn't as bad as I feared," he said about the weekend.

Another key test may come this afternoon and evening as the biggest crush of vacationers begin their voyage home, Mr. McNaull said.

"There certainly will be another push on the demand side there as people make those return trips and potentially as people gas up cars for the Tuesday back-to-work commute," he said.

Nationally, the average retail price for gasoline was $3.057 a gallon this morning, up from $2.867 on Sunday and $2.307 a month ago, according to AAA.

In the New York region, prices seemed to range from $2.95 a gallon to $3.75 a gallon, according to a spot survey done by the staffs of Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and John Corzine, Democrat of New Jersey. Both politicians called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate gasoline price increases and suggested it might help to lift the federal gasoline tax at least temporarily.

Gasoline supplies will likely remain tight through much of the coming week if not longer, industry officials and analysts said, as refiners slowly resume operations in the gulf region. It can take several days to restart those facilities, because of the danger of explosions and other accidents.

Of the 10 refineries that were shut down by the storm initially, eight have not resumed operations, two are restarting and hope to be operational in the coming days, and three still do not have electricity, the Energy Department said on Sunday.

At least four refiners that produce about 5 percent of the nation's gasoline and other oil-based fuels have sustained significant damage and could be out of commission for a month or more for repairs, officials and analysts said. Among them are ConocoPhillips' Belle Chase, La. facility; Exxon Mobil's Chalmette, La. plant; and ChevronTexaco's large refinery in Pascagoula, Miss.

Officials at the largest of the four, ChevronTexaco, said they still do not have power or phone service at their plant, where the company is building temporary housing for up to 1,500 employees and their families. It may be days before the company can say how long it will take to restart the plant, which has a capacity to process 325,000 barrels of oil a day.

"There is a cogeneration unit with Mississippi Electric there that needs to get up and running," said Michael Barrett, a company spokesman. "We need to get natural gas there. We are putting generators in there right now. The truth is we don't have telephone lines" working at the refinery.

Of the two major pipelines that bring gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel to the eastern half of the United States from Texas and the gulf, the smaller one, the Plantation pipeline, said it was operating at 100 percent. The other, the Colonial pipeline, was at 73 percent as of Saturday and hoped to be at full capacity by the end of the holiday weekend.

Also, the federal government and members of the International Energy Agency, a 26-nation organization created after the 1970's oil crisis, have started releasing crude oil and some gasoline to energy companies in an effort to ease supply constraints. Those moves helped push down crude oil prices 2.1 percent in London tradingtoday. The New York Mercantile Exchange was closed for the Labor Day holiday.

The United States Department of Energy has already agreed to loan 12.6 million barrels of oil to refiners so they can keep producing gasoline and other fuels as production facilities in the gulf recover. This weekend, the government went even further and said it would sell 30 million barrels or more of oil in addition to the loans, which companies have to replace when conditions improve.

But with so much refining capacity out of service, analysts said gasoline prices would remain high in spite of the crude oil that the federal government and its allies are unleashing.

"Some of these refineries will not be back to full operation perhaps well into next year," said Paul Horsnell, an analyst at Barclays Capital in London.

A spokesman for BP, formerly British Petroleum, Scott Dean, said the company was shipping gasoline from Europe to East Coast port to help alleviate shortages but it may take some time for the current supply crunch to wind its way out of the system.

"We are making fuels, we are distributing fuels," he said. "Fuels are arriving at the terminals and going out on trucks and arriving stations, but there are still disruptions."

Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting for this article.

    U.S. Appears to Have Avoided Massive Oil Supply Problems, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05cnd-oil.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Receding floodwaters expose the dark side of America

- but will anything change?

Jonathan Freedland sees a country waking up

to injustice and high-level incompetence

The Guardian        p. 3

Monday September 5, 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/05/
hurricanekatrina.usa5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just Acting Neighborly,

but Finding Itself Full Up

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

 

HOUSTON, Sept. 4 - Strained by an influx of evacuees without equal in modern American history, Texas struggled on Sunday to house about a quarter-million victims of Hurricane Katrina in shelters and hotel rooms and began organizing an emergency airlift to divert thousands more to other states.

Nearly a week after the storm flooded much of New Orleans and all but overwhelmed eastern Texas with evacuees and rescued survivors, efforts broadened to care for the injured and the needy. In Washington, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said 563 shelters holding 151,409 people had opened in 10 states.

One of the first flights on Sunday carried 149 evacuees from San Antonio, where 10,400 evacuees were being housed in a former air base, a mall and a Levi Strauss plant, to the Arizona state fairgrounds in Phoenix. More than 3,300 others were expected, said Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona.

In Austin, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry said Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia and Iowa had also offered to accept evacuees.

With Houston accommodating nearly 30,000 evacuees in the Astrodome area and at a downtown convention center, and 100,000 or more in hotel rooms and private residences, officials said the capacity to accept more people was dwindling, although they pledged that no one would be turned away.

"We can't take many more," said Frank Michel, a spokesman for Mayor Bill White. Despite signs on Interstate 45 and other major arteries directing buses of evacuees away from Houston and toward Dallas and other cities, many continued to come to Houston and were accepted for processing.

Some rescue efforts seemed to go awry. LaWanda Johnson, 33, a driver from Houston, said the school district had sent 365 buses to New Orleans on Saturday to pick up survivors but were turned back at LaPlace, outside New Orleans, by troops. The buses returned empty. In Orange, Tex., on the Louisiana border, Janie Johnson of the Red Cross said 809 people were at five shelters on Sunday, down from 1,000. Some had already found houses or apartments. The two school districts had enrolled 225 new students.

Former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton were to appear at the Reliant Center in Houston early Monday to start a fund-raising drive like the one they ran after the tsunami in Asia.

With shelters overloaded, officials redirected relief flights. After consultations between Governor Perry and Mayor Debra McCartt of Amarillo, a Continental Airlines flight with 127 evacuees from New Orleans landed in Amarillo on Sunday.

Among the evacuees was Manny Macgee, who was soon transported in his wheelchair to the civic center, where he sat alone, contentedly eating peach cobbler. He was celebrating, he said: It was his 73rd birthday.

Mayor McCartt greeted the arrivals. "I got to shake everyone's hand, give them a pat on the back," she said. "They're all glad to be here."

Dr. J. Rush Pierce Jr., the Amarillo public health official, said 12 doctors and 20 nurses, all volunteers, had processed about 60 percent of the patients and sent five to the hospital for conditions that included heart ailments, diabetes and severe dehydration. As Houston filled up, many evacuees were transported to Dallas, where officials said the convention center could handle 7,000 people. That capacity was reached Sunday.

Mayor Laura Miller of Dallas said Sunday that the city was at its saturation point. "We've registered 14,400 and easily have double that number in the area," she said. "I spent yesterday at the shelter and there was chaos and despair. Naked women were bathing in sinks, oblivious to what was going on around them, just to finally get some water and be able to get clean," she said.

By Saturday morning, 300 people an hour were arriving in Dallas.

At the convention center, children tossed a football in a field marked by yellow police tape. A boy roller-skated. Another rode a tricycle, and others played board games. People lined up to get haircuts from Donald McGee, 27. "It feels good to do something normal," said Mr. McGee, who said he had walked through chin-deep water to get to the convention center in New Orleans. "This is great," he said. "At the convention center, people were getting killed; girls got raped. We were hot and dehydrated. This is a blessing."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Maureen Balleza in Houston, Nathan Levy in San Antonio, Laura Griffin in Dallas, Margaret Toal in Orange, Tex., and David Bowser in Amarillo, Tex.

    Just Acting Neighborly, but Finding Itself Full Up, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05texas.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neighbouring states struggle to cope with influx of people

Texas bears brunt of problem

as hundreds of thousands flee disaster area,

many of them vowing never to return

The Guardian        p. 5

Monday September 5, 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/05/
hurricanekatrina.usa1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Response to Storm

Becomes Weapon for Democrats

in New York Race

 

The New York Times
September 5, 2005
By MIKE McINTIRE and ROBIN SHULMAN

 

Outrage over the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina has worked its way into New York City's mayoral campaign in recent days, with some of the Democratic candidates using the crisis as a vehicle for broader assertions that Republicans have neglected the poor.

While none publicly embraced the claim by some black leaders that the official response to the disaster was slow because most of the victims were black, the city's mayoral candidates approached the issue of race as a piece of a larger problem, saying that the relief effort points to a lack of empathy by President Bush toward impoverished city dwellers.

C. Virginia Fields, the only black candidate in the mayoral race, appeared yesterday at the New Life Tabernacle church in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and said that the elderly, the infirm and the poor, as well as black residents, had been disproportionately affected by slow relief efforts. On Friday, she issued a statement saying that President Bush had sent troops to protect property and "shoot looters rather than to get food and medical help to those in need."

"I'm angry," said Ms. Fields, the Manhattan borough president, speaking outside the church yesterday. "Why didn't we act? It would have made a difference in the lives of so many of those people."

Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, appeared at several black churches yesterday morning and issued a statement calling the Bush administration's response "shocking, inadequate and indefensible." Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker, told parishioners at the Love Fellowship Tabernacle in East New York, Brooklyn, that the disaster response was evidence that "we have a president and a federal government that have abandoned our cities."

The other Democrat in the race, Representative Anthony D. Weiner, spoke to congregants at another black church, Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he called the disaster response "a national shame."

Public attention to the hurricane and its aftermath has made it difficult for the Democratic mayoral candidates to make their voices heard as the Sept. 13 primary draws near. This was painfully evident yesterday for Mr. Miller, whose City Hall news conference on an environmental initiative was overshadowed by a simultaneous briefing by top city officials on New York's hurricane relief efforts.

At that briefing, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that the city, which sent 172 police officers to New Orleans on Saturday, was dispatching 150 more officers and 300 firefighters in response to pleas for help from Louisiana and other gulf states devastated by Katrina.

Some of the Democrats clearly saw the hurricane relief effort as an opportunity to link Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican, with President Bush on an unpopular issue, although the mayor made that more difficult yesterday when he added his voice to the chorus of critics saying Washington had been caught flatfooted.

"It would appear - and I think the president acknowledged - that the federal government's response has been inadequate," Mr. Bloomberg said in response to a question at the briefing.

Mr. Bloomberg was apparently referring to Mr. Bush's statement last week, regarding the relief efforts, that "the results are not acceptable." The president later sought to clarify his comments, saying, "'I am satisfied with the response; I'm not satisfied with all the results."

Of the Democratic candidates, Mr. Miller has most aggressively tried to pair Mr. Bloomberg with Mr. Bush. Campaigning at a street fair in Midtown on Saturday afternoon, he said the response to Katrina was "part of a pattern of lack of attention to urban areas" by the White House, and he criticized the mayor for defending the president's record on providing federal money to New York for anti-terrorism initiatives.

"We can do a lot better in this city," Mr. Miller said. "We need leadership that's going to stand up and fight for urban areas across this country."

For all the effort to tar Mr. Bloomberg, the Democrats were careful to acknowledge the mayor's steps to lend assistance to the hurricane victims. Mr. Miller praised him for it, and Mr. Weiner, asked yesterday to comment on Mr. Bloomberg's handling of New York's response, also declined the opportunity to criticize.

"I'm sure whatever was asked of the mayor, he did," Mr. Weiner said. "This isn't a time for national finger-pointing."

Winnie Hu and Janon Fisher contributed reporting for this article.

    U.S. Response to Storm Becomes Weapon for Democrats in New York Race, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/nyregion/metrocampaigns/05mayor.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


5.9.2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans

Begins a Search for Its Dead;

Violence Persists

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

 

Troops patrolled the streets, rescuers hunted for stragglers and New Orleans looked like a wrecked ghost town yesterday as the evacuation of the city neared completion and the authorities turned to the grim task of collecting bodies in a ghastly landscape awash in numberless corpses.

In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.

The larger picture of death was just as murky. No one could say how many had died in the hurricane or were waiting to be rescued after the city's levees burst. One morgue at the St. Gabriel Prison near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. Hundreds were missing in nearby Chalmette. In Baton Rouge, state officials said the official Louisiana death toll stood at 59, but most said that thousands was a more realistic figure. More than 125 were known dead in Mississippi.

"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Michael O. Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, told CNN on Sunday.

Seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans known as America's vibrant capital of jazz and gala Mardi Gras celebrations was gone. In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of biblical proportions.

As the effects of the crisis spread across the nation, 20 states have opened their shelters, homes and schools to the refugees. But moving the population of New Orleans to other parts of the country has created overcrowding and strains. In Texas, where nearly half the refugees are jamming stadiums, civic centers and hotels, Gov. Rick Perry said the state's capacity was almost exhausted. Thousands of people were also arriving at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.

In Baton Rouge, at two places, hundreds of people, many carrying umbrellas to protect them from the scorching heat, were lined up for hours waiting for emergency food stamps and other public assistance.

There were no quick solutions. Making New Orleans habitable again was expected to take many months, even a year.

Meanwhile, there were holdouts in the city, unknown numbers of people who refused to go. They were being urged to leave for their own safety. Officials warned of an impossible future in a destroyed city without food, water, power or other necessities, only the specter of cholera, typhoid or mosquitoes carrying malaria or the West Nile virus.

As helicopter and boat crews searched flooded neighborhoods for survivors yesterday and officials focused for the first time on finding, collecting and counting the dead, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, warned that Americans must brace for some gruesome sights in the days ahead.

"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Mr. Chertoff said on the "Fox News Sunday" television program. "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Stung by critics who say its sluggish response compounded the suffering and cost lives, the Bush administration rolled out a public relations offensive yesterday. Mr. Chertoff visited the Sunday television talk shows to give status reports and defend the government's response.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to the stricken states yesterday to assess the damage and pledge relief, and President Bush planned another visit to Louisiana and Mississippi today. He flew over the area on Wednesday as he returned to Washington from a vacation at his Texas ranch, and made an inspection tour on Friday.

The administration's problems in the crisis seemed to crystallize in a dramatic appearance on the NBC program "Meet the Press" by Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. Sobbing, he told of an emergency management official receiving phone calls from his mother, who, trapped in a nursing home, pleaded day after day for rescue. Assured by federal officials, the man promised her repeatedly that help was on the way.

"Every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' " Mr. Broussard said. "And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.' Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."

Mr. Broussard angrily denounced the country's leadership. "We have been abandoned by our own country," he said. "It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Congress, returning from a summer recess, is widely expected to undertake investigations into the causes of and reaction to the crisis, and even some Republicans warned that the government's response, widely viewed as slow and ineffectual, could further undermine Mr. Bush's authority at a time when he is lagging in the polls, endangering his Congressional agenda.

In New Orleans, thousands of National Guard and active duty troops as well as federal marshals finally appeared to be in control of streets where looters and hooligans had run wild for days last week, unchecked by overwhelmed police officers who were focused on saving lives, not property, in the chaotic city. Fires had burned unchecked by overwhelmed firefighters.

The crisis put enormous pressure on many police officers and firefighters, pressure some could not withstand. P. Edwin Compass III, the New Orleans police superintendent, said on Saturday that 200 of the 1,500 members of his force had walked off the job and that two others had committed suicide. He said yesterday that the city had offered to send all members of the police and fire departments and their families on vacations to Las Vegas.

"When you go through something this devastating and traumatic, you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process," Mr. Compass said.

The notion of a vacation in the midst of disaster struck some as unusual. But officials likened it to an R&R break for combat troops. Military reinforcements, who arrived in the thousands over the weekend, will take over the search and rescue work temporarily, though New Orleans officials said they would remain in charge.

"We haven't turned over control of the city," said Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans. "We're going to leave a skeleton force - about 20 percent of the department - for leadership and liaison with the troops while we get some rest."

During the buildup of troops in recent days, federal, state and local officials have given often wildly disparate figures for military personnel on the ground or on the way. Mr. Bush on Saturday said there were more than 21,000 National Guard troops in Louisiana and Mississippi and 4,000 active duty forces to assist them. He ordered 7,000 more troops into New Orleans.

Colonel Ebbert put the number in the city at 1,000. Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Michael P. Fleming of the National Guard in Baton Rouge said there were 16,000 guardsmen in Louisiana.

The deployment of the troops, whatever their numbers, the arrival of tons of food and other supplies, and progress in closing the breached levees added to a sense of momentum in the stricken city over the weekend. So did stepped-up evacuation efforts. The Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans convention center, which had become fetid and dangerous refuges for as many as 50,000, were virtually emptied. Hotels, hospitals and other shelters were also evacuated.

Though the number of the dead was still unknown, a few details could be gleaned about the tragedy. Officials said nine bodies came from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where emergency workers had set up a triage unit. Of a group of 11 bodies from the Superdome, officials said, many were ailing patients on ventilators.

New Orleans remained a city in crisis. There was still no power except that provided by generators, almost nowhere to buy food or water, no reliable transportation or communications systems, no effective firefighting forces.

There were thousands of people awaiting flights out at the airport. Officials said 3,000 to 5,000 people had been treated at the unit, and that only 200 remained. The airport director, Roy Williams, said 30 people had died, some of them elderly.

Other problems developed. Even as the city population dwindled, hundreds of new arrivals were reported to be entering from outlying towns, stragglers who had been unable to escape from their hometowns in the past week and who believed their surest way out could be found with the buses, trains and planes evacuating New Orleans.

There was no way to tell how many New Orleans residents remained in the city. Many were believed hiding in homes or apartments. Rescue teams in helicopters searched flooded neighborhoods and went out in boats and on foot to press a house-to-house search for holdouts yesterday. One helicopter crashed, but no one was injured. Many residents were found and evacuated, but what Mr. Chertoff called a significant number refused to go.

"That is not a reasonable alternative," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean the city."

People like Frank Asevado III, a 37-year-old mechanic, and Travis Latapie, 44, a shrimp fisherman, both from St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, complained bitterly in interviews of being abandoned by the government after the waters engulfed their community. They told of using their boats for several days to save 300 friends and neighbors, plucking them from floodwaters and the roofs of homes and cars.

"We never see no Coast Guard, no nothing," Mr. Latapie said.

Mr. Asevado added, "The government didn't do jack."

Aid from around the country continued to move toward the stricken region. New York City, which dispatched 100 city buses and 172 police officers to New Orleans on Saturday, decided yesterday to send 150 more officers and 300 firefighters today. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg noted that Louisiana had been among the many states that helped New York after Sept. 11.

"We understand that we have an obligation, and we're happy to do it," the mayor said.

In the midst of misery in New Orleans, there were lingering signs of a fading vivacity. About two dozen people gathered in the French Quarter for an annual Labor Day gay celebration, the Decadence Parade. Matt Menold, 23, a street musician wearing a sombrero and a guitar, explained: "It's New Orleans, man. We're going to celebrate."

But the tragedy of New Orleans was more vividly represented in the Garden District, a business area dotted with antique shops. At the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, a woman's body had been on the sidewalk since Wednesday. People had covered her with blankets and plastic, and by yesterday a small wall of bricks had been erected around the corpse to hold down a tarpaulin to cloak her.

On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and an epitaph: "Here lies Vera. God help us."

 

Reporting for this article was contributed by Jeremy Alford, Sewell Chan and Michael Luo from Baton Rouge, La., and John DeSantis, Christopher Drew and Joseph B. Treaster from New Orleans.

    New Orleans Begins a Search for Its Dead; Violence Persists, NYT, 5.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

Rescuers Reach Out to People

Clinging to Homes in New Orleans

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
and ROBERT D. McFADDEN

 

Rescue teams reached out to people still clinging to their homes in high water in New Orleans today, and President George W. Bush made his second trip to the Gulf Coast region in the past three days, going to Baton Rouge, La., and then to Mississippi to be briefed on the relief effort.

In New Orleans, rescue teams continued to try to find and help evacuate residents who remained in the waterlogged areas of the city. Those who had access to dry land were being encouraged to leave, according to the deputy police chief, Warren Riley.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed," he said at a news briefing.

He said that the police force was not opposed to citizens using boats to carry out independent rescue missions. "We are not opposed to people going out and saving lives," he said, but he added that the authorities wanted them to become part of an organized effort.

Troops patrolled the streets, rescuers hunted for stragglers and New Orleans looked like a wrecked ghost town as the evacuation of the city neared completion on Sunday, when the authorities started the grim task of collecting bodies in a ghastly landscape awash in numberless corpses.

President Bush visited the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge, stressing the need to deliver food, water and medicine. "So long as any life is in danger we got work to do," the president said, before flying by helicopter to Mississippi.Today, miles-long lines of vehicles crawled into Jefferson Parish as residents were allowed to return for brief inspections of their homes. Officials planned to allow traffic in for 12 hours, though they encouraged residents to inspect their property, pick up personal items and leave. Deputy Chief Riley said that the residents of New Orleans were not being given similar permission.

The commander of the joint task force coordinating military relief efforts, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, said today that the priorities were to find survivors, distribute food and water and then enable them to communicate with each other, as well as eventually supplying them with fuel so they can be self-sustaining.

He defended the efforts of rescue workers in New Orleans, deflecting questions at a news briefing that reflected some of the criticism that a lack of communication and poor security was hampering the workers.

In Houston, former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton announced the establishment of a fund, part of a drive to raise money like the one they ran after the tsunami in Asia.

Already, they said, Wal-Mart has contributed $23 million to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, which will be turned over to the governors of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi to determine how best to use the money.

"Nothing we do can be an adequate response to the agony that we have seen, the suffering of people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama," said Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Bush, the president's father, said recovery was expected to take years, and the fund would take the "outpouring" of generosity from donors to the next level.

In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout on Sunday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.

The larger picture of death was just as murky. No one could say how many had died in the hurricane or were waiting to be rescued after the city's levees burst. One morgue at the St. Gabriel Prison near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. Hundreds were missing in nearby Chalmette. In Baton Rouge, state officials said the official Louisiana death toll stood at 59, but most said that thousands was a more realistic figure. More than 125 were known dead in Mississippi.

Seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans known as America's vibrant capital of jazz and gala Mardi Gras celebrations was gone. In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of biblical proportions.

As the effects of the crisis spread across the nation, 20 states have opened their shelters, homes and schools to the refugees. But moving the population of New Orleans to other parts of the country has created overcrowding and strains. In Texas, where nearly half the refugees are jamming stadiums, civic centers and hotels, Gov. Rick Perry said the state's capacity was almost exhausted. Thousands of people were also arriving at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.

Officials warned of an impossible future in a destroyed city without food, water, power or other necessities, only the specter of cholera, typhoid or mosquitoes carrying malaria or the West Nile virus.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to the stricken states Sunday to assess the damage and pledge relief. President Bush made an inspection of the devastated areas on Friday.

The administration's problems in the crisis seemed to crystallize in a dramatic appearance on Sunday on the NBC program "Meet the Press" by Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. Sobbing, he told of an emergency management official receiving phone calls from his mother, who, trapped in a nursing home, pleaded day after day for rescue. Assured by federal officials, the man promised her repeatedly that help was on the way.

"Every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' " Mr. Broussard said. "And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.' Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."

Mr. Broussard angrily denounced the country's leadership. "We have been abandoned by our own country," he said. "It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Today, he gave permission to residents of his parish to return and check on their belongings, but not to stay. Congress, returning from a summer recess, is widely expected to undertake investigations into the causes of and reaction to the crisis, and even some Republicans warned that the government's response, widely viewed as slow and ineffectual, could further undermine Mr. Bush's authority at a time when he is lagging in the polls, endangering his Congressional agenda.

In New Orleans, thousands of National Guard and active duty troops as well as federal marshals finally appeared to be in control of streets where looters and hooligans had run wild for days last week, unchecked by overwhelmed police officers who were focused on saving lives, not property, in the chaotic city. Fires had burned unchecked by overwhelmed firefighters.

The crisis put enormous pressure on many police officers and firefighters, pressure some could not withstand. P. Edwin Compass III, the New Orleans police superintendent, said on Saturday that 200 of the 1,500 members of his force had walked off the job and that two others had committed suicide. He said on Sunday that the city had offered to send all members of the police and fire departments and their families on vacations to Las Vegas.

The notion of a vacation in the midst of disaster struck some as unusual. But officials likened it to an R&R break for combat troops. Military reinforcements, who arrived in the thousands over the weekend, will take over the search and rescue work temporarily, though New Orleans officials said they would remain in charge.

"We haven't turned over control of the city," said Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans. "We're going to leave a skeleton force - - about 20 percent of the department - for leadership and liaison with the troops while we get some rest."

During the buildup of troops in recent days, federal, state and local officials have given often wildly disparate figures for military personnel on the ground or on the way. Mr. Bush on Saturday said there were more than 21,000 National Guard troops in Louisiana and Mississippi and 4,000 active duty forces to assist them. He ordered 7,000 more troops into New Orleans.

Colonel Ebbert put the number in the city at 1,000. On Sunday, Brig. Gen. Michael P. Fleming of the National Guard in Baton Rouge said there were 16,000 guardsmen in Louisiana.

The deployment of the troops, whatever their numbers, the arrival of tons of food and other supplies, and progress in closing the breached levees added to a sense of momentum in the stricken city over the weekend.

Though the number of the dead was still unknown, a few details could be gleaned about the tragedy. Officials said nine bodies came from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where emergency workers had set up a triage unit. Of a group of 11 bodies from the Superdome, officials said, many were ailing patients on ventilators.

New Orleans remained a city in crisis. There was still no power except that provided by generators, almost nowhere to buy food or water, no reliable transportation or communications systems, no effective firefighting forces.

People like Frank Asevado III, a 37-year-old mechanic, and Travis Latapie, 44, a shrimp fisherman, both from St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, complained bitterly in interviews on Sunday of being abandoned by the government after the waters engulfed their community. They told of using their boats for several days to save 300 friends and neighbors, plucking them from floodwaters and the roofs of homes and cars.

"We never see no Coast Guard, no nothing," Mr. Latapie said.

Mr. Asevado added, "The government didn't do jack."

Aid from around the country continued to move toward the stricken region. New York City, which dispatched 100 city buses and 172 police officers to New Orleans on Saturday, decided Sunday to send 150 more officers and 300 firefighters today. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg noted that Louisiana had been among the many states that helped New York after Sept. 11.

"We understand that we have an obligation, and we're happy to do it," the mayor said.

Rescuers Reach Out to People Clinging to Homes in New Orleans, NYT, 5.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05cnd-storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two large fishing boats

were stranded on the median of Route 23

a week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

 

Photograph: Vincent Laforet

The New York Times

 

Rescuers Reach Out to People Clinging to Homes in New Orleans

NYT        5.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05cnd-storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina could prompt

new black "great migration"

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
3:21 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - If refugees end up building new lives away from New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina may prompt the largest U.S. black resettlement since the 20th century's Great Migration lured southern blacks to the North in a search for jobs and better lives.

Interviews with refugees in Houston, which is expecting many thousands of evacuees to remain, suggest that thousands of blacks who lost everything and had no insurance will end up living in Texas or other U.S. states.

Officials say it will take many months and maybe even years before the birthplace of jazz is rebuilt.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed," New Orleans Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley told reporters on Monday. "We are simply asking people not to come back to this city right now."

Many evacuees like Percy Molere, 26, who worked in a hotel in New Orleans' famed French quarter, say they cannot keep their lives on hold for very long.

"If it took a month, I'd go back, but a year, I don't want to wait that long," said Molere. "Hopefully we're going to stay in Houston just to stay out of New Orleans" for the time being.

Experts caution that it is too soon to clearly predict the long-term impact of the devastation of New Orleans, a city of less than half a million people more than two-thirds of whom are black. But one scenario would be massive resettlement elsewhere.

"You've got 300,000, 400,000 people, many of them low income without a lot of means, who are not going to have the ability to wait out a year or two or three years for the region to rebuild," said Barack Obama, the only black member of the U.S. Senate.

"They are going to have to find immediate work, immediate housing, immediately get their kids into school and that probably will change the demographics of the region," he told Reuters on Monday during a visit to Houston, the largest single gathering point for the refugees.

Because of the legacy of slavery, southern states including Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have historically been home to the greatest concentration of U.S. blacks. In 1900, 85 percent of U.S. blacks lived in the South and as early as 1830, more than 58 percent of Louisiana's population was black.

Between 1940 and 1970 economic changes prompted 5 million blacks to quit the south for cities across the North including Chicago, Detroit and New York, marking one of the nation's largest internal migrations.

"It could have potentially that kind of effect," said Obama, whose father immigrated from Kenya.

 

MIGRATION TRENDS

New Orleans did not always follow the trend. Historically, far fewer residents have moved from New Orleans than from most American cities, despite its high poverty and crime rates.

Nicholas Lemann, author of "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America," was wary of predicting that Katrina would prompt major resettlement.

"It is kind of early to tell," he said.

But he said as officials elsewhere accommodate large numbers of blacks, they should avoid putting them in confined areas as Chicago did in the past, which created new urban woes. "They should think carefully on how to avoid the sort of ghetto phenomenon," he said.

Part of the migration trend will be set by what federal, state and local agencies do to help refugees rebuild their lives.

"What I do think should be focused on now is what is the Congress is going to do when they get back," former President Bill Clinton said in Houston on Monday. "How are we going to find jobs for these people, where are they really going to live, do they need some cash right away?"

"They feel lost."

    Katrina could prompt new black "great migration", R, 5.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T192153Z_01_BAU569645_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-MIGRATION-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joyce Thibideaux

searched for belongings in her home

in Long Beach, Mississippi.

 

Photograph: Frank Polich

Reuters

 

Rescuers Reach Out to People Clinging to Homes in New Orleans

NYT        5.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05cnd-storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina survivors visit wrecked homes

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
3:01 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
and Paul Simao

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Thousands of residents of suburban New Orleans returned on Monday to inspect homes wrecked by Hurricane Katrina and President George W. Bush went back to the disaster zone to quell a political crisis over bungled aid efforts.

The search for storm victims went on as rescuers in boats, helicopters and military vehicles went house to house looking for people still stranded a week after Katrina blew through, causing massive flooding and destruction.

Pressed to give an estimate of the death toll, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told NBC's Today Show that a figure of 10,000 "wouldn't be unreasonable."

Many of the dead were not hard to find. Swollen bodies floated in flooded streets and police advised passersby to steer clear.

While people began to go back to outlying areas, police said New Orleans itself, the home of jazz and Mardi Gras, should stay out of bounds. The city was flooded when last week's storm burst protective levees.

"We advise people that this city has been destroyed, it has completely been destroyed," said Deputy Police Chief Warren Riley.

In suburban Jefferson Parish, stunned residents got their first glimpse of the damage wrought by Katrina when it struck Louisiana with 140 mile per hour winds and a massive storm surge.

They were greeted by a panorama of toppled trees and street signs, and spacious middle-class homes that had been flooded with several feet of water.

"I try to be upbeat but it's devastating. I may lose my house because I may not be able to make my payments, and I don't know when I'm going to work again," said Mark Becker, 48, at his Metairie home.

Storm winds had ripped two holes in his roof and caused the ceiling to collapse in a bedroom and kitchen.

Others said the damage could have been worse. They said their homes were mostly intact and salvageable.

Many of those going back brought guns or friends or both for protection in case they encountered looters.

The Jefferson Parish government urged its residents not to stay in their homes, but to gather items they needed and leave by nightfall because power and water had not been restored.

 

BUSH UNDER FIRE

Bush, who has faced fierce criticism for the slow relief response, visited dozens of Katrina victims being cared for at a prayer center in Baton Rouge and promised the country would "do what it takes" to help people get back on their feet.

It was the second trip to the ravaged region in less than a week for Bush, already suffering from the lowest public approval ratings of his presidency, largely because of the war in Iraq. He had already acknowledged the initial relief effort was "unacceptable."

Bush said he wanted to "let the good people of this region know there's a lot of work to be done."

"We can help save lives once a person finds a shelter such as this," he said. "The response of this country has been amazing."

But the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in an open letter, called upon Bush to fire every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"We're angry, Mr. President," the newspaper said.

Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush, traveled to Houston with fellow former president, Bill Clinton, to establish a fund for disaster victims. The Wal-Mart retail chain and Walton Family Foundation gave $23 million.

The official death toll in Louisiana stood at 59, but the state government said that was just known dead and the number would grow, perhaps into the thousands. Well over 100 deaths have been confirmed in neighboring Mississippi.

While many of the dead were out in the open, officials said most were likely buried under piles of rubble or hidden in attics where they took refuge from rising waters.

Police and military troops were regaining control of the city after days of murder, rape and looting that horrified America and the world.

On Sunday, police shot and killed two people in a shootout on a bridge in eastern New Orleans, Deputy Police Chief Riley said on Monday. Police initially said they had killed four people in the incident.

 

POLICE OFFICERS UNACCOUNTED FOR

About 600 of New Orleans' 1,641 police officers are themselves unaccounted for, according to Riley, who said they had faced the same problems as other residents when the storm hit, losing homes and scrambling to help relatives.

Temporary morgues were being set up around the region to store bodies.

But lights were going on in some neighborhoods of the stricken city as the local power company began restoring electricity.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it was making progress in repairing levees and could begin pumping water out on Monday. Still, draining the entire city could take 80 days or more.

At least 240,000 refugees had flooded into neighboring Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry said the state could handle no more and requested that those still pouring in be airlifted to other states.

Not all New Orleans residents wanted out. "They'll have to drag me out by my feet," said Mike Reed, 49, as he swept debris from the streets of the city's historic French Quarter, which experienced light flooding compared with other neighborhoods.

At least two French Quarter bars -- Molly's and Johnny White's -- have been serving customers in the week since the storm. "That's our job. That's just what we do," said Molly's owner, Jim Monaghan.

    Katrina survivors visit wrecked homes, R, 5.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T190211Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina's wrath spares some,

not all the affluent

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
3:03 PM ET
Reuters
By Paul Simao

 

METAIRIE, Louisiana (Reuters) - While the poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans suffered the most visible destruction from Hurricane Katrina, even affluent suburbs did not escape the wrath of the storm.

Metairie, about 10 miles east of New Orleans on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, has a predominantly white, middle and upper crust population living in spacious, comfortable homes.

While parts of the suburb escaped major damage, other areas of Metairie remained under three to four feet of flood waters on Monday. Some residents said they expected their homes to be a complete loss.

Authorities were letting residents back into their homes throughout suburban Jefferson Parish to survey the damage, and Ronald Jackson, 33, was paddling a small boat down his flooded street to check on his house for the first time since the evacuation order on August 28.

The smell from the floodwaters was rank and overpowering and Jackson, in boots up to his knees, was dreading what he would find. "It's probably a total write-off because of the water damage," he said.

Where the flood waters had receded, residents cleaned refrigerators and buried the contents outside on the direction of authorities who didn't want rotting food on the streets.

David Johnson, 43, digging in his swampy back yard, had a plastic garbage bag full of chicken, vegetables, fruit and other food. "Everything is rotting. The smell is horrible. I've got to get rid of it," Johnson said.

He said he had seen dogs foraging in the neighborhood, one reason to quickly bury anything that might attract them.

The sun had come out and some parts of town were drying out. Police and the national guards were patrolling the main thoroughfares. A dusk to dawn curfew was in effect.

"We boated across the lake to get here," said Glenn LeBlanc, 51, because of heavy traffic on roads into the suburb. His son Vincent carried a shotgun, just in case.

Michael Huffey was working on his house, ripping out carpets and surveying the damage. His pool was filled with waste water and debris.

"We were expecting far worse, but we are the lucky ones," he said while surveying water marks up the side of the building, now on swampy ground.

Trees and street signs were down everywhere and some roofs had been damaged by high winds, but most structures in the area appeared intact.

Huffey said authorities had told him he was free to stay but with no power or running water and an overpowering smell of mold he was inclined to leave after collecting essentials and cleaning up what he could.

    Katrina's wrath spares some, not all the affluent, R, 5.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T190354Z_01_ROB561824_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-SUBURB-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Clinton, Bush

launch new fund

to help flood refugees

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
12:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Former U.S. presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton established a new fund on Monday to assist the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina's destructive impact on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

"Recovery is going to take years. We need to help these Gulf Coast communities and, of course, the great city of New Orleans get back on their feet," Bush said at a news conference with Clinton. "The job is too big, too overwhelming for any one group."

The floods that followed Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and other coastal areas, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees to Texas and many other states.

"Nothing we do can be an adequate response to the agony that we have seen, the suffering of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama," Clinton said before visiting the Astrodome complex in Houston that houses thousands of mostly poor and black New Orleans refugees.

Texas officials say they were accommodating 139,000 in public shelters across the state, with another 100,000 or so evacuees staying in hotels. These numbers exclude those in shelters run by the Red Cross, churches and others groups, and those in private homes.

The Red Cross says it had mobilized its largest response to a single event in its history and was housing more than 135,000 in 12 mostly southern states, although some people were relocated as far away as Utah.

Clinton and Bush, the current president's father, said the fund, which set up a Web site at www.bushclintonkatrinafund.com, would benefit disaster relief efforts for Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. The governors there will decide how best to use it, Bush said.

 

LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS

Although refuges are receiving shelter and food, officials are realizing a long-term solution is required to house them, educate children and provide jobs.

"One of things we have to ask is, what could we do to give incentives for people to get jobs where they have to relocate; a lot of these people will be out of their homes a year or more," Clinton said.

Also in Houston, Clinton's wife Hillary, a U.S. senator from New York, said Congress would take up the issue of long-term financial help, but said it was too soon to say if tax increases would be an appropriate response.

Bush, a Republican, and Clinton, a Democrat who defeated him in 1992, worked together earlier this year to help raise money for victims of last December's Asian tsunami. They are joining together anew at the request of President George W. Bush.

"We get along pretty well, surprising the heck out of a lot of people, but we do," Bush said.

Asked about widespread criticism of his son's slow response to the crisis, he said: "What do I think as a father? I don't like it ... (but) it goes with the territory."

Bush said the Wal-Mart retail chain and the Walton Family Foundation had already given $23 million to the new fund.

Among others who have contributed to the new fund are Microsoft, Nike and Entergy Corp.

    Clinton, Bush launch new fund to help flood refugees, R, 5.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T163132Z_01_ROB559427_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-FUND-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina seen hurting 2005 growth

 

Mon Sep 5, 2005
9:43 AM ET
Reuters
By Matt Falloon

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the U.S. Gulf Coast will hit the world's biggest economy harder than any previous storm, analysts say, but the blow to growth could be more than offset later by the boost from reconstruction.

Katrina's destructive journey across the southern United States last week wrecked New Orleans, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and may have killed thousands.

Damage is estimated at $25 billion and disruption to U.S. refineries pushed oil prices to record highs above $70 a barrel.

"We expect Hurricane Katrina to have a much larger effect on the U.S. economy than its predecessors," Goldman Sachs said in a research note, predicting negative hits to real gross domestic product in the third and fourth quarters this year of between 0.5 and one percentage point.

But the reconstruction effort could help later to reverse those growth losses, the bank said.

"Growth rates for the first two to three quarters (of 2006) could be boosted by one percentage point or more."

Barclays Stockbrokers say the impact of soaring oil prices -- which many believe will hurt economic growth -- should be canceled out when the rebuilding begins.

"The estimated $35 billion drag on the U.S. economy from high oil prices should be more than met by the reconstruction programme worth as much as $50 billion," Barclays said in a research note.

 

OIL SHOCK

Shares in construction firms with exposure to the U.S. market and oil majors have gained as investors bet on increased revenues in the wake of Katrina.

But the hurricane-driven surge in the cost of oil could mean high oil prices are finally felt at the bottom line, Barclays added.

Many companies have so far managed to absorb higher input costs resulting from soaring fuel prices.

"As we enter the last month of the quarter, there is the fear that the market will have to cope with some profits disappointments," it said.

Barclays predicts oil prices could fall back to $55 a barrel having peaked at $70, but other analysts argue oil prices will hold near current levels -- leading to further concerns about inflation and consumer spending.

"Oil has been going up for some time, and crude is not near $70 a barrel just because of Katrina," Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein's investment grade credit research team said in a note. "We believe ... oil prices will remain high and volatile."

And as Katrina influences economic growth, the cost of fuel and company profits, the hurricane could also influence U.S. monetary policy, Goldman Sachs said.

"Hurricane Katrina has just handed them (the U.S. Federal Reserve) a big piece of new data -- namely, that conditions affecting the near-term outlook are suddenly much more uncertain than they were just a few days ago," Goldman Sachs said in a note.

"Given this new piece of information, why continue to tighten if it is not clear this is the appropriate move?"

The Fed, which meets on September 20, has raised rates 10 times to 3.5 percent from one percent since June last year.

    Katrina seen hurting 2005 growth, R, 5.9.2005,
    http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T134413Z_01_BAU549349_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ECONOMY-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans

Begins a Search for Its Dead;

Toll Remains Unclear

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

 

Troops patrolled the streets, rescuers hunted for stragglers and New Orleans looked like a wrecked ghost town yesterday as the evacuation of the city neared completion and the authorities turned to the grim task of collecting bodies in a ghastly landscape awash in numberless corpses.

In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.

The larger picture of death was just as murky. No one could say how many had died in the hurricane or were waiting to be rescued after the city's levees burst. One morgue at the St. Gabriel Prison near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. Hundreds were missing in nearby Chalmette. In Baton Rouge, state officials said the official Louisiana death toll stood at 59, but most said that thousands was a more realistic figure. More than 125 were known dead in Mississippi.

Seven days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans known as America's vibrant capital of jazz and gala Mardi Gras celebrations was gone. In its place was a partly submerged city of abandoned homes and ruined businesses, of bodies in attics or floating in deserted streets, of misery that had driven most of its nearly 500,000 residents into a diaspora of biblical proportions.

As the effects of the crisis spread across the nation, 20 states have opened their shelters, homes and schools to the refugees. But moving the population of New Orleans to other parts of the country has created overcrowding and strains. In Texas, where nearly half the refugees are jamming stadiums, civic centers and hotels, Gov. Rick Perry said the state's capacity was almost exhausted. Thousands of people were also arriving at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. In Baton Rouge, at two locations, hundreds of people, many carrying umbrellas to protect them from the scorching heat, were lined up for hours waiting public assistance. And there were no quick solutions. Making New Orleans habitable again was expected to take many months, even a year.

Meanwhile, there were holdouts in the city, unknown numbers of people who refused to go. They were being urged to leave for their own safety. Officials warned of an impossible future in a destroyed city without food, water, power or other necessities, only the specter of cholera, typhoid or mosquitoes carrying malaria or the West Nile virus.

As helicopter and boat crews searched flooded neighborhoods for survivors yesterday and officials focused for the first time on finding, collecting and counting the dead, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, warned that Americans must brace for some gruesome sights in the days ahead.

"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Mr. Chertoff said on the "Fox News Sunday" television program. "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Stung by critics who say that its sluggish response compounded the suffering and cost lives, the Bush administration rolled out a public relations offensive yesterday. Mr. Chertoff made the rounds of Sunday television talk shows to give status reports and defend the government's response.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to the stricken states yesterday to assess the damage and pledge relief, and President Bush planned another visit to Louisiana and Mississippi today. He flew over the area on Wednesday as he returned to Washington from an extended vacation at his Texas ranch, and made an inspection tour on Friday.

The administration's problems in the crisis seemed to crystallize in a dramatic appearance on the NBC program "Meet the Press" by Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near New Orleans. Sobbing, he told of an emergency management official receiving phone calls from his mother, who, trapped in a nursing home, pleaded day after day for rescue. Assured by federal officials, the man promised her repeatedly that help was on the way.

"Every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' " Mr. Broussard said. "And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.' Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night."

Mr. Broussard angrily denounced the country's leadership. "We have been abandoned by our own country," he said. "It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Congress, returning from a summer recess, is widely expected to undertake investigations into the causes of and reaction to the crisis, and even some Republicans warned that the government's response, widely viewed as slow and ineffectual, could further undermine Mr. Bush's authority at a time when he is lagging in the polls, endangering his Congressional agenda.

In New Orleans, thousands of National Guard and active duty troops as well as federal marshals finally appeared to be in control of streets where looters and hooligans had run wild for days last week, unchecked by overwhelmed police officers who were focused on saving lives, not property, in the chaotic city. Fires had burned unchecked by overwhelmed firefighters.

The crisis put enormous pressure on many police officers and firefighters, pressure some could not withstand. P. Edwin Compass III, the New Orleans police superintendent, said on Saturday that 200 of the 1,500 members of his force had walked off the job and that two others had committed suicide. He said yesterday that the city had offered to send all members of the police and fire departments and their families on vacations to Las Vegas.

"When you go through something this devastating and traumatic, you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process," Mr. Compass said.

The notion of a vacation in the midst of disaster struck some as unusual. But officials likened it to an R&R break for combat troops. Military reinforcements, who arrived in the thousands over the weekend, will take over the search and rescue work temporarily, though New Orleans officials said they would remain in charge.

"We haven't turned over control of the city," said Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans. "We're going to leave a skeleton force - about 20 percent of the department - for leadership and liaison with the troops while we get some rest."

During the buildup of troops in recent days, federal, state and local officials have given often wildly disparate figures for military personnel on the ground or on the way. Mr. Bush on Saturday said there were more than 21,000 National Guard troops in Louisiana and Mississippi and 4,000 active duty forces to assist them. He ordered 7,000 more troops into New Orleans.

Colonel Ebbert put the number in the city at 1,000. Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Michael P. Fleming of the National Guard in Baton Rouge said there were 16,000 guardsmen in Louisiana.

The deployment of the troops, whatever their numbers, the arrival of tons of food and other supplies, and progress in closing the breached levees added to a sense of momentum in the stricken city over the weekend. So did stepped-up evacuation efforts. The Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans convention center, which had become fetid and dangerous refuges for as many as 50,000, were virtually emptied. Hotels, hospitals and other shelters were also evacuated.

Though the number of the dead was still unknown, a few details could be gleaned about the tragedy. Officials said nine bodies came from the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where emergency workers had set up a triage unit. Of a group of 11 bodies from the Superdome, officials said, many were ailing patients on ventilators.

New Orleans remained a city in crisis. There was still no power except that provided by generators, almost nowhere to buy food or water, no reliable transportation or communications systems, no effective firefighting forces. At night, the city was dark except for a few lights dotting office buildings and hotel towers, though spotlights illuminated a big American flag atop one building.

There were thousands of people awaiting flights out at the airport. Officials said 3,000 to 5,000 people had been treated at the unit, and that only 200 remained. The airport director, Roy Williams, said 30 people had died, some of them elderly.

Other problems developed. Even as the city population dwindled, hundreds of new arrivals were reported to be entering from outlying towns, stragglers who had been unable to escape from their hometowns in the past week and who believed their surest way out could be found with the buses, trains and planes evacuating New Orleans.

There was no way to tell how many New Orleans residents remained in the city. Many were believed hiding in homes or apartments. Rescue teams in helicopters searched flooded neighborhoods and went out in boats and on foot to press a house-to-house search for holdouts yesterday. One helicopter crashed, but no one was injured. Many residents were found and evacuated, but what Mr. Chertoff called a significant number refused to go.

"That is not a reasonable alternative," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean the city."

People like Frank Asevado III, a 37-year-old mechanic, and Travis Latapie, 44, a shrimp fisherman, both from St. Bernard Parish, east of New Orleans, complained bitterly in interviews of being abandoned by the government after the waters engulfed their community. They told of using their boats for several days to save 300 friends and neighbors, plucking them from floodwaters and the roofs of homes and cars.

"We never see no Coast Guard, no nothing," Mr. Latapie said.

Mr. Asevado added, "The government didn't do jack."

Aid from around the country continued to move toward the stricken region. New York City, which dispatched 100 city buses and 172 police officers to New Orleans on Saturday, decided yesterday to send 150 more officers and 300 firefighters today. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg noted that Louisiana had been among the many states that helped New York after Sept. 11.

"We understand that we have an obligation, and we're happy to do it," the mayor said.

In the midst of misery in New Orleans, there were lingering signs of a fading vivacity. About two dozen people gathered in the French Quarter for an annual Labor Day gay celebration, the Decadence Parade. Matt Menold, 23, a street musician wearing a sombrero and a guitar, explained: "It's New Orleans, man. We're going to celebrate."

But the tragedy of New Orleans was more vividly represented in the Garden District, a business area dotted with antique shops. At the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, a woman's body had been on the sidewalk since Wednesday. People had covered her with blankets and plastic, and by yesterday a small wall of bricks had been erected around the corpse to hold down a tarpaulin to cloak her.

On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and an epitaph: "Here lies Vera. God help us."

 

Reporting for this article was contributed by Jeremy Alford, Sewell Chan and Michael Luo from Baton Rouge, La., and John DeSantis, Christopher Drew and Joseph B. Treaster from New Orleans.

New Orleans Begins a Search for Its Dead; Toll Remains Unclear, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Pierce helped direct a boat yesterday

down a flooded New Orleans street to a banquet hall

where several people awaited rescue.

Some in the city refused to leave their homes

 

Photograph: Lori Waselchuk

for The New York Times

 

Rescuers, Going Door to Door, Find Stubbornness and Silence

NYT        5.9.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05scene.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rescuers, Going Door to Door,

Find Stubbornness and Silence

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By JERE LONGMAN

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - The boat pulled up to the living room window on Read Boulevard early Sunday afternoon, and a volunteer rescuer, Stanley Patrick, began yelling: "Mr. Robert! Mr. Robert! Can you hear me?"

There was no sound in response, only the lapping of water in this reeking New Orleans East neighborhood, where the rooftops of cars were still covered nearly a week after a levee broke and the city was inundated.

Mr. Patrick grabbed a sledgehammer, broke through the window of the tidy brick house and sloshed down a hallway into a back bedroom. It seemed unlikely that he would encounter anyone alive in this toxic water, in this fetid heat.

He found what he expected to find, an 83-year-old man, floating face down in stagnant water that had risen three and a half feet into the home. A Louisiana state trooper asked that the man not be identified in full because his family had not yet been notified.

Rescuers were told there might be a woman in the house, too.

"I didn't see her, but if he's dead, she's dead," Mr. Patrick said. "If he didn't leave, she didn't leave."

As rescue operations went on, the frustrations of the police and volunteers continued to mount Sunday, as a growing number of those who had stayed in their homes seemed to be dead, and many of those who remained alive refused to leave.

But Col. Terry Ebbert, director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, said Sunday that he expected that nearly everyone would be removed from the city by Tuesday, as rescuers made block-by-block searches. He said he thought there were fewer than 1,000 residents left in the city. "We're going to remove them," he said.

"People don't want to come out," said Capt. Tim Bayard, commander of the narcotics division of the New Orleans Police Department, who is supervising the water rescue effort. "They say they have enough water and food to sustain themselves. They don't understand. It's going to take six to eight weeks before the electricity comes on."

The water has receded only about a foot in many places, he said, adding that it was still 20 feet deep in spots. "They need to come out," Captain Bayard said. But some residents fear that if they leave, their houses will be ransacked by looters, he said.

"They've already lost their cars," he said. "All they have left is their house. They don't want those animals stealing from them. Write that, animals. Anybody that would take advantage of this is hardly better than animals. Not the people who are taking food and water and clothing. Those stealing TV's and shooting at police. What can you do with a TV? There's no electricity."

Police have said that early rescue efforts were hampered when they encountered gunfire. It was also difficult to get enough of boats in the water because of bureaucratic foul-ups, Captain Bayard said. One day, as many as 300 boats were in the water, he said, but he could have used 1,000.

"There was a breakdown in communication and coordination, and some people wanting to be lone stars and not cooperate," he said, declining to lay blame but saying federal officials were not at fault. "We have the boats now. Unfortunately, people don't want to utilize them."

More than 10,000 people have been evacuated by boat, Captain Bayard said.

Captain Bayard said he was reluctant to force anyone to leave against their will. If a boat capsized in a struggle, police officers and evacuees could drown or be subjected to disease, he said. But if ordered to remove residents, he would do so, he said.

A volunteer rescuer, Morgan Lopez, said he and colleagues had all but forced four people from a home at Dwyer and Bundy Roads on Sunday, where a sea of raw sewage had reached the steps of the house. A woman, an 8-year-old child and the child's grandparents finally agreed to leave, Mr. Lopez said.

"We acted like we were cops," Mr. Lopez said. "We were not letting them stay in that stuff. They had a lot of new clothes. Maybe they were trying to protect that."

Mr. Lopez was one of about 40 workers from R&R Construction in Lake Charles, La., who volunteered their time in boats usually used for bass fishing.

Two other R&R workers, Mr. Patrick and Scott Lovett, were dispatched to Read Boulevard to look for what they thought was an older couple. A shotgun rested in the boat next to Mr. Lovett, who said shots had been fired near him on occasion during the past week.

"I don't feel like I'm in the U.S.," Mr. Lovett, 22, said. "I feel like I'm in a war. All the guns, the chaos."

Mr. Patrick, 44, an ironworker, said he had also rescued victims after Hurricane Andrew hit Louisiana in 1992.

The man on Read Boulevard may have tried to get into his attic and cut his way through the roof, but was perhaps too feeble or retreated in heat that would have topped 100 degrees, Mr. Patrick theorized, noting a ladder that led to the attic.

The house appeared to be on a slight incline, and perhaps the man thought he was safe, Mr. Patrick said.

"It's tragic," Mr. Patrick said. "The water rose in one night. These people probably didn't know. There's a lot more dead right here. I can smell it."

He predicted that the death toll would be "astronomical."

In coming days, the boat searches will shift from primarily a rescue mission to a recovery mission, once a sufficient morgue can be established, Captain Bayard said. Still, he said, the police, volunteers and the Army would continue to look for survivors, and military trucks would patrol the streets in case those who had insisted to remain changed their minds - perhaps, he said, once they ran out of food or could no longer stand the smell of decay.

"It's frustrating because they don't want to help themselves," Captain Bayard said. "But if they are going to come out, we're going to be there to pick them up. We're not going to turn our backs on them."

Rescuers, Going Door to Door, Find Stubbornness and Silence, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05scene.html

 

 

 

 

 


Medical Team From Georgia,

Trying to Provide Help,

Hits Roadblocks Along the Way

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By GARDINER HARRIS

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - Dr. Jeffrey Orledge and his medical team provided care in New York City after the 2001 terrorist attacks and in Florida last year after Hurricane Ivan. None of that prepared them for the bedlam of the past week, he said on Sunday.

Dispatched to Alabama from its home base in Augusta, Ga., on Aug. 28 in preparation for the hurricane, the team drove from place to place in Mississippi and Louisiana. Each time, it found it had nothing to do or could not provide assistance.

Finally, early on Thursday, the team decided to go to the New Orleans International Airport, where it saw thousands of patients, some of them near death.

The odyssey of Dr. Orledge demonstrates the difficulties federal officials confronted as they tried to cope with what may turn out to be the worst disaster in United States history.

His team, the Georgia 4 Disaster Medical Assistance Team, was one of many "assets" that federal officials "pre-positioned" before the storm hit. But for Dr. Orledge, this early planning was squandered by poor coordination and communication and nonexistent security support.

Dr. Orledge is an emergency room physician and an assistant professor at the Medical College of Georgia. His team includes two nurses and two paramedics.

The team was told on Saturday, Aug. 27, that it would be deployed. The next day, it flew to Atlanta, rented a Chevrolet Suburban and drove to a Federal Emergency Management Agency facility in Anniston, Ala., where it sat out the storm.

At midnight on Monday, federal officials told the team to go to Kenner, La., a small town near the airport, where it would help operate a triage center.

"We arrive. Utter chaos. And the triage center that we were supposed to support didn't exist," Dr. Orledge said.

The team's local contact was Kenner's mayor, Dr. Orledge said. The mayor thought that Dr. Orledge was there to coordinate the money, supplies and other assistance that the mayor assumed federal officials would soon be sending, Dr. Orledge said.

Dr. Orledge told the mayor that his team knew nothing of such things. Eventually, the mayor led the team to a school gymnasium where nearly 100 people had gathered.

"As soon as I started asking medical questions, we were surrounded," Dr. Orledge said.

There was no security. Dr. Orledge felt that his team was not safe, and he insisted that they leave. They were escorted to a nearby hotel "where we were immediately surrounded by about 100 drunk people," Dr. Orledge said.

"So I say, 'All right, we're not staying here,'" Dr. Orledge said. They got back into their cars and drove to city hall, where they spent the night.

The next day, town officials directed the team to Kenner Regional Medical Center.

"The hospital's got no air conditioning, no water or sewer and very few medical supplies, and they've got 200 patients," Dr. Orledge said.

Dr. Orledge said that his team could provide little assistance in such a case, so town officials directed them to a nearby nursing home.

"This time there were 250 patients, no air conditioning, no water, no sewer and a generator that was going to die in four hours," Dr. Orledge said. "We couldn't do anything there either."

The team's satellite and cellphones had not been working. Finally, though, they were able to reach federal emergency officials, who told them to go to Camp Shelby near Hattiesburg, Miss.

The trip to Hattiesburg took nearly five hours over roads made nearly impassable by downed trees and power lines.

"Just as soon as we get there our phone rings and they tell us to turn around and go to Baton Rouge," Dr. Orledge said.

Their vehicles were nearly out of gas. They flagged down a local police officer, who found them a supply. They drove back the way they came, passed Kenner and arrived in Baton Rouge, La., late Wednesday night.

Federal emergency officials told the team that they were urgently needed to help support an urban search and rescue team, or USAR. They were given 30 minutes to prepare for departure. Their destination? City Hall in Kenner, La.

"We told them that we'd just been there and that there's nothing there, but they insist that there's a mission," Dr. Orledge said.

The team got back into its vehicles and drove to Kenner's City Hall.

"I ask the mayor where the USAR team is, and he says, 'What's that?'" Dr. Orledge said.

By then, people were openly looting in Kenner, Dr. Orledge said.

Because of logistical difficulties, Kenner's mayor could not be reached on Sunday.

On Wednesday, the team heard a rumor that some military units had occupied the New Orleans airport. They decided to drive to the airport and, when they arrived, slept in their vehicles.

The next morning was Thursday. The Georgia team joined a triage operation to assess the health status of thousands.

Donald R. Jacks, a federal emergency spokesman, estimated that more than 40,000 evacuees came through the airport on Friday and Saturday. The worst cases were brought in late Thursday and Friday when area hospitals were evacuated.

Some patients arrived with full medical charts, Dr. Orledge said. Some were near death. Stretchers with very ill patients filled the airport's baggage claim area. Most were taken out in special planes.

Dr. Orledge's team worked for more than 12 hours on Thursday, 18 hours on Friday and 14 hours on Saturday. By then, they had been asked to help relatively healthy evacuees just before they were boarded onto planes.

Among the patients was Ronald Morgan, 51, of New Orleans. Mr. Morgan had a deep gash on his left wrist. He said he got it from punching out a window to escape the second floor of his house as the water rose to the roof. Theresa Cannon, 47, his wife, said they barely escaped in time.

After he had been living on the street for nearly a week, Mr. Morgan's wound had begun to fester. Dr. Orledge dressed the wound, gave Mr. Morgan some antibiotics and told him to seek medical attention as soon as he arrived in San Antonio, where evacuees were told they were being flown.

As he was giving instructions, Ms. Cannon said her foot had been bothering her. She took off her shoe, and she, too, had an infected wound, which she said she had gotten from a nail on the roof. Dr. Orledge prescribed a different antibiotic to ensure that they did not share pills.

A few minutes later, Harold Veasey, 66, hobbled into the medical area. He removed his shoes. His feet were covered in sores, a result of walking in wet socks and shoes for five days.

Dr. Orledge prescribed more antibiotics and told Mr. Veasey to sit for 30 minutes with his feet bare. But he soon suggested that Mr. Veasey board an airplane, his prescription for everyone he saw.

He said that he hoped that better medical care - as well as a better life - awaited his patients elsewhere.

Medical Team From Georgia, Trying to Provide Help, Hits Roadblocks Along the Way, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05medical.html

 

 

 

 

 


After Failures,

Officials Play Blame Game

 

September 5, 2005
Reuters
By SCOTT SHANE

 

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Eric Lipton and Christopher Drew and written by Mr. Shane.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - As the Bush administration tried to show a more forceful effort to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, government officials on Sunday escalated their criticism and sniping over who was to blame for the problems plaguing the initial response.

While rescuers were still trying to reach people stranded by the floods, perhaps the only consensus among local, state and federal officials was that the system had failed.

Some federal officials said uncertainty over who was in charge had contributed to delays in providing aid and imposing order, and officials in Louisiana complained that Washington disaster officials had blocked some aid efforts.

Local and state resources were so weakened, said Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, that in the future federal authorities need to take "more of an upfront role earlier on, when we have these truly ultracatastrophes."

But furious state and local officials insisted that the real problem was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Mr. Chertoff's department oversees, failed to deliver urgently needed help and, through incomprehensible red tape, even thwarted others' efforts to help.

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water," said Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. "They wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans expressed similar frustrations. "We're still fighting over authority," he told reporters on Saturday. "A bunch of people are the boss. The state and federal government are doing a two-step dance."

In one of several such appeals, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, called on President Bush on Sunday to appoint an independent national commission to examine the relief effort. She also said that she intends to introduce legislation to remove FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security and restore its previous status as an independent agency with cabinet-level status.

Mr. Chertoff tried to deflect the criticism of his department and FEMA by saying there would be time later to decide what went wrong.

"Whatever the criticisms and the after-action report may be about what was right and what was wrong looking back, what would be a horrible tragedy would be to distract ourselves from avoiding further problems because we're spending time talking about problems that have already occurred," he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

But local officials, who still feel overwhelmed by the continuing tragedy, demanded accountability and as well as action.

"Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired?" asked Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans.

Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority and made things worse, Mr. Broussard complained on "Meet the Press."

When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, he said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said.

One sign of the continuing battle over who was in charge was Governor Blanco's refusal to sign an agreement proposed by the White House to share control of National Guard forces with the federal authorities.

Under the White House plan, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré would oversee both the National Guard and the active duty federal troops, reporting jointly to the president and Ms. Blanco.

"She would lose control when she had been in control from the very beginning," said Ms. Bottcher, the governor's press secretary.

Ms. Bottcher was one of several officials yesterday who said she believed FEMA had interfered with the delivery of aid, including offers from the mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, and the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.

Adam Sharp, a spokesman for Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said the problem was not who was in command. FEMA repeatedly held up assistance that could have been critical, he said.

"FEMA has just been very slow to make these decisions," Mr. Sharp said.

In a clear slap at Mr. Chertoff and the FEMA director, Michael D. Brown, Governor Blanco announced Saturday that she had hired James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA during the Clinton administration, to advise her on the recovery.

Nearly every emergency worker told agonizing stories of communications failures, some of them most likely fatal to victims. Police officers called Senator Landrieu's Washington office because they could not reach commanders on the ground in New Orleans, Mr. Sharp said.

Dr. Ross Judice, chief medical officer for a large ambulance company, recounted how on Tuesday, unable to find out when helicopters would land to pick up critically ill patients at the Superdome, he walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been waiting in the parking lot.

Louisiana and New Orleans have received a total of about $750 million in federal emergency and terrorism preparedness grants in the last four years, Homeland Security Department officials said.

Mr. Chertoff said he recognized that the local government's capacity to respond to the disaster was severely compromised by the hurricane and flood.

"What happened here was that essentially, the demolishment of that state and local infrastructure, and I think that really caused the cascading series of breakdowns," he said.

But Mayor Nagin said the root of the breakdown was the failure of the federal government to deliver relief supplies and personnel quickly.

"They kept promising and saying things would happen," he said. "I was getting excited and telling people that. They kept making promises and promises."

Scott Shane and Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Christopher Drew from New Orleans. Jeremy Alford contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., and Gardiner Harris from Lafayette, La.

    After Failures, Officials Play Blame Game, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05blame.html

 

 

 

 

 

White House

Enacts a Plan

to Ease Political Damage

 

September 5, 2005
Reuters
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and ANNE E. KORNBLUT

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - Under the command of President Bush's two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.

It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.

The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.

As a result, Americans watching television coverage of the disaster this weekend began to see, amid the destruction and suffering, some of the most prominent members of the administration - Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense; and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state - touring storm-damaged communities.

Mr. Bush is to return to Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday; his first visit, on Friday, left some Republicans cringing, in part because the president had little contact with residents left homeless.

Republicans said the administration's effort to stanch the damage had been helped by the fact that convoys of troops and supplies had begun to arrive by the time the administration officials turned up. All of those developments were covered closely on television.

In many ways, the unfolding public relations campaign reflects the style Mr. Rove has brought to the political campaigns he has run for Mr. Bush. For example, administration officials who went on television on Sunday were instructed to avoid getting drawn into exchanges about the problems of the past week, and to turn the discussion to what the government is doing now.

"We will have time to go back and do an after-action report, but the time right now is to look at what the enormous tasks ahead are," Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

One Republican with knowledge of the effort said that Mr. Rove had told administration officials not to respond to Democratic attacks on Mr. Bush's handling of the hurricane in the belief that the president was in a weak moment and that the administration should not appear to be seen now as being blatantly political. As with others in the party, this Republican would discuss the deliberations only on condition of anonymity because of keen White House sensitivity about how the administration and its strategy would be perceived.

In a reflection of what has long been a hallmark of Mr. Rove's tough political style, the administration is also working to shift the blame away from the White House and toward officials of New Orleans and Louisiana who, as it happens, are Democrats.

"The way that emergency operations act under the law is the responsibility and the power, the authority, to order an evacuation rests with state and local officials," Mr. Chertoff said in his television interview. "The federal government comes in and supports those officials."

That line of argument was echoed throughout the day, in harsher language, by Republicans reflecting the White House line.

In interviews, these Republicans said that the normally nimble White House political operation had fallen short in part because the president and his aides were scattered outside Washington on vacation, leaving no one obviously in charge at a time of great disruption. Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush were in Texas, while Vice President Dick Cheney was at his Wyoming ranch.

Mr. Bush's communications director, Nicolle Devenish, was married this weekend in Greece, and a number of Mr. Bush's political advisers - including Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman - attended the wedding.

Ms. Rice did not return to Washington until Thursday, after she was spotted at a Broadway show and shopping for shoes, an image that Republicans said buttressed the notion of a White House unconcerned with tragedy.

These officials said that Mr. Bush and his political aides rapidly changed course in what they acknowledged was a belated realization of the situation's political ramifications. As is common when this White House confronts a serious problem, management was quickly taken over by Mr. Rove and a group of associates including Mr. Bartlett. Neither man responded to requests for comment.

White House advisers said that Mr. Bush expressed alarm after his return to Washington from the Gulf Coast.

One senior White House official said that Mr. Bush appeared at a senior staff meeting in the Situation Room on Friday and called the results on the ground "unacceptable." At the encouragement of Mr. Bartlett, officials said, he repeated the comment later in the Rose Garden, the start of this campaign.

    White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05bush.html

 

 

 

 

 


In Tale of Two Families,

a Chasm Between Haves and Have-Nots

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN

 

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 4 - It was moving day for the families of Gaynell Porretto and Tracy Jackson, the first page of the next chapter in their Hurricane Katrina horror stories.

Mrs. Porretto's four-car caravan crammed with a lifetime of photo albums, a few changes of clothes and coolers of drinks pulled up to a yellow house with a wide front porch that she had just rented for $600 in the humble hamlet of Arnaudville, La.

It is 125 miles from her storm-sacked home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, half the size for twice as many people, but she can see the church steeple from the yard, and her son is signed up for football at the nearby high school.

"I have a ZIP code!" she said, exulting. "It's the happiest I've ever been."

Outside the New Orleans airport, Ms. Jackson's four sickly and hungry children, ages 1, 3, 5 and 7, were sprawled on a skycap's cart as she slogged through the sweaty, snail-like line, the baby atop a blue plastic bin filled with what they had scrounged from strangers.

It is all they have, their $2,000 cash savings burned up with their belongings - including birth certificates - in a post-flood fire at their apartment in uptown New Orleans. Even as they waited to board a plane, they did not know where they were taking it.

"I'm just hoping it's a better place," she whispered. "I've never been on an airplane before, I'm afraid of heights."

Two families displaced by the same disaster, both facing uncertain futures as they moved forward on Saturday, but in completely divergent circumstances.

Just as it ripped through levees to send water pouring through New Orleans, the storm cleaved a harsh chasm among the region's refugees, providing a stark portrait of the vast divide between America's haves and have-nots.

The more than 100 members of Mrs. Porretto's extended family have cars that carried them out last Sunday morning, well before the hurricane hit.

Ms. Jackson, who does not know how to drive, escaped on foot only after the floodwaters started filling her apartment on Tuesday, walking first to a bridge, then to the squalid Superdome.

Mrs. Porretto, 51, has an American Express card that covered her $564.26 bill at the Hilton in Lafayette, La., where a cousin who works for AT&T secured a low corporate rate when she booked a block of rooms days before of the storm.

Ms. Jackson, 24, does not have a bank account, and her husband, Jerel Brown, spent their last $25 to buy fish and shrimp from men grilling on the street in the chaos, so now there is nothing in the pockets of his baggy jeans but a crushed pack of Benson & Hedges someone gave him to calm him down.

The Porrettos have cellphones and connections in city government and churches that not only helped them find one of the last available rental properties anywhere around here, but also let them sneak back into their neighborhood early this weekend to grab televisions and furnishings for their new house.

Mr. Brown, in tears, has no recourse but to ask a reporter to look for his missing brother, Wallace, and if he turned up, find out how they could get back in touch.

John Edwards, the former senator whose presidential primary campaign last year was based on the theme that America is a country torn in two by race and class, sent an e-mail to supporters last week, saying that the hurricane's destruction exposed "a harsher example of two Americas."

"Every single resident of New Orleans, regardless of their wealth or status, will have terrible losses and life-altering experiences," Mr. Edwards wrote. But poor people, he added, "suffered the most from Katrina because they always suffer the most."

Mrs. Porretto, a court clerk, and her husband, Joel, a retired police officer, are hardly rich. But as they embark on life in exile, they look like royalty compared with Mr. Brown, Ms. Jackson and their children, wandering to a destination unknown with little more than the clothes they have worn for a week.

"We don't know where we're going, we don't know how we're going to survive when we get there - we're starting all over," Mr. Brown said as he stood in line for three hours in the airport's heat. "I never been out of this city. I'm going to be a stranger."

Nearly one in four of New Orleans' 445,000 residents live in poverty, many of them in neighborhoods like the one where the Jackson-Brown clan huddled in a $350-a-month two-bedroom apartment across from a dilapidated and dangerous housing project; 69 percent of the city is black, and the median household income is $31,369. To the west in Metairie, where Ellen DeGeneres grew up, the median income is $41,265, just below the national average, 87 percent of the 145,000 residents are white, and fewer than 1 in 10 are poor.

But in the hurricane's wake, the poorest have turned desperately destitute, while the well-to-do make do with what they have left.

For the past week, the Porrettos and their many cousins converged at the Hilton, Lafayette's finest hotel, drinking red wine late into the night as they laughed in the lobby. The teenagers put a dollar on a string in front of the elevator, watching guests lunge for it as they yanked it away. The adults stayed up until 2 a.m. daring the dozens of dogs among the evacuated to strut their stuff.

"Every dog that did a trick, we drank a beer," Mrs. Porretto explained.

But some days, she stayed in bed depressed through the afternoon, or burst into tears out of nowhere. Their house has roof damage, and they do not yet know what the water has wrought inside. A Ford Taurus full of prized possessions that her husband parked outside Macy's to ride out the storm has been ravaged. The court where she has worked for 25 years is closed indefinitely. Her sister Kathy Skeins, whose family of four will share the little house along with Mrs. Porretto's 78-year-old mother-in-law, is worried about how her boys, 15 and 11, will fare in public school for the first time, and what will happen to the $3,500 tuition she already paid at the Catholic school back home.

"It hit us Monday that we were homeless," Mrs. Porretto said. "We have meltdowns. You just have nothing to look forward to."

Until they found the shotgun-style house in Arnaudville, a town of 1,400 down a long country road north of Lafayette.

On Saturday, as the two sisters unpacked the storm-survival arsenal they had amassed at the hotel - pounds of ham for sandwiches and a new toaster oven, all manner of snacks and condiments, even a bottle of olives to ease Mrs. Porretto's arthritis - a neighbor stopped by with a box of cleaning supplies.

The landlord, who is lending an air mattress and queen bed, drew a map to the nearby restaurant and movie theater. The women debated whether they need a land line, but agreed cable television was a must, and set out shopping to stock their new shelves.

"We need to make a list, Gay," Mrs. Skeins said. "We need a mop and a broom, so we can keep up the kitchen."

Mrs. Porretto propped a photo collage of her son's first year on a bedroom windowsill, and imagined the morning sun streaming in through the living room. The sisters stocked the refrigerator with bottles of Coors Light they had brought.

"Gotta relax some way," Mrs. Skeins said. "We'll sit on the porch and have a cold beer."

"We've got a porch, Kathy, I can't wait!" Mrs. Porretto said, forgetting the hurricane for a minute. "We grew up with a porch!"

On moving day, Mrs. Porretto wore a clean T-shirt and fresh lipstick. Two hours' drive away at the airport, Ms. Jackson was braless under her soiled shirt and had a blue bandana covering her unwashed hair.

The Skeins' 125-pound Rottweiler, Buster, galloped across the grass in Arnaudville to drink from a spigot, after a week squished in a hotel bathroom; the Jackson children are without their mutt, Max, last seen as their apartment began to burn.

"We heard the dog barking," Ms. Jackson said. "I think he's dead."

Like the Porrettos, Ms. Jackson, Mr. Brown, their children, a nephew and a friend they call Auntie left New Orleans last Sunday morning, to stay with a friend. But they went back on Tuesday, and as the water rose to waist level, they fled with no provisions. After two nights shielding the baby's eyes from dead bodies at the feces-infested Superdome, they set out for the convention center, where rumors of rapes and worse left them taking turns sleeping on the floor in fear for their children's safety.

"Last night I heard a baby screaming, 'Stop, stop, get off me, don't touch me,' " Ms. Jackson recalled.

Their blue plastic bin is filled not with family treasures, but with scraps that other refugees and relief workers have handed out: three rolls of toilet paper, a box of Teddy Grahams, toddlers blue plastic sandals, two apples, a gallon of milk.

Mr. Brown was barefoot until a friend gave him a pair of sneakers that remain unlaced because they are too small; he has no socks. An elderly lady gave Ms. Jackson a quilted handbag to hold diapers and the pink pills the triage nurse gave to 7-year-old Waynenisha, who suffers from febrile seizures.

"It has some perfume and some body spray," she said thankfully. "I'm a lady. I can't walk around smelling like a grown man."

Now, Ms. Jackson is wondering whether she will be able to enroll her children in school without identification - even her own Social Security card is gone. Mr. Brown, who had been making do washing 18-wheelers and running errands for a convenience store, said he will "go there and get a job if they let me," though he is still unsure where there might be.

"We just started life's journey together," he said, gesturing at the little ones on the luggage cart. "As we're building, it just all fell apart at one time."

Standing in the sweltering line, Mr. Brown occasionally lashed out, slapping the leg of a child on the move or barking at others in line for pushing. When an older woman passed out on the curb, he pushed through the crowd to pour water down her head and back. "Where's the help?" he called out. "We need help! Give her some air, please."

A few minutes later, the Rev. Jesse Jackson turned up with three buses. The Jackson-Browns leaped out of line to rush aboard with their blue plastic bin and grabbed the last row in the air-conditioned coach, leaving the skycap's cart behind.

    In Tale of Two Families, a Chasm Between Haves and Have-Nots, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05moving.html

 

 

 

 

 


City to Offer

Free Trips to Las Vegas for Officers

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
and CHRISTOPHER DREW

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - A day after two police suicides and the abrupt resignations or desertions of up to 200 police officers, defiant city officials on Sunday began offering five-day vacations - and even trips to Las Vegas - to the police, firefighters and city emergency workers and their families.

The idea of paid vacations was raised by both Mayor C. Ray Nagin and senior police officials who said that their forces were exhausted and traumatized and that the arrival of the National Guard had made way for the officers to be relieved.

"I'm very concerned about individuals who have been here, particularly since the first few days, and have been through a lot of hardship," Mr. Nagin said in an interview.

He said most of the police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers "are starting to show signs of very, very serious stress, and this is a way to give them time to reunite with their families."

Mr. Nagin, who has been demanding more federal assistance for days as his city struggled with despair, death and flooding, said he had asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for the trips but the agency said it could not. He said the city, therefore, would pay the costs.

He said he believed there were now enough National Guard members in the city to allow the police to take a break and still keep the city secure, and he brushed off questions about whether such a trip might look like a dereliction of duty.

"I'll take the heat on that," Mr. Nagin said. "We want to cater to them."

His words were seconded by the police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, in a separate interview. "When you go through something this devastating and traumatic," Mr. Compass said, "you've got to do something dramatic to jump-start the healing process."

The officials were planning to send 1,500 workers out in two shifts for five days each. They are sending them to Las Vegas because of the availability of hotel rooms and to Atlanta because many of them had relatives there.

They said that they were trying to get the first officers on their way on Monday and that the first stop would be Baton Rouge, about 75 miles from here.

There the officers will be given physical examinations and inoculations against possible infection from the polluted floodwaters, said Col. Terry Ebbert, the director of homeland security for the city, who has authority over the police and fire departments and other emergency services.

Then, Colonel Ebbert and other officials said, those who want to go to Las Vegas or Atlanta will be given air transportation and a hotel room. The city is reserving hotel rooms in Baton Rouge, they said, adding that the officers and firefighters may also be given the choice of flying to other cities.

Colonel Ebbert, the senior official running the recovery and rescue operation, and Mr. Compass both said that they planned to take a break as well, but probably for less than five days, and that they would continue to direct the recovery by telephone.

Officials said they expected the military, with much greater resources, to expand rescue work, begin cleaning up the city and take the first steps toward reconstruction.

W. J. Riley, the deputy superintendent of police, said that by late Sunday afternoon more than 2,900 National Guard members and law enforcement officers from around the country were operating in New Orleans. By early evening, Mr. Riley said, the advance units of a 2,200-person force from the 82nd Airborne Division had landed.

Several thousand more soldiers were expected, including members of the First Cavalry Division.

Reinforcements are also expected for the fire department. Senior firefighters, who have been forced to ignore some fires and to try merely to keep the worst blazes from spreading, said that several hundred firefighters with fire engines and radio equipment were heading for New Orleans from departments around the country.

New Orleans officials said they would remain in charge. Mr. Riley, who has been on the police force for 24 years, will oversee the police department in the superintendent's absence.

"We haven't turned over control of the city," Colonel Ebbert said.

Mr. Riley said that 40 percent of the city's force of about 1,200 officers would remain at their posts while the others were on leave. When the first group returns, Mr. Riley said, those who stayed behind will get a break.

Deputy Fire Chief Joseph Matthews, who is also the director of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness, said officials viewed the time off for their security forces as essential. "We've been at this six days and we need to give our people a break," he said.

    City to Offer Free Trips to Las Vegas for Officers, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/nationalspecial/05vegas.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hurricane Forces New Orleans Newspaper

to Face a Daunting Set of Obstacles

NYT        5.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/media/05picayune.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hurricane Forces

New Orleans Newspaper

to Face a Daunting Set

of Obstacles

 

September 5, 2005
The New York Times
By LISA GUERNSEY

 

Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune, faced an ugly decision on Tuesday morning. About 240 employees and some members of their families, including one 6-month-old baby, had spent the night in the corridors of the newspaper building at 3800 Howard Avenue in New Orleans, just over a mile northwest of the Superdome.

They seemed to have survived the hurricane: the building was still standing, though a full sheet of glass from one window had been blown out of its casing, slicing through the general manager's office.

Outside, however, the parking lot was submerged and water was rising up the steps to the entrance. And there were reports of a jail break nearby. As the water crept up another riser, he made his decision. "We needed to leave while the leaving was possible," he said.

What followed was an odyssey for Times-Picayune workers as they looked for a new home outside New Orleans while managing to publish their paper - initially online and eventually in print.

The paper, which normally has a circulation of 270,000, had to report the biggest story in its history with no electricity, no phone access and no place to work.

With its readers scattered across the South, the paper turned its affiliated Web site, www .nola .com, into a release valve for the accumulating tales of misery from the city, providing news, crucial information and a missing persons forum that now contains more than 17,000 posts.

The pilgrimage has already joined the lore of The Times-Picayune, which has served New Orleans since 1837 and whose history includes the writers William Faulkner and William Sidney Porter, better known by his pen name, O. Henry.

Other newspapers in the hurricane zone also struggled to publish. The Mississippi Press, in Pascagoula, took refuge in The Mobile Register's offices in Alabama, and used its presses. The Sun Herald, in Gulfport, Miss., managed to print a paper each day last week with the help of The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia.

But The Times-Picayune became an example of a private business in New Orleans that was able to function, even thrive, through the disaster. At the same time, employees there were coping with the loss of their homes and relocation of their families, just like their neighbors.

And they struggled with their own deepest fears: for five days, the wife and son of a photo technician were missing (they were found on Saturday at a shelter in Houma, La., where they had been airlifted from their neighborhood). But one reporter, Leslie Williams, remains missing.

"We vacillate between utter despair at what's happened to our city and our lives and exhilaration at what we're doing and how our readers are responding to it," Mr. Amoss said.

Last Monday, after the initial blow of Katrina, the idea of evacuation was not being considered, Mr. Amoss said. The electricity was out, but the newspaper had a generator to keep some computers running in the photo studio, which was the most interior, and therefore safest, part of the building.

Staff members and their families who had chosen to stay at the building overnight, some with their spouses, had planned to hunker down and wait out the storm. But by Monday evening, as Katrina was moving on, their sense of safety was eroding.

James O'Byrne, the features editor, and Doug MacCash, the art critic, ventured out on bicycles to inspect the Lakeview neighborhood where Mr. O'Byrne lived. Already, houses were nearly submerged in more than eight feet of water. "I know for a fact my house is gone," Mr. O'Byrne said.

At 10 p.m. Monday, as other news outlets were reporting that the city had escaped destruction, Mark Schleifstein, the paper's environmental reporter, confirmed that a breach had opened in the levee near the 17th Street canal. The article was headlined: "Lakeview Levee Breach Threatens to Inundate City."

That paper was never printed. A power outage shut down the paper's presses, which are housed in the same building, so it was published only on the paper's Web site.

By midmorning on Tuesday, "you couldn't walk out the building without walking in water up to your waist at this point," said Peter Kovacs, the managing editor for news operations. As the water rose, Mr. Amoss and the publisher, Ashton Phelps Jr., devised a plan to leave from the loading docks, using the newspaper's delivery trucks.

"Editors were barking orders through the newsroom and cafeteria, where some were still eating breakfast, to grab what you could put on your lap and move to the loading dock," Mr. Amoss said. About six laptops were carried out. Mr. Kovacs snapped up his toothbrush, a college T-shirt and a cigar.

At 9:40 a.m., the newspaper's Web site displayed this post, clearly punched out in haste: "The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building. Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We want to evaucate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building."

As the trucks were pulling out, Alex Brandon, a photographer, returned to the building with a computer storage card full of photographs. He trudged and swam through the water, handing over the card, said Doug Parker, the photography editor, then returned to work. "He's still on the streets of New Orleans, hasn't had a shower since Monday," Mr. Parker said.

The water sloshed against the grilles of the delivery trucks, some packed with as many as 25 staff members, as they moved slowly along roads leading to the Pontchartrain Expressway. From the back of the trucks, the evacuees could see toppled trees, downed power lines and residents pushing shopping carts and walking along the upper edges of the roads.

The trucks headed for the paper's West Bank bureau, about eight miles south of the Howard Avenue building and a few miles past the city line. There, the editors decided some employees would need to return to the city to continue reporting and taking pictures, and they asked for volunteers. Seven reporters and two photographers climbed into a truck to go back. In total, the newspaper has had about 15 reporters and photographers in New Orleans since the storm hit.

"I'm thinking if there had been another 15 to 30 minutes, our butts would still be in there," Mr. Kovacs said.

The evacuated employees were sent to two locations. By midafternoon Tuesday, many had arrived in Houma, La., where The Courier was offering food, computers, phone lines and, although spotty, Internet connections. Employees' families were dropped off at nearby shelters. The Courier, which is owned by The New York Times Company, had just finished work on its afternoon issue.

About 12 journalists, led by Dan Shea, a managing editor, stayed in Houma that night, posting news on the Web site and trying to put together an issue of the paper in portable document format, or pdf, which allows for a traditional newspaper layout.

The team had none of their production software and templates, and no access to any of The Times-Picayune's fonts, and was struggling with rolling blackouts. Still, Mary Chauvin, a copy editor, was able to replicate the look of the paper on the fly by cobbling together graphic elements from earlier online editions..

About 60 more Times-Picayune staff members went on to Baton Rouge, La. There, the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University had offered banks of phones and computers.

The paper that appeared the next morning, again in pdf format on the Web site, contained 17 articles and an editorial, all written by staff members, and 12 photographs, only one of which came from The Associated Press.

Photographs taken from the air showed a city washed out; emergency crews climbing on a roof for a rescue, only to find a dead man; refugees in boats; burning buildings; a pile of floating rubble that included a half-submerged car.

A detailed article about the breach near the 17th Street canal by Mr. Schleifstein was headlined: "Flooding Will Only Get Worse."

By Wednesday, reporters were sending articles to their editors from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houston and several spots along the coast, some by whatever landline they could find, often from the homes of friends or relatives. Sometimes, they resorted to powering their laptops using car batteries.

Nola.com became what Mr. Phelps, the Times-Picayune's publisher, called a lifeline, with more than 72 million page views by people around the world, from Sunday to Thursday last week. Mr. Amoss said page views surpassed 30 million on Friday. Before the hurricane, the site received about six million page views a week.

The most frightening experience was still to come for one reporter, Gordon Russell, reporting from New Orleans. Last Thursday, when the streets seemed ripe for riots to break out, he and a photographer drove from the Convention Center into the aftermath of what looked like a shootout. A bloodied body lay on the ground and police officers had their weapons up.

The photographer, Marko Georgiev, a freelancer for The New York Times, said that as he slowed his car to take a photo, the police trained their weapons on the car. Ordered from the car, the two men were pushed face-first against the car and nearby walls with hands up. Police officers threw their notebooks and camera equipment to the ground and ordered them to leave.

Mr. Russell, quoted by his colleagues on the Nola.com Web site later that day, said: "I'm scared. I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm getting out of here." The headline above the report said "City Not Safe for Anyone."

Meanwhile, staff members, straining to report the disaster, were realizing the extent of the damage to their own homes. More than 30 percent of the newspaper staff members had lost their homes, one employee estimated.

Jon Donley, the editor of Nola.com, worked for two days without hearing from his adult daughter before learning she was safe. "He worked posting all that on the Internet, not knowing whether his daughter was alive or not," Mr. O'Byrne said.

Joe Graham, a photo technician, had still not heard from his wife and son by Friday afternoon. Their house was in eastern New Orleans, an area that had some of the worst flooding. On Saturday afternoon, Terry Baquet, the Page 1 editor, was almost giddy as he reported that Mr. Graham's family had been found safe.

At the Washington bureau for the Newhouse newspaper chain, which publishes The Times-Picayune and 25 other newspapers, colleagues said they felt out of touch. "We were only able to reach editors intermittently," said Bill Walsh, The Times-Picayune's Washington reporter. "Some we didn't even know where they were or whether they were all right."

By the weekend, many on the staff were realizing what they had accomplished, although their exuberance was tempered by the tremendous losses endured by the city and the unresolved disappearance of their colleague, Mr. Williams, who had been sent to the Mississippi coast last Monday to cover the storm.

"I'm trying not to let a depressing thought get into my head," Mr. Kovacs said. Mr. Williams is an experienced reporter who was born in the area and has covered many hurricanes.

"It weighs on me; it weighs on all of us," said Mr. Amoss.

Meanwhile, editors were trying to beat back a rumor that the paper would be shut down. On Thursday, Mr. Phelps called the rumor "ridiculous" in a statement. "The Times-Picayune will continue to publish. Period," he wrote.

And indeed, by Friday morning, The Times-Picayune had managed to resume its print editions again. It printed 50,000 copies at The Courier -a "seat of the pants" press run, Mr. Amoss said, its size a guess of how much of an audience the paper would have.

The paper was distributed, using the same delivery trucks that had ferried the staff to safety, to subscribers throughout Louisiana and to the habitable areas of New Orleans. And it was also delivered in bulk to shelters, where it was given away.

There's no telling when, or if, The Times-Picayune can bring its circulation back to the 270,000 that it had a little over a week ago. No one knows the condition of its presses, or how the Howard Avenue building has fared. The Courier will continue to be its printing plant for the time being.

But Mr. Amoss also took heart in the news that readers were pouncing on the paper "like hungry wolves" as soon as it was delivered, and the print run was being increased to 60,000 for today's issue.

    Hurricane Forces New Orleans Newspaper to Face a Daunting Set of Obstacles, NYT, 5.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/business/media/05picayune.html

 

 

 

 

 

Thousands still need rescue

in New Orleans

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
10:36 PM ET
Reuters
By Jim Loney

 

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - By boat and helicopter, rescuers are still pulling hundreds of people a day from rooftops, homes and buildings in stricken New Orleans nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina's devastating strike, officials said on Sunday.

As rescue operations continue, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it is making progress toward pumping out the city but still expects it could take 80 days or more to complete the job.

Local officials believe there are thousands of people remaining in the stricken city, despite the evacuation of hundreds of thousands before Katrina hit and tens of thousands more by the U.S. military and other agencies after the storm.

Many of those remaining may still be caught in homes surrounded by flood water.

"We still have thousands in the city. We are still rescuing people off rooftops and from attics," New Orleans City Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said on Sunday.

About 3,000 people were evacuated by helicopter from the city in the last 24 hours, National Guard Brig. Gen. Michael Fleming said on Sunday.

Police said they were receiving 1,000 or more emergency calls for help each day, many of them from people still trapped in their homes and attics.

"I believe we have a few thousand more to rescue," Clarkson said.

But police officials said the armada of small boats participating in rescue operations were not able to respond to all of the calls.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had 24 pumps in eastern areas of the city moving water out. In St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, water was draining from the streets.

"There are areas that are receding," said Mike Rogers, an Army Corps coordinator. "We've just got a long way to go."

Rock was being shipped in to repair the levees, Rogers said.

Giant pumps that can move large quantities of water were crippled by the storm. Getting them to work again is expected to take up to a week, and engineers estimate it will then take up to 80 days to clear New Orleans of water.

Thousands still need rescue in New Orleans, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-09-05T023705Z_01_KRA355788_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-KATRINA-NEWORLEANS-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans police

kill looters in shoot-out

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
9:26 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans police killed four looters who had opened fire on them on Sunday as rescue teams scoured homes and toxic waters flooding streets to find survivors and recover thousands of bloated corpses.

A fifth looter was in critical condition but no more details were available about the incident in a city where authorities are slowly regaining control after a wave of looting, murders and rapes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"Five men who were looting exchanged gunfire with police. The officers engaged the looters when they were fired upon," said New Orleans superintendent of police, Steven Nichols.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors working on a levee breach were fired on by gunmen but no one was hurt, said the Corps' Mike Rogers. It was not clear if the two incidents were connected.

Six days after Katrina ripped up the Gulf Coast and sent flood waters pouring into New Orleans, no one knows how many people were killed, but government officials say the number is in the thousands.

"When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood, people whose remains will be found in the street," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. "It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Under fire for its slow response to the flooding, the Bush administration tried to save face on Sunday by sending top officials down to the disaster zone and pledging to do whatever it takes to clean up New Orleans and help its refugees.

President George W. Bush was to visit relief efforts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Poplarville, Mississippi, on Monday -- his second trip to the devastated region in less than a week.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: "We have been abandoned by our own country," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

"For God sakes, shut up and send somebody," a tearful and anguished Broussard said of promises not kept by Washington, adding that "bureaucracy has committed murder" in New Orleans.

 

NIGHTMARE CONFLUENCE

But in a sign that a return to normality, while still far off, was at least a possibility, lights began to go back on in parts of the beleaguered city, as Electric company Entergy Corp. started to restore power.

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al Qaeda-linked Web sites called the "wrath of God" striking America, National Guard troops and U.S. marshals patrolled streets stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting.

Coast Guard helicopters hovered over devastated neighborhoods and continued to pluck survivors from roofs. Some brave residents joined the rescue efforts and spoke of horrors in the deep and muddy waters.

In New Orleans' notoriously poor 9th district, police launched search missions with small speed boats to find both the living and the dead.

The tips of roofs poked out from the water, which bubbled from burst gas mains, and, in one spot, a swelling corpse floated on flood waters. Law enforcement officials advised reporters not to go close.

"It's about to pop at any minute. And you don't want to be there when that happens," one officer said.

Officials said they had assembled facilities capable of handling 1,000 bodies immediately and were expanding them.

Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana's emergency response medical director, declined to speculate on how high the death toll might go. "It's not about numbers," she said. "Each death is enough. This is horrific."

Louisiana's official death toll stood at just 59 on Sunday but officials said it would rise dramatically.

While the city's human population suffered enormously, its famous Audubon Zoo managed to take good care of its charges. Only three of its 1,400 animals died, officials said, adding that they had planned for years for a catastrophic storm.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Government and emergency officials insisted it was not the right time to assign blame for botched rescue efforts, and instead warned of challenges ahead.

"We're going to have to go house to house in this city. We're going to have to check every single place to find people who may be alive and in need of assistance," Chertoff said.

 

EMERGENCY SERVICES

He said unsanitary conditions meant emergency services would not allow residents to stay in their homes while flooded areas were pumped out.

In a rare admission of error, Bush conceded the relief efforts were unacceptable, and this weekend ordered 7,200 extra active-duty troops to the disaster zone.

Newsweek reported that former Louisiana Democratic Sen. John Breaux, whom it called a close ally of Bush, rejected the president's claim that nobody anticipated the failure of New Orleans' levees, saying the two talked about it last year.

Most of Katrina's victims were black and poor, and some black leaders have said the federal government would have moved much more quickly if rich, white people were suffering.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected the claim on a tour of Mobile, Alabama. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race."

But it looked different from the disaster zone.

"For those who were alone in the water, alone on the roof, you might ask 'What did we do to deserve this?"' Rev. Lowell Case told his congregation at St. Francis Xavier Church in Baton Rouge. "A lot of us think being black may have had something to do with it, being poor and black in New Orleans."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans' international airport. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.

A total of 54,000 military personnel are now committed to relief efforts, including around 40,000 National Guard.

U.S. oil refineries in the Gulf area and offshore oil and gas platforms were slowly recovering from Katrina's impact, which has pushed gasoline prices to more than $3 a gallon.

 

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba, Paul Simao and Jim Loney in Baton Rouge, Adam Tanner in Houston, Matt Daily in Biloxi, Steve Holland, Charles Aldinger, John Whitesides and Eric Walsh in Washington)

    New Orleans police kill looters in shoot-out, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-05T012658Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Evacuations

Move Tens of Thousands

From New Orleans

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
and CHRISTINE HAUSER

 

Rescue efforts continued in New Orleans today to try to find people stranded in the flood ravaged city after the pace of evacuations picked up markedly. President Bush has ordered 7,000 additional troops to the city and the Gulf Coast states to crack down on lawlessness and to evacuate thousands of refugees.

Most of the hurricane survivors have been cleared from the New Orleans Superdome and the convention center, where they huddled in squalor and chaos for days. At least 19,000 have been reported evacuated from the area, with thousands bused to Texas.

Today, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Louisiana and toured a medical facility at the New Orleans international airport. He spoke to and shook hands with military and rescue officials, but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped, Reuters reported.

"As the president said it is a natural disaster of historic proportion," Mr. Rumsfeld said later in televised remarks to reporters.

"No one can come up with anything that approximates this in the history of our country," he said.

The secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, said in a news briefing that there were a significant number of people who did not want to leave their homes but would have to, because of unsanitary conditions, including the discovery of corpses, after the water is cleared. He said rescue efforts were continuing today to find people alive.

"We're going to have to go house to house in this city," he said. Officials are dividing the city up into quadrants to coordinate efforts.

The authorities have come under fire for their response to the disaster. "We have been abandoned by our own country, " Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's "Meet the Press."

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," Mr. Broussard said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

Mr. Chertoff said that now was not the time to "draw a deep breath" and address criticism when all attention should be paid to rescue and relief efforts.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said today that the death toll from the hurricane is in the thousands, according to The Associated Press.

Caravans of buses that for thousands meant deliverance from danger, hunger and misery were finally rolling in, and thousands more, including 100 New York City buses accompanied by New York police officers, were on the way.

But new problems are beginning to emerge. More than 220,000 hurricane refugees are already in Texas and thousands more are coming. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said on Saturday that local officials were reporting "they are quickly approaching capacity in the number of evacuees they believe they can assist."

With the stranded being brought out of New Orleans on stretchers and by air, bus and train, the president acknowledged again on Saturday that his administration had failed to help many of the hurricane's most desperate victims promptly and promised to resurrect New Orleans and devastated coastal areas of several states.

"I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering," Mr. Bush declared hours after signing a $10.5 billion package of assistance for the stricken region, which he called a down payment on aid to come. "Many are angry and desperate for help. The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in our hour of need. And the federal government will do its part."

Expanded search and rescue effort brought new glimpses of the likely death toll, with bodies set out in makeshift morgues, abandoned on roads or floating in canals. Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana has also said she expected the death toll to reach thousands. Rear Adm. W. Craig Vanderwagen of the federal Public Health Service said just one morgue, at a St. Gabriel prison, was expecting as many as up to 2,000 bodies.

The authorities told of a huge toll in Chalmette, a small community east of New Orleans, where 31 bodies were found in a nursing home and hundreds more residents were missing.

The refugee emergency is beginning to affect neighboring states, Texas most of all. About 18,500 refugees were in the Houston Astrodome and an adjacent building, amid reports that it was at capacity. More than 120,000 refugees were in 97 shelters in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and other cities, according to Governor Perry's office, with an additional 100,000 in hotels and motels.

The American Red Cross reported Saturday night that it was housing more than 96,000 refugees in nine states. Louisiana had more than 51,000 refugees in 127 Red Cross shelters; Mississippi had more than 13,000 in 102 shelters; and Alabama had nearly 4,000 in 47 shelters.

Hundreds of newly arrived National Guard troops patrolled the lawless streets of New Orleans, beginning the task of wresting control from thugs and looters and restoring order in a city that had all but surrendered to death and disorder after Hurricane Katrina. Their numbers were unknown, but the head of the city's emergency services said there were only about a thousand, far fewer than needed.

The deployment of the troops, the arrival of major convoys of desperately needed supplies, the speeded evacuation of tens of thousands of people from refugee centers and hospitals, and progress in closing some of the breached levees brought glimmers of hope for the flooded and ravaged city.

The Army Corps of Engineers said crews had closed a 300-foot gap in the 17th Street Canal levee, where the heaviest floodwaters had entered the city, and said they expected to close a second gap in another canal over the weekend. But Brig. Gen. Robert Crear said it might take months to remove all the floodwaters from the swamped city. "We're looking at anywhere from 36 to 80 days to being done," he said.

President Bush scheduled another trip to Louisiana for Monday.

Mr. Chertoff said the war in Iraq was not hurting the Guard's ability to respond to domestic catastrophe. He said the issue was not numbers, but logistics. "These are citizen soldiers, we have to get them mobilized and deployed," he said.

While thousands of refugees were evacuated from the New Orleans convention center, chaos reigned at the airport, thousands were still trapped in homes and hotels, fires raged virtually unchecked in parts of the city, the power was out, and vast sections were still under water.

Those who were newly rescued came with tales of endurance and loss. Waiting for evacuation at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, Kevin Davis, 34, said he had been stranded on a bridge since Tuesday with 30 others. When a helicopter sought Friday to extricate his wife, Donies, she slipped out of the harness and fell back to the bridge where she was unconscious and bleeding, he said. Another helicopter took her away a half hour later but left Mr. Davis behind.

"Nobody can tell me anything about my wife," he said, as he waited to be flown out of New Orleans.

On streets where gun battles, fistfights, holdups, carjackings and marauding mobs of looters had held sway through the week, the mere sight of troops in camouflage battle gear and with assault rifles gave a sense of relief to many of the thousands of stranded survivors who had endured days of appalling terror and suffering.

"They brought a sense of order and peace, and it was a beautiful sight to see that we're ramping up," Governor Blanco said. "We are seeing a show of force. It's putting confidence back in our hearts and in the minds of our people. We're going to make it through."

Still officials cautioned that New Orleans faced a long, difficult climb out of the crisis. Six days after the hurricane decimated the Gulf Coast in a fantasia of howling winds and towering seas that weakened and then breached the city's protective levees, New Orleans was still a nightmarish town that had endured the unthinkable: 80 percent of its ground flooded, perhaps thousands of its citizens killed and numberless homes and businesses destroyed by water, fires, looters and scavengers.

The shocking discovery of a large number of victims in Chalmette added a chilling new dimension to the scope of the disaster. While national attention has focused primarily on the tragedy of New Orleans, officials said almost no notice had been given to scores of outlying communities that were even more exposed to the storm's wrath - towns isolated on the peninsulas of the bird's foot delta reaching into the Gulf of Mexico.

At dawn yesterday, as a brilliant orange sun rose over the Mississippi, two huge columns of smoke climbed over the city as major fires burned unchecked, one apparently at the scene of an explosion that ripped through a propane gas storage warehouse on Friday, and another at a Saks Fifth Avenue store. Firefighters were handicapped by low water pressure and the difficulty of getting around the flooded city.

There was no electricity in the city, and almost every office and store was closed. Bodies still floated in the floodwaters, and everywhere were signs of recent disorder: shattered storefronts, the detritus of looting that showed help had come too late. There was no water or food for sale, and no one had any idea how many people were still in New Orleans. A police officer making rescues in a boat said several people in homes five feet deep in water had turned him away, saying they had plenty of food, water and beer.

Troops were on patrol outside City Hall, at the federal buildings, at refugee centers and at major intersections, and there were only glimpses of the hoodlums who had ruled unchecked for days.

Superintendent P. Edward Compass III of the Police Department said 200 of the 1,500 officers on his force had walked off the job, citing the perils of fighting armed and menacing refugees, and he reported that two officers had committed suicide.

While the sound of gunfire had been common in the streets of New Orleans for much of the week, it seemed to taper off. Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said much of the earlier violence had been by youths with guns.

"Some of these kids think this is a game," he said. "They somehow got their hands on a weapon. They think they are playing Pac-Man or something and shooting at people. Those kinds of hot spots will continue, but I can tell you they will learn very quickly the 82nd Airborne does not like to be shot at. This is not a game."

The absence of any widespread disorder was only one of the positive signs. In addition to the arrival of hundreds of National Guard troops to the region, which coincided with President Bush's visit on Friday, there were other signs of hope.

The evacuations of Tulane University and Charity Hospitals were completed, officials said, but three other hospitals remained open. The evacuation of the Louisiana Superdome, which had become a fetid shelter of last resort for 25,000 people, was all but completed, with many of its refugees taken to the Astrodome in Houston, 350 miles away.

Progress was made in repairing breached levees that had allowed the waters of Lake Pontchartrain to flood the below-sea-level city. Three breaks occurred in canals that jut into New Orleans from the lakefront. The mouths of each of the canals have been closed, and engineers and contractors have begun to drain the canals to get at powerful pumps that will be used to clear water from the city. They also have begun to reconstruct the levee itself, driving piles into the 300-foot gap.

Amtrak made its first run out of New Orleans since the hurricane, carrying 650 people to Dallas.

Convoys of trucks carrying food, water and other relief supplies rolled into the city and were greeted by cheers and sobs of relief by some of the exhausted, traumatized refugees. Others, like 46-year-old Michael Levy, one of the refugees at the convention center, were bitter. "They should have been here days ago," he said as others yelled in agreement.

 

Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington for this article, Joseph B. Treaster from New Orleans and Campbell Robertson from Gulfport, Miss.

    Evacuations Move Tens of Thousands From New Orleans, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/05STORMCND.html

 

 

 

 

 

Bush Faces Rising Complaints

About Handling of Disaster

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times > International Herald Tribune
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - President Bush faced increasingly bitter complaints today from local and state officials in the battered Gulf Coast region as he struggled to exert control over a disaster that almost surely claimed thousands of lives.

Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, a Democrat, said today that she was so angry about federal failures and second-guessing that if she heard any more criticism of local efforts, even from the president, she might "punch" him.

The New Orleans mayor, C. Ray Nagin, said matters were improving but remained a "disgrace."

The president of a local Louisiana parish, Aaron Broussard, broke down sobbing on the NBC program "Meet the Press" today as he talked about an elderly woman who drowned while awaiting repeatedly promised help.

"Nobody's coming to get us," Mr. Broussard said, his head sagging. "The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody."

Mr. Bush, criticized even by some supporters for failing to respond more decisively, has ordered additional active-duty troops to the region, and sent top cabinet members there to help guide still-unfinished rescue work.

He dropped his own plans for Labor Day on Monday, saying he would return to Louisiana and Mississippi, and overhauled his month's schedule, canceling a long-anticipated visit by President Hu Jintao of China.

White House advisers scrambled to confront a confluence of critical challenges - including the hurricane, sagging support for the Iraq war and record-high gasoline prices - that politicians say could severely challenge his second-term legislative plans.

The politics of an already-charged season appeared suddenly overshadowed by the depths of the hurricane disaster.

Even the scripts of Sept. 11 commemorations next Sunday may have to be rewritten, as one of the most fundamental lessons Americans thought their leaders had learned - that mountains needed to be moved to prepare for the unexpected - seemed to some to have fallen short.

The secretary of health and human services, Michael Leavitt, said Sunday that Katrina's death toll almost surely was in the thousands.

Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, warned that already-shocked Americans needed to brace for worse as waters recede, baring the full extent of death and destruction.

Meanwhile, Mr. Chertoff said, work was continuing at an almost unimaginable scale, "basically moving the city of New Orleans to other parts of the country." But he added, "I think we are in control of what's going on in the city."

The first major opinion poll since the disaster showed ambivalent feelings toward Mr. Bush's handling of it, far less positive than the near-universal support he received in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. An ABC poll found that 46 percent of Americans approved of Bush's handling of the crisis, almost exactly half his 91 percent approval rating after Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush sent several top advisers to the region, including Mr. Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as federal and state authorities reportedly wrestled behind the scenes over which had ultimate authority in the crisis area.

Mr. Chertoff's department has been harshly criticized for the federal failure to prepare adequately for a possible disaster that some emergency officials, and The Times Picayune of New Orleans, had anticipated with eerie precision years ago.

A proposal to detach the Federal Emergency Management Administration from Homeland Security is to be introduced this week in Congress. Some critics say that the Homeland Security takeover of FEMA added a harmful layer of bureaucracy.

Mr. Chertoff in turn seemed to cast some blame elsewhere. He said earlier that "our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor."

Today, Senator Landrieu, a Democrat whose father, Moon Landrieu, was once the mayor of New Orleans, dropped her earlier reserve about criticizing federal failings.

Mr. Bush had said that the enormousness of the crisis had "strained state and local capabilities."

Local authorities took this as a deeply unjustified criticism, and a distraught Ms. Landrieu said that if she heard any more criticism from federal officials, particularly about the evacuation of New Orleans, she might lose control.

"If one person criticizes them or says one more thing - including the president of the United States - he will hear from me," she said on the ABC program "This Week." "One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."

She also referred angrily to comments Mr. Bush had made Friday at the New Orleans airport about the fun he had had there in his younger days.

"Our infrastructure is devastated, lives have been shattered," Ms. Landrieu said during a helicopter tour of the area with an ABC interviewer. "Would the president please stop taking photo-ops?"

Mr. Chertoff warned that Americans, already horrified by scenes of misery and chaos in New Orleans, should brace for worse.

"I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming," he told Fox News. As waters recede, "we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, you know, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets," he said.

"It's going to be about as ugly a scene as I think you can imagine. Certainly as ugly of a scene as we've seen in this country, with the possible exception of 9/11."

The New Orleans mayor, Nagin, who last week lashed out at federal authorities in an expletive-laced outburst, told reporters on Saturday that while he regretted his language, he was still frustrated by the federal response. "We're still fighting over authority," he said. "A bunch of people are the boss. The state and the federal government are doing a two-step dance."

He added, "I think it's getting better, but the pace is still not sufficient."

In Washington, even some Republicans have warned that the much-assailed White House response could undermine Bush's authority and his legislative agenda, including plans to overhaul the tax code, Social Security and immigration law.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that Mr. Bush's handling of the crisis could, if it is seen to improve, re-energize his plans. Otherwise, "it swamps the rest of his agenda."

But the government message has found itself struggling for time on the airwaves against angry criticisms like Ms. Landrieu's, and anguished cries for help, like that of Mr. Broussard, the local official who broke down sobbing on NBC.

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything," Mr. Broussard said. "His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night.

"Nobody's coming to get us," he said through his tears. "Nobody's coming to get us."

Ms. Landrieu warned of the risk to nearly submerged railway lines that serve a wide area of the country. Another hurricane, she said, would have calamitous effect.

"We are one storm away from disaster," she said, looking forward. "Doesn't anybody hear us?"

    Bush Faces Rising Complaints About Handling of Disaster, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/05cndbush.html

 

 

 

 

 

Internet is bulletin board

for Katrina victims

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
4:01 PM ET
Reuters
By Todd Eastham

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After 9/11, descriptions and photos of missing family, friends and co-workers were plastered on walls and bulletin boards in lower Manhattan, but with New Orleans a ghost town after Hurricane Katrina, the Internet is now the medium of choice for those seeking lost loved ones.

"My aunt Geraldine, age 95, lives with her 75-year-old daughter, my first cousin Bernadine Givens ... in New Orleans. ... We believe Geraldine's 76-year-old half brother, my uncle Raul Maurice, was also with them," read one posting on craigslist.org, a popular community bulletin board.

"Geraldine is in a wheelchair. Please Help Me. I spoke with them on Sunday August 28th, the day before Katrina hit ... and nothing since," said the posting under the "missing people" icon in a New Orleans section of that site.

While the power of the Internet offers promise to people struggling to reconnect with hurricane survivors, people and pets, several phone calls on Sunday -- six days after the Category 4 storm hit the Gulf Coast -- yielded only one happy outcome, recounted by Kristina Carapina, 21, of Houston.

"Today is my birthday & yesterday I heard from the Red Cross that they were rescued from the roof. "They called at 11:30 last night from a shelter. ... They were in St. Bernard, the worst hit area. They were on the roof for five days."

They were her boyfriend Brian, 27, Tim McHughes, 24, and their mother, Dianne Clement. They were "a little worn out and bruised up, but they're good. "They brought a barbecue up to the roof. They had some canned food."

Still, two people from that family remained unaccounted for in the ruined city -- a grandmother and an uncle.

 

'SEARCHING FOR MY COUSINS'

And that was among the most gratifying outcomes. Salvador Mendez of Ohio's posting on craigslist read: "I am searching for my cousins, David Roberto, Luis or Matilde Mendez of Taqueria Corona as well as their mother Aminta Huezo Parada."

Contacted on Sunday, Mendez said, "Unfortunately, I don't have any news about them." He had also posted notices on the New Orleans site nola.com and findkatrina.com. Of those sites, he and others said craigslist was most user friendly.

The Web search wasn't limited to people. Billie Sue Bruce of Jonesville, Virginia, said she was outraged to see television footage of a white bichon dog named Snowball torn from a little boy's arms by a guardsman as the boy was evacuated by bus.

Bruce posted a $500 reward for return of the dog to the boy and was joined by others. The reward, now posted on craiglist, and other sites like savejustone.com and smallpawsrescue.com, had risen to $2,500 with other contributors.

"That story terribly upset me because it was a combination of a child's heartbreak and an abandoned pet," said Bruce.

Bjay Lateny of San Diego posted on craigslist a search for Marie-Helen Poulaert from Belgium, saying she had used the Web site in the past for "getting rid of stuff in my backyard ... looking for work," but never for anything like this.

"I went to high school with her in northern Arizona. She was an exchange student. But I've had no word. You're actually the first call," she told this reporter.

News Web sites including CNN.com have also set up Internet help centers, including missing persons lists, resources for survivors, ways to donate and volunteer. The success of these sites in bringing survivors together with friends and loved ones could not be immediately determined.

    Internet is bulletin board for Katrina victims, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T200154Z_01_BAU472051_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-INTERNET-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans collects dead

as officials dodge blame

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
4:06 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans began the gruesome task of collecting its thousands of dead on Sunday as the Bush administration tried to save face after its botched rescue plans left the city at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: "We have been abandoned by our own country, " Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," Broussard said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al Qaeda-linked Web sites called evidence of the "wrath of God" striking America, National Guard troops and U.S. marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting.

Local and federal officials said they expected to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the U.S. Gulf coast last Monday.

"When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood. People whose remains will be found in the street," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News.

 

AS UGLY AS YOU CAN IMAGINE

"There'll be pollution. It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Later, Chertoff flew into New Orleans and said the search for storm victims would be arduous. "Let me be clear: we're going to have to go house to house in this city," he said. "This is not going to happen overnight."

President George W. Bush, who in a rare admission of error, conceded on Friday that the results of his administration's relief efforts were unacceptable, said on Saturday he would send 7,200 more active-duty troops over three days.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans' international airport on Sunday. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was touring the Mobile, Alabama, area, in her native state.

A further 10,000 National Guard troops were being sent to storm-hit Louisiana and Mississippi, raising the total to 40,000. A total of 54,000 military personnel are now committed to relief efforts.

Lawmakers promised to allocate more relief money in coming weeks after Bush signed a $10.5 billion aid package for Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina.

 

LOOKING FOR THE DEAD

Towns along the Gulf Coast ripped apart by Katrina were beginning the enormous task of reconstruction and accounting for the dead. In hard-hit Biloxi, Mississippi, homes and cars still lay piled up on each other or under trees, and power lines dangled everywhere.

Well over 100 deaths had been confirmed in Mississippi and "we are finding new casualties in the debris," Biloxi town spokesman Vincent Creel said on Saturday.

The living told tales of horror in stricken New Orleans.

"There were bodies floating everywhere. Lots of them. Some had bullets in them," said Michael Davis, 18, as he described his escape from a neighborhood immersed in more than 10 feet of water last week. He ultimately found refuge at a domed arena in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Mississippi largely escaped the turmoil in New Orleans but officials warned of a serious risk of dysentery and other diseases from contaminated water.

"It's not a disaster, it's a catastrophe," Harrison County's health director, Bob Trabnicek, said in Biloxi.

"Why they don't try to get us out of here, I don't know," said Ella Robertson, 51, as she paced back and forth on a debris-lined Biloxi street. "Waiting, that's all we can do."

The storm's impact was felt across the United States as gas prices rose to well over $3 a gallon after Katrina's 140-mph (225-kph) winds shut eight oil refineries and crippled others.

 

'TWO CATASTROPHES'

Defending the administration's response and disaster planning, Chertoff said the hurricane and flood in New Orleans were "two catastrophes" that presented an unprecedented challenge.

"That perfect storm of combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody's foresight," the homeland security chief said.

Critics have said the Federal Emergency Management Agency has lost its effectiveness since it became part of the Homeland Security Department in a post-September 11 reorganization.

Rice was slammed by critics on the Internet after she attended a New York performance of the Monty Python musical "Spamalot" on Wednesday, a day after New Orleans flooded.

After returning to Washington, she defended the administration against charges the slow government response and prolonged suffering of New Orleans' predominantly black storm victims were signs of racial neglect.

"That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help, I just don't believe it," said Rice, the administration's highest-ranking black official.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Bush administration officials were blaming state and local authorities for the disaster response problems. The newspaper said the administration was rebuffed in an effort to take control of police and National Guard units reporting to Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat.

(Additional reporting by Kerry Wutkoski and Phil Barbara in Washington; Mark Babineck in New Orleans; Erwin Seba, Paul Simao and Jim Loney in Baton Rouge, Peter Cooney and Adam Tanner in Houston, Matt Daily in Biloxi, Steve Holland, Charles Aldinger, John Whitesides and Eric Walsh in Washington)

    New Orleans collects dead as officials dodge blame, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T200718Z_01_BAU471101_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-KATRINA-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans collects its dead$

in 'ugly' search

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
3:01 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan
and Mark Babineck

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans turned to the gruesome task of collecting its dead on Sunday with rescue teams scouring flooded streets and homes to find survivors and recover thousands of corpses.

Six days after Hurricane Katrina ripped up the U.S. Gulf Coast and sent flood waters pouring into New Orleans, no one knows how many people were killed, but government officials say the number is surely in the thousands.

"When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood. People whose remains will be found in the street," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said. "It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: "We have been abandoned by our own country, " Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," Broussard said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

"For God sakes, shut up and send somebody," a tearful and anguished Broussard said of promises not kept by Washington.

After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al Qaeda-linked Web sites called evidence of the "wrath of God" striking America, National Guard troops and U.S. marshals patrolled the city, stricken in the days after the hurricane by anarchic violence and looting.

Coast Guard helicopters hovered over devastated neighborhoods on Sunday and continued to pluck survivors from roofs. Some brave residents joined the rescue efforts and spoke of horrors in the deep and muddy waters.

Alfred Thomas, a 43-year-old resident of the Hollygrove neighborhood, has used his small flatboat to shuttle food and water in and out since storm hit.

 

CORPSES SEEN AND UNSEEN

He said he has seen 17 bodies floating around in the streets and that many others are inside houses. "You go down some streets and you can smell them, but you can't see them. You know they are in their homes somewhere," Thomas said.

Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Under fire for its slow response to the flooding, the Bush administration tried to save face by sending top officials down to the disaster zone and pledging whatever it takes to clean up New Orleans and help its hundreds of thousands of refugees.

They insisted it was not the right time to assign blame or look at the lessons learned from the botched rescue efforts, and instead warned of major challenges ahead.

"We're going to have to go house to house in this city. We're going to have to check every single place to find people who may be alive and in need of assistance." Chertoff said in New Orleans. "This is not going to happen overnight."

President George W. Bush, who in a rare admission of error, conceded the results of his administration's relief efforts were unacceptable, this weekend ordered 7,200 extra active-duty troops to the disaster zone.

Newsweek reported former Louisiana Democratic Sen. John Breaux, whom it called a close ally of President Bush, rejected Bush's claim that nobody anticipated the failure of New Orleans' levees, saying he talked to Bush about it last year.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans' international airport on Sunday. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right by a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.

"It will take many, many, many months and into years for this area to recover," Rumsfeld said at the end of his tour.

Most of Katrina's victims were black and poor, a point not lost on many black leaders and officials who have said the federal government would have moved much quicker if rich, white people were the ones suffering.

 

RICE REBUFFS RACE-BASED CRITIQUE

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disputed the accusations when she toured Mobile, Alabama on Sunday.

"Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," she said. "I just hope that when people stop and think about it, they will just see that that's just not the case," Rice said."

A total of 54,000 military personnel are now committed to relief efforts, including paratroopers and around 40,000 National Guard.

After days of broken promises, the rescue effort kicked into top gear on Saturday with tens of thousands of people evacuated in helicopters, planes, buses and trains.

"It feels great but it's too little, too late. They could have reacted more promptly." said Sterling Brook, a New Orleans hotel worker who was airlifted out on Sunday.

The death toll has continued to rise as evacuees succumbed to illness and exhaustion.

While the mayhem of New Orleans captured the world's attention, towns along the Gulf Coast were beginning the enormous task of reconstruction and accounting for the dead.

In hard-hit Biloxi, Mississippi, homes and cars still lay piled up on each other or under trees, and power lines dangled everywhere.

Well over 100 deaths had been confirmed in Mississippi and municipal workers were finding new casualties in the debris. Officials warned of a serious risk of dysentery and other diseases from contaminated water.

The impact of the storm was felt across the United States as gas prices rose to more than $3 a gallon after Katrina's 140 mph (225 kph) winds shut eight oil refineries and crippled others.

 

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba, Paul Simao

and Jim Loney in Baton Rouge,

Adam Tanner in Houston, Matt Daily in Biloxi, Steve Holland, Charles Aldinger,

John Whitesides and Eric Walsh in Washington)

    New Orleans collects its dead in 'ugly' search, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T190209Z_01_HO481242_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Louisiana official

haunted by drowned woman

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
3:00 PM ET
Reuters

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A New Orleans official was overcome by emotion on national television on Sunday when describing how a woman was abandoned and eventually drowned after repeated promises she would be rescued.

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, the emergency management, who's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said are you coming, son, is somebody coming," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, said as he burst into heavy sobbing on NBC's Meet the Press program.

"And he said 'yeah mama, somebody's coming to get ya, somebody's coming to get ya on Tuesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Wednesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Thursday, somebody's coming to get you on Friday.'

"And she drowned Friday night, she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us."

"Nobody's coming to get us, nobody's coming to get us," Broussard said through tears.

Broussard, president of the parish just south of New Orleans, did not give the woman's name.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina "will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history," he said.

Local and federal officials said they expected to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the U.S. Gulf Coast last Monday.

Broussard said the government must acknowledge the part it played in senseless deaths.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," he said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

He demanded congressional hearings on what went wrong in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane.

"They've had press conferences. I'm sick of press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody."

    Louisiana official haunted by drowned woman, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T190049Z_01_BAU468384_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-DROWNING-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Some evacuees

see religious message in Katrina

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
2:02 PM ET
By Adam Tanner

 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - In the last week, Joseph Brant lost his apartment, walked by scores of dead in the streets, traversed pools of toxic water and endured an arduous journey to escape the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his hometown New Orleans.

On Sunday, he was praising the Lord, saying the ordeal was a test that ended up dispelling his lifelong distrust of white people and setting his life on a new course. He said he hitched a ride on Friday in a van driven by a group of white folks.

"Before this whole thing I had a complex about white people; this thing changed me forever," said Brant, 36, a truck driver who, like many of the refugees receiving public assistance in Houston, Texas, is black.

"It was a spiritual experience for me, man," he said of the aftermath of a catastrophe al Qaeda-linked Web sites called evidence of the "wrath of God" striking an arrogant America.

Brant was one of evacuees across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi who gave thought to religion on Sunday, almost a week after the floods changed their lives, perhaps forever.

At the Astrodome in Houston, where 16,000 refugees received food and shelter, Rose McNeely took the floods as a sign from God to move away from New Orleans, where she said her two grown children had been killed in past years in gunfights.

"I lost everything I had in New Orleans," she said as she shared a cigarette with a friend. "He brought me here because he knows."

Gerald Greenwood, 55, collected a free Bible earlier in the morning, but sat watching a science fiction television program above the stands in an enclosed stadium once home to Houston's baseball and football teams. "This is the work of Satan right here," he said of the floods.

The Bible was one of the few books many of the refugees had among their possessions. On Friday, several Jehovah's Witnesses walked the floor of the Astrodome, where thousands of cots were set up, to offer their services.

 

THE WAGES OF SIN

On Sunday, the Salvation Army conducted an outside religious service that included songs such as "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."

"Natural disaster is caused by the sin in the world," said Maj. John Jones, area commander for the Salvation Army, who led the service. "The acts of God are what happens afterwards ... all the good that happens."

"God made all this happen for a reason. This city has been going to hell in a handbasket spiritually," Tim Washington, 42, said at New Orleans' Superdome on Saturday as he waited to be evacuated.

"If we can spend billions of dollars chasing after (Osama) bin Laden, can't we get guns and drugs off the street?," he asked. Washington said he stole a boat last Monday and he and a friend, using wooden fence posts as oars, delivered about 200 people to the shelter. "The sheriff's department stood across the street and did nothing," he added.

The Salvation Army's Jones was one of many trying to comfort victims in Sunday services across several states.

At St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Baton Rouge, several hundred local parishioners and storm survivors attended Sunday service. "I wish we could take your broken hearts and give you ours," Rev. Donald Blanchard told the gathering.

In addition to consoling storm victims, the church's lead pastor, Jerald Burns, said Katrina's tragedy needed to be a rallying cry for parishioners, church leaders and government leaders to help the needy.

"It's not what God is asking of us," Burns said. "It is what God is demanding of us.

Some people walked out of the church in tears in mid-service.

Churches in many states have taken in evacuees and organized aid for people who in many cases lost everything they had in the storm. But at least some bristled at the role of religion in helping the afflicted.

"We're getting reports of how some religion-based 'aid' groups are trying to fly evangelists into the stricken areas and how U.S. Army chaplains are carrying bibles -- not food or water -- to 'comfort' people," Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheist, said in a statement.

"People need material aid, medical care and economic support -- not prayers and preaching," she said.

 

(Additional reporting by Jim Loney in Baton Rouge

and Mark Egan in New Orleans)

    Some evacuees see religious message in Katrina, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T180245Z_01_BAU462115_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CHURCH-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans residents

lament lack of insurance

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
12:56 PM ET
Reuters
By Belinda Goldsmith

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Packing just a few T-shirts and some shorts, Jenny Bagert joined the hordes fleeing New Orleans after a warning that one of the fiercest hurricanes in U.S. history was about to hit the low-lying southern city.

Her lack of preparation was fairly typical for New Orleans residents who had grown increasingly complacent about hurricane warnings and evacuation plans, with few adequately insured against the long forewarned disaster.

"We evacuate so often we know what and how we should prepare, but you just get used to it. We never thought it would be this bad," Bagert, 32, a photographer, told Reuters by telephone from an aunt's house near Houston, Texas.

"I'm hoping my one-story, raised house in mid-city might be OK, but we saw my mother's house on the television with just the roof showing so we know she has lost it."

But Bagert's family is among the lucky ones. They took out flood insurance, well aware of the risks in New Orleans, which is below sea level and encircled by levees. They are still stunned by the devastation and thousands of deaths in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"We just keep breaking down," Bagert said.

Only about 40 percent of New Orleans homeowners have flood insurance, which is provided in the United States under a government program, the National Flood Insurance Program, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Standard homeowner insurance only covers damage from fire and wind while commercial or automobile insurance does cover flood damage. A high number of car claims are expected from Katrina with thousands of cars submerged.

Private insurers, like State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. and Allstate Corp., which lead the home insurance market in the state of Louisiana, do sell policies for the FEMA and can settle the claims for policy holders.

 

FEW INSURED

But only 85,000 residential and commercial policies have been sold in Orleans parish, in which the city is located, by the NFIP, according to latest figures -- while the U.S. census lists about 213,000 housing units in the city in 2002.

"We estimate about 40 percent of properties have flood insurance -- and virtually all the damage caused in New Orleans was by floods, not winds," a FEMA spokesman said.

The NFIP program also only offers up to $250,000 for homeowners to rebuild damaged properties, and up to $100,000 to replace contents.

Risk modeler Risk Management Solutions has estimated that 150,000 properties have been flooded in New Orleans.

But widespread flooding, debris, power outages and a lack of lodging could prevent damage assessments for weeks.

Early estimates expect Katrina to be the most costly U.S. storm, with insured losses of more than $25 billion -- topping insured losses of $21 billion from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

"This is going to be one of the, if not the, most costly natural disaster in the United states," said Jeanne Salvatore, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute.

Salvatore said each claim would be have to handled on a case-by-case basis to see if the damage was caused by water, winds, or a combination of both. Some properties were destroyed by fire.

Homeowners without flood coverage whose homes were water damaged will have to rebuild using their own funds.

In past catastrophes, insurers have covered about 60 percent of total economic loss, but this could be considerably less with Katrina because so much of the damage has been caused by flooding, which is not covered by the insurers.

Instead, business claims, such as insurance for business interruption, could represent about 50 percent of claims, up from 30 percent after previous hurricanes.

 

LOST MEMORIES

People who rent properties are not insured for flooding.

Bedonna Wakeman, 56, a street artist, was renting an apartment in the Marigny area that was badly affected but she was out of town when the Katrina pummeled the U.S Gulf Coast.

"I have lost everything I own -- from my mother and father's wedding picture to the 12 canvases I had painted for a new show," Wakeman said from her son's apartment in New York.

"It's just so hard to fathom that it could be two months, six months, or a year before we are allowed back. No one knows."

Hurricane Katrina is likely to put further upward pressure on insurance rates, which were already rising in the Gulf states and the Southeast, by reminding insurers that too much exposure to coastal areas can be risky.

But the National Association of Insurance Commissioners said the property and casualty industry had adequate capital and liquidity required to withstand even the record losses expected to stem from Katrina. The industry has $425 billion in reserves, according to second-quarter figures.

However, residents who managed to leave the city to watch the disaster unfold from a safe distance said their losses were nothing compared with the suffering of those left behind, with flooding wiping out many of the poorer neighborhoods.

"You are just looking into the face of death when you see those people still there," Wakeman said.

    New Orleans residents lament lack of insurance, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T165700Z_01_BAU460930_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BIZFEATURE-KATRINA-HOMEOWNERS-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

US accepts offer of UN help

in Katrina aftermath

 

Sun Sep 4, 2005
2:54 PM ET
Reuters

 

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The Bush administration, long critical of the United Nations, has accepted a U.N. offer of help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and a U.N. team has gone to Washington to see how it can complement American efforts.

The United Nations on Sunday announced the United States had accepted its aid offer and said its staff will be based at the USAID Hurricane Operations Center, where international assistance is being coordinated.

U.N. officials, often criticized by Republicans in Washington, said the world body's teams could be useful in coordinating and setting priorities for foreign aid offers.

They "are ready to provide emergency staff and a wide variety of relief supplies as and when necessary," the U.N. statement said.

On Friday Secretary-General Kofi Annan told President George W. Bush that a U.N. task force was at work in anticipation of U.S. requests for assistance and expertise.

The task force found that U.N. agencies could supply water storage tanks, water purification tablets, high energy biscuits, generators, planes, tents and other emergency supplies as well as experienced staff members, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

She said that the United Nations had disaster teams trained to evaluate needs and coordinate aid, including over 100 experts specializing in floods and earthquakes. The United Nations sent five teams to the Indian Ocean area in December after the earthquake-caused tsunami and flooding.

Annan last week issued a statement offering the United States "any assistance that the United Nations can give."

"We will be happy to work with other parts of the international community to support the efforts of President Bush and his administration, the American Red Cross, and other U.S. relief organizations who have been our partners in the past," Annan said.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs known as OCHA, is chairing the task force, which includes the World Food Program, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In a reversal, the United States, a major world donor itself, last week let it be known it would accept help from a variety of nations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided "no offer that can help alleviate the suffering of the people in the afflicted area will be refused," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Thursday.

Some 60 nations have offered help, from longtime American friends such as Japan, Germany, Canada, France and Britain as well as Cuban President Fidel Castro, who is willing to donate doctors and medicine and the Venezuelan government, frequently criticized by the Bush administration.

    US accepts offer of UN help in Katrina aftermath, R, 4.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-04T185509Z_01_BAU468038_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-AID-UN-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

A Delicate Balance

Is Undone in a Flash,

and a Battered City Waits

 

September 4, 2005

The New York Times

By PETER APPLEBOME,

CHRISTOPHER DREW,

JERE LONGMAN

and ANDREW REVKIN

This article was written and reported

by Peter Applebome, Christopher Drew,

Jere Longman and Andrew C. Revkin.

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - They waited, and they waited, and then they waited some more in the 90-degree heat, as many as 5,000 people huddled at a highway underpass on Interstate 10, waiting for buses that never arrived to take them away from the storm they could not escape.

Babies cried. The sick huddled in the shade in wheelchairs or rested on cots. Dawn Ray, 40, was in tears, looking after an autistic niece who had soiled herself and her son who is blind and has cerebral palsy. A few others, less patient, simply started walking west with nowhere to go, like a man pushing a bike in one hand and pulling a shopping cart in another. But most just waited with resigned patience - sad, angry, incredulous, scared, exhausted, people who seemed as discarded as the bottles of water and food containers that littered the ground.

"Disease, germs," one woman, Claudette Paul, said, covering her mouth with a cloth, her voice smoldering with anger. "We need help. We don't live like this in America."

New Orleans has always existed in a delicate balance between land and water, chaos and order, black and white, the very rich and the very poor. It has been the lacy ironwork of French Quarter balconies, the magical shops and galleries on Royal Street and the magisterial cuisine not just at Galatoire's or Mr. B's or Commander's Palace but also at humble po-boy joints and neighborhood restaurants in every part of town.

But it has also been a place of crushing poverty, of dreary housing projects and failing schools, where crime and violence have been an incessant shadow in daily life, as much a part of the local sensibility as the smothering blanket of heat and humidity.

This week, bit by bit, that delicate balance came completely undone. Water took over earth when levees broke, putting 80 percent of the city under water. The mix of fatalism and bravado that allowed the city's biggest fear - a killer hurricane - to become the marquee drink of Bourbon Street gave way to terror and despair and horrifying spasms of looting and violence. New Orleans became unrecognizable not just physically, but psychologically as well. Faced with a disaster of biblical proportions, everything fell apart, and government was either overmatched or slow to the task.

The flood-control apparatus, which government officials and scientists had long said was inadequate, gave way, but federal engineers did not even realize that a major breach had occurred until the next morning, when citizens began reporting rising flows on Web logs. The city's evacuation plan worked, except for the thousands who were too poor or disabled to find their own way out of the city before the storm. The radios and cellphones that officials and police officers use to communicate failed, erasing any remaining semblance of authority in a city beset by chaos and crime. And finally, a full federal response came only after the dialogue between local and federal officials devolved into anger.

Just two months ago, further evidence emerged that the city and its levees were sinking, increasing the risk of a catastrophic flood, even as federal money to protect the city was being cut afresh. As flood waters rose on Tuesday, Senator Mary L. Landrieu tried to impress upon colleagues in Washington that this was America's tsunami, but she said that the more she pleaded, the more she felt she was not being heard. Most local officials who were supposed to be running the city eventually left, mainly because they could not communicate with the outside world, whose help they desperately needed. It took four days for National Guard troops to arrive to restore order as looting and lawlessness spiraled out of control.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin said federal aid began flowing after he spoke by telephone to President Bush and told him bluntly: "Man, this is a mess, and I am not getting the resources I need. I need help, and if I don't get the help I need this city is going to blow up and this is going to be a national disgrace."

New Orleans, Flannery O'Connor once wrote, is a place where the devil's existence is freely recognized.

But not this devil. Not the devil of bloated bodies floating in muddy waters washing lazily over submerged pickups and campers, of corpses being eaten by rats as they decomposed on city streets, of people dying in wheelchairs outside the convention center as friends poured water over their heads to try to keep them alive.

Not the devil who left Bill and Gail Orris sitting exhausted, dazed after escaping through the hole they poked through the roof of their home in nearby Chalmette, while their 20-year-old daughter, Lennie, unable to walk and mentally disabled, sucked her thumb and jerked spasmodically back and forth in her wheelchair in the hot sun.

Not the devil who left Catherine Weiss, at 75, apologizing profusely for not having her teeth with her - she had left in a hurry, after all, when the water filled her house like a bathtub - and panicked about what had happened to her nephew, Michael Phillippello, who collapsed as a boat ferried them across the river to safety.

Not the man on talk radio, stranded in his house but begging people not to try to come back to see what they had left behind.

"It's like the five stages of accepting death," he said. "First, I was thinking if I had enough ice to save the good shrimp and tilapia, then it's whether I can save the house, now it's about my life. If I had two AK's I'd feel safe here. As it is, someone could pop me off, and I could end up bloated, no one would check for bullet holes, and I'd just end up in some potter's field. You can feel human life kind of receding like the waters."

The storm that brought those waters began as Tropical Depression 12, yet another swirl of tropical turbulence in the southeastern Bahamas. But at each step of the way Hurricane Katrina seemed to overachieve. It hit Florida with more power than expected, killing nine people and knocking out electricity for a million more. Then it crossed back into the Gulf of Mexico, intensifying into one of the strongest storms on record as, in a horrific bit of timing, it churned directly over the "loop current," a great, deep whorl of tropics-hot seawater that pulses in between the Yucatán and Cuba each year and then stays south of Louisiana into late summer. Often, storms weaken as they suck up cool water that lies stratified beneath the warm surface. But in the loop, even the depths are hot.

"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," said Mayor Nagin, who urged people on Saturday to leave town and then gave an evacuation order on Sunday, when it looked as if a Category 5 storm, with winds as high as 175 miles an hour, could be headed for New Orleans. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."

Many of the 1.3 million people in the metropolitan area did that. But, as always, many did not. This surprised exactly no one. In a 2003 Louisiana State University poll, 31 percent of New Orleans residents said they would stay in the city even if a Category 4 hurricane struck.

Many stayed because they felt they had no choice.

The survey found that those who said they would stay tended be poor, less educated, disabled, older, childless or isolated, or had lived in the city for a long period. Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans lives below the poverty line, compared with 9 percent nationwide, according to census figures. Twenty-four percent of its adults are disabled, compared with 19 percent nationwide. An estimated 50,000 households in New Orleans do not have cars.

And there was another bit of bad timing: the hurricane came at the end of the month, when those depending on public assistance are waiting for their next checks, typically mailed on the first of every month.

"They wouldn't have had any money to evacuate," said Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell.

Experts disagreed on whether there were adequate evacuation plans for those most in need. Brian Wolshon, an L.S.U. civil engineering professor who consulted on the state evacuation plan, said the city relied almost entirely on a "Good Samaritan scenario," in which residents would check on elderly and disabled neighbors and drive them out of the city if necessary.

Planning was stymied by a shortage of buses, he said. As many as 2,000 buses, far more than New Orleans possessed, would be needed to evacuate an estimated 100,000 elderly and disabled people.

But Chester Wilmot, an L.S.U. civil engineering professor who studies evacuation plans, said the city successfully improvised. He said witnesses described seeing city buses shuttle residents to the Superdome before Hurricane Katrina struck.

"What I've heard is that there were buses, but they weren't very well utilized," Professor Wilmot said. "They literally carried very few people."

The two professors agreed that the evacuation of New Orleans residents with cars went well. They said a new "contraflow plan," which used all lanes of I-10 for outbound traffic, avoided the kind of traffic that snarled during a voluntary evacuation of the city during Hurricane Ivan in 2001.

"What you're going to find is that everyone who wanted to get out, got out," said Professor Wolshon. "Except for the people who didn't have access to transportation."

But many other stayed because they wanted to stay. Because their friends were staying. Because they were worried about looters if they left. Because they felt they could protect their property by staying home. They stayed because they had elderly parents who were going to stay, because they thought they knew which parts of the city flooded and which did not. Or because they always had.

"Hard-headed, honey," said Mrs. Weiss, when asked why she rode out the storm in the same brick home where she has stayed for storms for 41 years. "From now on, I'm leaving for a tropical storm."

And then there were the tourists, many of whom came with only the haziest sense of what they were facing and not the slightest idea of what they should do. When Chris and Tammy Distefano, Kris and Mike Miller and Chad and Michelle Toomey arrived from York, Pa., on Saturday morning for their first trip to New Orleans, they asked the limo driver, Joseph, what to expect. Not much, he answered. The storms always went somewhere else. He took them on a tour and dropped them off at their hotel. They dropped off their bags and walked over to Pat O'Brien's for a hurricane, the mix of dark rum, passion fruit and other juices that people drink from plastic cups as they tour the French Quarter. They were scared to death as the storm rattled their hotel, shutting off the power, Sunday night and Monday morning.

But as Monday rolled into afternoon and the storm moved west, people peeked outside to find streets battered, trees down, roots torn up, but the city mostly dry. It looked like the N'awlins luck had held again.

 

Thriving on Bluff

And why not? For generations - centuries, really - this city had thrived in part on the poker-hand bluff, its sheer allure masking its starker realities.

Eighteenth-century accounts sent back to France as the first settlers carved into the Mississippi silt focused on the fanciful, not the real, said Craig E. Colten, a geographer at L.S.U. and the author of a new book on the city, "An Unnatural Metropolis."

Few entrepreneurs seeking to sell the idea of building a town on this swampy island mention that as they dug into the earth, they came upon recently buried tree trunks - a sign that they were standing on land laid down by epic floods.

And as the city grew, wedged between the Mississippi River and the broad, shallow Lake Pontchartrain, so too did efforts to ring it with earthen levees. But the very expansion of the city contributed to the rising flood risk, Dr. Colten said. As swampier spots were drained, the drying soil compressed, causing reclaimed land to sink ever more.

In the 20th century, more land was drained as the city's legendary system of pump stations and purging canals spread. But that made it sink all that much faster.

Hurricanes feeding on warmth from the gulf rumbled by most summers. Some potent ones smashed other Gulf Coast towns, like Galveston, Tex., in 1900, and storms in 1947 and 1965, struck New Orleans directly, but with survivable intensity. Hurricane Betsy, in September 1965, finally spurred a federal hurricane protection plan for Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity.

But the system that emerged was a compromise from the start, cut back by competing Army Corps of Engineer projects, by pressure from local communities that had to pay part of the tab, and by the tendency to focus more on current costs than on future risks.

Officials settled on a system of levees sufficient to protect against another Hurricane Betsy - roughly akin to what is now called a Category 3 storm, the kind that statistics estimate might strike New Orleans once in 200 years.

A lull in Atlantic hurricane frequency from around 1970 until 1995 probably contributed to complacency, said Bob Sheets, a former director of the National Hurricane Center.

But more recently, a string of studies found that after 1995, a natural Atlantic cycle had switched from the pattern that stifles storms to one that nurtured them. Other studies pointed to an eventual increase in storm intensity from global warming.

Computer simulations showed ever more clearly how New Orleans could swamp like a low boat in high seas under the assault from certain hurricanes.

Still, the compromises over flood protection persisted. After a scare from Hurricane Georges in 1998, Congress authorized the Corps of Engineers to begin studying bolstering the city's defenses against a Category 5 storm. But money for that study, and simply for finishing the last components of the original plan to protect against a Category 3 storm, dribbled in district at a fraction of annual requests.

In 2004, with insufficient money to close contracts with the companies doing the work, Alfred Naomi, a senior district project manager, told the local East Jefferson Levee Authority, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune: "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement."

This year, the New Orleans district was hit by a $71.2 million cut. Without more federal money, the district reported in May, the raising of various levees and other "pressing needs" would not be met. In June, at a meeting of emergency planners and hurricane experts, Roy Dokka, an L.S.U. engineer who has spent much of his career refining measurements of elevations around the gulf, presented findings that parts of the coast and New Orleans were sinking 2 to 50 times faster than earlier estimates.

Many spots were two to four feet lower than anyone thought, recalled Stephen Baig, a National Hurricane Center meteorologist, a chilling hint that calculations of the flood potential of particular storms, and the vulnerability of levees, might be significantly underestimated.

"For levee heights, and for our models," Dr. Baig recalled, "that could mean the difference between overtopping and not overtopping."

On Monday, there was nothing dramatic when the levee failed, no sound of an explosion or a crash. At midday, as the storm was blowing out of the city, the Web site of The Times-Picayune quoted residents near the 17th Street canal saying that after experiencing only minor flooding from the storm, suddenly the water in their yards was rising from what seemed to be a breach in the canal. One man said later that afternoon that the water was rising one brick on his house every 20 minutes.

By 4:20 p.m. on Monday, the Web site reported that the water had already rolled through the nearby Lakeview neighborhood and on down to the center of the city. By then, the water in Lakeview had reached the second stories of many houses. The berms along Lake Pontchartrain had held. The problem was in canals that had been built to carry water pumped from city drains out to the lake. But on Monday, with the lake rising, the flow in the canals reversed.

A surge, probably 10 feet above normal, flowed in from the lake, rising until it began cascading over the top of the sleek, butter-colored walls that stood between the east side of the 17th Street Canal and the city's Bucktown neighborhood.

Greg Breerwood, a deputy district engineer for the Corps, said it appeared that as the weight of the water pressed on the high part of the wall, the water pouring over the top hit the ground on the other side and ate away at the soil supporting its base.

A section of the wall pushed in and the rush of water turned that breach into a gash as broad as a football field is long. The lake and below-sea-level city were becoming one body of water.

"We heard about the flood wall failing," Mr. Breerwood said. "Then we realized there was an open corridor to the city."

 

A Reluctance to Leave

Once the levee broke, most long-time New Orleanians knew that the city could unravel quickly, with nothing to stop the lake from pouring into neighborhoods that were still dry and surging across a huge city park and into downtown.

Ms. Landrieu, a Democrat who grew up in New Orleans, whose father, Moon Landrieu, had been mayor, whose brother, Mitch, is currently Louisiana's lieutenant governor, was at the federal and state command center in Baton Rouge when the first warnings about the break flashed on Monday afternoon.

Ms. Landrieu knew how reluctant people could be to leave. This was the first time her own father had ever left during a hurricane. She said in an interview that she knew instantly that thousands who thought they had survived the storm would now be trapped in their houses, racing the rising floodwaters to their second floors, or to their attics or rooftops.

But she and other local officials suddenly faced a new problem: convincing federal officials that just one break in one canal with such a mundane name could bring on a cataclysm.

"I have been with Michael Brown since the minute he landed in this center," Ms. Landrieu said Friday in Baton Rouge, referring to the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "and I have been telling him from the moment he arrived about the urgency of the situation."

But, she said, "I just have to tell you that he had a difficult time understanding the enormity of the task before us."

Natalie Rule, a spokeswoman for FEMA, disputed Ms. Landrieu's account. "There was no doubt in our minds that a Category 3, 4 or 5 headed for New Orleans was going to be dangerous," Ms. Rule said. She said agency officials told state and local leaders: "We will be there for you. You just go for it. We've got your back."

But if they did, no one knew it. And as the flood-control system broke down, so soon did everything else.

There was no immediate announcement that the levee had been breeched or what it meant, but different people realized at different times that maybe the bullet had not been dodged, after all. The prestorm evacuation, as chaotic as it seemed to anyone stuck on the road, was still part of a plan. Now , a whole new ad hoc stage began.

The tourists from York ventured out Monday to see gangs of youths, maybe four, then a dozen, then another four, breaking into the Canal Place Mall, home to high-dollar retailers like Saks and Gucci, Brooks Brothers and Ann Taylor. Worried that things were slipping out of control, they managed to make a plane reservation at $637 a ticket to get out of town. A local family staying at the hotel drove them out for $100 a head, the best money they ever spent. There had been no plans for what to do with stranded tourists, and before long, the hotels were closing down.

With the Superdome overloaded and without food or air-conditioning, the hotels guided visitors to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, a huge rectangular building that stretches about a mile and is several hundred yards wide. It has been used for conventions with more than 70,000 people. But soon the situation there devolved into anarchy, too, to the point that officials, often circumspect and cagey with the news media, were just the opposite.

"The tourists are walking around there and as soon as these individuals see them, they're being preyed upon," said P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police. "They are beating, they are raping them in the streets."

 

The Flooded Ninth

Before dawn on Tuesday, Ms. Landrieu's brother, the lieutenant governor, and Sgt. Troy McConnell of the state police left Baton Rouge to assist in the rescue of flooded residents of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Mr. Landrieu knew the city intimately. But now he was navigating the Lower Ninth Ward not by car, but by boat. The four men on board would cut the engine and float in watery silence, listening for calls for help from inside houses or attics.

People yelled from rooftops or waved shirts or rags, as if they were flags, from vents in the attic. A few wooden houses floated like buoys.

It had become so hot inside the fetid houses that some residents shivered in the cold water as they swam to the rescue boat. One woman was so heavy and immobile that 12 men were needed to lift her off a gurney.

They must have rescued 100 people, but by the end of the day the mood began to change to one of irritated impatience. "By dusk, people were getting agitated and upset," Sergeant McConnell said. "They had been in those houses for two days with nothing to eat or drink."

Soon there was a small army of evacuees, refugees with no place to go who were deposited on the island of dry land at the edge of I-10 in Metairie. During the long, hot afternoon and into the humid night, the crowd swelled to 2,000 hungry, flood-weary people, residents of the northern neighborhoods of New Orleans and of St. Bernard Parish to the northeast who had been plucked from their roofs and attics.

Barefoot women cradling naked, screaming babies limped from a National Guard rescue truck, everything they owned on their backs after 36 hours of watching the floodwaters breach their doors, topple their refrigerators and drive them to the only high ground available - roofs, trees, attics and bridge spans. Behind them, elderly couples in nightgowns and slippers leaned on each other for support as they walked slowly from the helicopter that rescued them. Many clutched garbage bags holding all the possessions they could salvage; many had no more than damp tank tops and shorts clinging to their bodies. Most were hungry, thirsty and alone.

Chermaine Daniels, 49, had left her flooded one-story house in the Ninth Ward on Tuesday morning, gashing her ankle on a fence as she struggled to swim to a neighbor's two-story house. Later that day, Ms. Daniels and several others were rescued by a uniformed officer in a boat and deposited at an I-10 encampment.

"What do we do now?" she asked the boat driver.

"You're on your own," the driver replied.

 

An Array of Complaints

Increasingly, local officials also felt that they were on their own.

On Tuesday night, Mayor Nagin complained that while federal officials had agreed that morning that stemming the flow from the breach was the highest priority, "it didn't get done."

Ms. Landrieu said she had talked to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, on Tuesday and told him: " 'You remember when I flew over the tsunami with you? This was worse than anything we saw.' He said, 'No, you've got to be kidding.' I said, 'I know it's hard to grasp.' And he said, 'We're on it.' " Mr. Frist's office did not respond to requests for comment.

By Wednesday, with little visible response from the federal government, Ms. Landrieu said that she talked to FEMA officials. "I started to sense they were thinking I was a little overwrought, that maybe I was exaggerating a little bit," she said. When she pressed Mr. Brown on when he was going to finally get buses to pick up the people who had been trapped at the Superdome, "he just mumbled," she said.

Mayor Nagin said that he could not remember whether he spoke to President Bush on Wednesday or Thursday, but that the president acknowledged the federal government could have done more and promised to fix the situation.

By then, the state leaders also had an array of complaints. People were infuriated about the lack of National Guard troops to keep order and end the looting. How could the Corps of Engineers, which builds and takes care of the levees, have not had a contingency plan for dealing with a levee breach, especially in such a critical spot? And each time another federal agency offered to help, FEMA seemed to delay in providing guarantees that it would reimburse them later.

For instance, a defense agency had packages of communications gear ready to deploy and held them while awaiting FEMA's approval, according to two congressional aides.

Inside New Orleans, city officials were trying to keep some semblance of control over their city, and failing. The most basic reason was a massive breakdown of the communications system. Cellphones failed and satellite phones did not arrive for several days, according to Representative Charlie Melancon, a Democrat who represents suburban New Orleans.

Ms. Landrieu said on Wednesday: "Our communications systems are not functioning adequately; they are compromised. Not Louisiana's communications system. The United States of America. We didn't have the right communications system for 9/11. We don't have the right communications system now. By that I mean the simplest things. A police chief in a city talking to a mayor in a city wasn't happening while this was going on because their cellphones were down and their radios didn't communicate."

The flooded city was also becoming lawless. Even in better times, New Orleans has more than its share of crime, with one of the nation's highest big city murder rates. Now, as law enforcement was all but swept away by the storm, there were acts of desperation and acts of depravity.

As water rose into his home on Tuesday, Louis Martin Sr., a 36-year-old truck driver, said he commandeered a flatbed truck to rescue his family from the second floor of a neighboring home. He then made several trips, ferrying neighbors to the convention center at the instructions of a police officer. By now the crowd there had reached about 25,000 people.

On Wednesday, Mr. Martin said, armed youths appeared when evacuation buses didn't. "They had guns and they were looking for someone," he said. "I saw two boys running. There were shots."

At the convention center, food and water grew scarce. Dead bodies sagged in wheelchairs. Residents reported hearing burst of sporadic gunfire. A number of city police officers walked off their jobs in despair.

By Wednesday, many city officials left for Baton Rouge, mainly because they could not communicate with the outside world and they needed to work with federal and state leaders directing operations from the command center there, said Ms. Hedge-Morrell, the councilwoman. In Baton Rouge, she said, "we could yell and scream and keep fussing at them." By Thursday, local officials were yelling and screaming in public.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, complained that the whole recovery operation had been "carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days," and "the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us any resources for security." He added, "It's like FEMA has never been to a hurricane."

 

Finally, Hope

Friday, for the first time, there was a dose of hope.

President Bush's visit to New Orleans, where he met with Mayor Nagin, and to the rest of the tattered Gulf Coast region, helped calm some of the tensions. Referring to the federal emergency actions, Mr. Bush said: "What is not working right, we're going to make it right."

The first sizable contingent of troops rolled into town and restored a measure of order to the convention center. There was food and water. There was a sense that maybe, things at least would stop getting worse.

But at a time when the nation fears disaster as never before, there was a horrific view of how unprepared emergency preparedness can be.

Louisiana's other United States senator, David Vitter, called FEMA's response completely dysfunctional, completely overwhelmed. He said the death toll might reach 10,000 unless the rescue is speeded up. "Hopefully today is the turnaround, that is my prayer," Mr. Vitter, a Republican, told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush.

But this sense of expectancy dissipated at the causeway on I-10 where the crowd of refugees had swollen from about 2,500 to 5,000, according to Lt. Michael R. Field of the Louisiana State Police.

"It's worse today," he said. "It's not evacuating to move people from one part of the city to another. We need to get them out of this situation." "

Some of the sick were being helicoptered to a field hospital at the airport. But Dr. Alan Hinton, a surgeon volunteering his time, said it was difficult to tell who was most in need of help. "There's no organization," he said.

Jerome Wise, 46, who said he retired with a disability as a postal worker, tripped as he climbed out of a helicopter and shattered the one possession he had taken from his flooded home a framed family photograph. His wife and seven of his children were somewhere in Mississippi. His eighth child, Calvin Holmes, was with him. He had been born 19 years ago on this day, but there was not much to celebrate here.

"Doesn't feel like a birthday," Mr. Holmes said.

 

Reporting for this article was contributed by Felicity Barringer from New Orleans, Susan Saulny from Baton Rouge, La., and David Rohde from New York.

    A Delicate Balance Is Undone in a Flash, and a Battered City Waits, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04reconstruct.html

 

 

 

 

 

French Quarter

Becomes Oasis of Wary Calm

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Marty Montgomery stood on his second-floor balcony on Friday night, playing blues on his harmonica into empty French Quarter streets that have never seemed so dark, so desolate - or so threatening.

On the table beside him sat a shotgun that he calls kindness.

"If something happens and I have to use it, I'll be killing them with kindness," Mr. Montgomery said, laughing with a tinge of menace.

Life is not so easy these days in the French Quarter, the district of all-night bars, historic homes and voodoo traditions that is the oldest, rowdiest and, these days, driest part of storm-battered New Orleans.

Outside, the Quarter's elegant 150-year-old buildings look relatively unruffled, except for some loosened bricks, having been spared the worst of Hurricane Katrina's winds and sitting high enough to have avoided the flooding. Ceramic flowerpots on every other balcony seem not to have budged, gaslights still burn outside doors, Preservation Hall stands solidly intact, seemingly undamaged.

But inside the gated buildings, the Quarter's few remaining residents feel under siege. Yet their lives go on. And because this is the French Quarter, they go on with a certain style.

Inside Mr. Montgomery's building at 519 St. Philip Street, five small loft apartments built around a courtyard, 10 people have banded together with a blend of military precision and New Orleans panache to create an oasis of civility in a city with no running water, no electricity, a dwindling supply of food and a spreading sense of chaos.

Every night they eat hot dinners, prepared over a barbecue grill and served with white wine: ravioli with ragout one day, crab cakes and andouille sausage on another. They have moved a yellow portable toilet from a nearby construction site to the curb outside, scrubbing it clean after every use. For baths, they have filled spray bottles with water and a hint of bleach.

"I'd rather have burned skin than die of illness," said Stephanie McCorkle, 42, a voodoo devotee who led tours of haunted houses in the Quarter before the storm.

And all night, every night, Mr. Montgomery, a former sailor who waited tables before the storm, keeps watch over the block, his shotgun and harmonica to keep him company. Except for a tavern next door, a corner hotel where tarot card readers live and one house down the block, the street is empty.

Indeed, the block is so quiet these days that Mr. Montgomery, 49, has discovered night sounds he did not know were there, before the music stopped: the croak of frogs, the chirp of crickets, the squeak of river rats.

Now he listens to the frogs for warning signs: when they grow quiet, he knows people are approaching.

Though 519's residents knew each other from working at a nearby restaurant, the Market Café, they were never particularly close - indeed, Mr. Montgomery and the group's cook, John Tibbetts, barely spoke.

Now, they do everything communally, down to sharing the dry sneakers, clean T-shirts, food and water they have taken from stores. They justify the looting as necessary to their survival. "I'm not proud of it," Mr. Tibbetts, 50, said. "But we do what we have to do."

Mr. Montgomery, a tall, wiry, intense and commanding man who rarely wears a shirt these days, is tacitly accepted as the group's general, setting rules that govern personal hygiene, security and access by "outsiders" to their building. His reputation as an enforcer has gained him renown within the neighborhood.

Friday evening, when looters broke into a liquor store around the corner, the manager came looking for Mr. Montgomery, who chased the looters off, shouting, "If you come back, I'll waste you."

Then he flagged down passing police officers, who briefly detained one looter, scolded him loudly and then released him. Unperturbed, Mr. Montgomery returned to the liquor store and helped board up the door.

"We call them the St. Philip's militia," said Dewanda Dey, the wife of the liquor store manager.

There are signs of life elsewhere in the Quarter. At the corner of Bourbon and Orleans Streets, Johnny White's Sports Bar remained open during the storm - and all day, every day, since.

Early Saturday, three tipsy patrons sat at the elbow-worn bar under a ceiling featuring photographs of bar regulars. Five others stood in the street sipping warm drinks. To fight the city's gloom, its patrons plan to hold their own Decadence Day parade on Sunday to mark the annual gay Mardi Gras. "There won't be feathered hats and tubas," said Joseph Bellomy, 24, a bartender. "But we'll do the best we can."

Watching over them all is Ride Hamilton, a firefighter who splits his time between Sioux Falls, S.D., and an apartment down the block from Johnny White's. Though he does not drink alcohol, he hangs out at the bar because he adores its clientele.

Like a supply sergeant, Mr. Hamilton, 29, has stocked his apartment building with water, dry goods and bath products for him and his friends. Each morning, dressed in his blue firefighter's shirt, black leather pants and black boots, his right eyelid pierced with three silver hoops and his long hair pulled into a ponytail, he drives his Ford Escort to go "shopping" for more.

At the stores, he sees looters with shopping carts who bid one another "good morning." Like the residents of 519, he justifies his work as a necessary evil to help friends survive deprivation that could last months.

"Call it 'gathering supplies,' " he said. "Just don't call it looting."

Several residents of 519 hope to leave New Orleans as soon as friends or relatives can come pick them up. (None own cars.) But Mr. Montgomery says he will stay, confident that his beloved city, and particularly the French Quarter, will rebuild.

"Someday," he said, "the lights will come back on. The music will start back up. And life will go on. And I'll have ice in my glass again."

French Quarter Becomes Oasis of Wary Calm, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04quarter.html

 

 

 

 

 

In Houston Astrodome,

Safe but Restless Refuge

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

 

HOUSTON, Sept. 3 - Sleep did not come easily to the orphans of the storm.

Deep into the wee hours of Saturday, five days after they had lost their homes and all their possessions to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of exhausted evacuees from New Orleans bused to the Astrodome here lay on green cots staring numbly, playing cards, reading the Bible or aimlessly pacing the vast arena, as if after all the sleepless nights they had forgotten how to sleep.

Or maybe it was the stark stadium lighting that dimmed but never quite faded to dark.

Some milled with a purpose, seeking rides to Austin or news of the missing with cardboard signs in grim shorthand. "Blanca Ducree." "Jinfeng." High above the crowd in the 62,000-seat arena, which could swallow an 18-story building, electronic signs that in happier days flashed baseball and football scores were only slightly more elaborate: "Donsha looking for Billy Parker."

Well after midnight, high time for an 8-year-old in braids to be tucked into bed, Yolanda Paul circled the Astrodome hoping to find lost relatives, including her daddy, Larry Paul. "In my heart, I believe they got out," said her mother, Rainee Grant, who had driven in from St. Louis with Yolanda and her baby sister to search the shelters, so far in vain.

In contrast with the mayhem in the New Orleans convention center and the squalor of the Superdome that many evacuees evoked with horror, the Astrodome radiated security and services.

Dozens of Houston police officers patrolled the floor and concourses. There were a few arrests for fights but nothing worse, the officers said.

A clinic staffed by dozens of volunteer doctors and nurses from Houston's huge medical establishment dispensed medication and treated a range of ailments and needs that included rashes and infections from contaminated floodwaters, seizures, dehydration, dialysis, chest pains, drug and alcohol withdrawal and psychiatric disorders. There were 85 showers and hundreds of toilets. The entire fourth tier was given over to hot food service - beef tips and Cajun rice on Friday night - augmented by boxes of apples and bags of baby carrots available throughout the night. The telephone company SBC set up dozens of phones for free long-distance calls. Legions of volunteers roamed the aisles and concourses mopping floors, emptying trash bins and handing out clothing, diapers, toys, water, juice, soft drinks and snacks.

Some gestures seemed even more generous than others. Bob Chrane, a Houston lawyer, posted his calling card and telephone numbers with the offer: "take 1 wheelchair + 1 attendant; smoker and dog O.K."

Karen Wakefield, a volunteer for the Red Cross, handed Henry Becker, a contractor who had escaped the flood with a neighbor, some stomach medication but had disappointing news on his request for reading glasses. "I looked high and low and couldn't find any," she said.

Gloria Brown, minister of the House of Joy Fellowship in Houston with, she said, a diploma in clowning, walked among the cots handing out plastic crucifixes and promising to return, if officials approved, with her clown act to cheer up the crowd.

Shawande Graps, 25, and two other mothers evacuated from New Orleans with 10 children among them were on cots on an upstairs tier when Martha Hicks, 24, a volunteer majoring in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, passed by with a carton of clothes. "You like Spider-Man?" she asked Ms. Graps's son, Shondell, 3. He nodded gravely. Ms. Hicks pulled out a Spider-Man T-shirt and handed it to him.

Ms. Graps seemed overwhelmed. "When we were home, he watched Spider-Man all day," she said. "I just thank the Lord. This is a nice spot to go to sleep."

Mayor Bill White and other Houston officials who vowed Friday to throw open the city's arms to the victims of Hurricane Katrina said that the Astrodome, which pioneered the domed stadium in 1965 but had lost its teams to more modern arenas, could shelter as many as 18,000 storm survivors. But with other emergency centers opening up at the newer Reliant Park next door and the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown, considerably fewer than that bedded down in the Astrodome on Friday night.

Still, the green concrete arena floor was chockablock with cots, and several hundred people who gave up waiting for more cots to arrive ended up sleeping in the padded red seats.

That led to some grumbling.

Robin Gail Petit, 51, who is diabetic and takes nine medicines, fell on some steps, which required a trip to a Houston hospital. When she got back several hours later, she said, someone had taken her cot. She timidly repossessed it, hoping the new claimant would not return.

But many of the visitors seemed too absorbed in the grim circumstances to complain.

Covil Joseph, 58, a video director wearing a castoff T-shirt, said that he and his sister and their 81-year-old mother in a wheelchair had been plucked from their house by a boatman, then were refused refuge by a hospital and spent seven hours tied to a bridge while being lashed by the storm. They were rescued but he said he had no idea where his mother and sister were taken.

Chanelle Jones, 31, with three boys and a girl and four months pregnant, said her back was so hurt from sleeping on the ground that she had trouble standing. Her husband, a temporary worker, had barely been able to support the family before the storm.

"I lost everything I ever worked for," Ms. Jones said through tears. "All my children's clothes, their birth certificates, everything - everything is gone except us.

"My children are always asking me: 'Why are you crying?' "

Ivory Joyce, 62, who had worked for the city on a garbage truck, said he was missing important medicine. "I'm a suicide patient," he said. "I've talked to a psychiatrist."

Arthur Mack, 64, tried to read "Death Squadron," a World War II novel, but it appeared to have been in a war zone of its own, pages falling apart as he turned them.

Cecile Conway, 44, who swam to safety but lost track of family members, sat reading the Bible, marking Psalm 6 with green pencil for emphasis: "O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, nor chastise me in Your hot displeasure. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak. O Lord, heal me for my bones are troubled."

Yong Han, a doctor at Texas Children's Hospital who volunteered at the clinic after a full shift at work, said a woman unable to locate her family members had been left to care for 11 grandchildren. And, he said, two women in the shelter, unable to cope with their stress, had given up their children to foster care. "I do missionary work in the poorest part of Mexico," Dr. Han said, "but I got to tell you, this is pretty bad."

As in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, some of the most poignant testimonies were those pinned to a message wall and taped to surfaces throughout the arena. "Kentrell Hyams and Shawntrel Hyams," read one anguished appeal, "I'm looking for y'all. I'm staying at Reliant Arena. Your mom, Cheryl. I love y'all. I'm staying on cot. I have cot ready for y'all all the way in back."

    In Houston Astrodome, Safe but Restless Refuge, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04astro.html

 

 

 

 

 

Law Officers,

Overwhelmed,

Are Quitting the Force

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said Saturday.

Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.

The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.

P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, said most of his officers were staying at their posts. But in an unusual note of sympathy for a top police official, he said it was understandable that many were frustrated. He said morale was "not very good."

"If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don't think you would be too happy either," Mr. Compass said in an interview. "Our vehicles can't get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes."

Fire Department officials said they did not know of any firefighters who had quit. But they, too, were sympathetic to struggling emergency workers.

W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of police, said there were about 1,200 officers on duty on Saturday. He said the department was not sure how many officers had decided to abandon their posts and how many simply could not get to work.

Mr. Riley said some of the officers who left the force "couldn't handle the pressure" and were "certainly not the people we need in this department."

He said, "The others are not here because they lost a spouse, or their family or their home was destroyed."

Police officials did not identify the officers who took their lives, one on Saturday and the other the day before. But they said one had been a patrol officer, who a senior officer said "was absolutely outstanding." The other was an aide to Mr. Compass. The superintendent said his aide had lost his home in the hurricane and had been unable to find his family.

Because of the hurricane, many police officers and firefighters have been isolated and unable to report for duty. Others evacuated their families and have been unable to get back to New Orleans.

Still, some officers simply appear to have given up.

A Baton Rouge police officer said he had a friend on the New Orleans force who told him he threw his badge out a car window in disgust just after fleeing the city into neighboring Jefferson Parish as the hurricane approached. The Baton Rouge officer would not give his name, citing a department policy banning comments to the news media.

The officer said he had also heard of an incident in which two men in a New Orleans police cruiser were stopped in Baton Rouge on suspicion of driving a stolen squad car. The men were, in fact, New Orleans officers who had ditched their uniforms and were trying to reach a town in north Louisiana, the officer said.

"They were doing everything to get out of New Orleans," he said. "They didn't have the resources to do the job, or a plan, so they left."

The result is an even heavier burden on those who are patrolling the street, rescuing flood victims and trying to fight fires with no running water, no electricity, no reliable telephones.

Police and fire officials have been begging federal authorities for assistance and criticizing a lack of federal response for several days.

"We need help," said Charles Parent, the superintendent of the Fire Department. Mr. Parent again appealed in an interview on Saturday for replacement fire trucks and radio equipment from federal authorities. And Mr. Compass again appealed for more federal help.

"When I have officers committing suicide," Mr. Compass said, "I think we've reached a point when I don't know what more it's going to take to get the attention of those in control of the response."

The National Guard has come under criticism for not moving more quickly into New Orleans. Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters on Saturday that the Guard had not moved in sooner because it had not anticipated the collapse of civilian law enforcement.

Some patrol officers said morale had been low on the force even before the hurricane. One patrolman said the complaints included understaffing and a lack of equipment.

"We have to use our own shotguns," said the patrolman, who did not want to be identified by name. "This isn't theirs; this is my personal gun."

Another patrol officer said that many of the officers who had quit were younger, inexperienced officers who were overwhelmed by the task.

Some officers have expressed anger at colleagues who have stopped working. "For all you cowards that are supposed to wear the badge," one officer said on Fox News, "are you truly - can you truly wear the badge, like our motto said?"

The Police and Fire Departments are being forced to triage the calls they get for help.

The firefighters are simply not responding to some fires. In some cases, they cannot get through the flooding. But in others, they decide not to send trucks because they are needed for more serious fires.

"We can't fight every fire the way we did in the past and try to put it out," Superintendent Parent told a group of firefighters on Saturday morning at a promotion ceremony in the Algiers section of New Orleans, a dry area.

Even facing much more work than could possibly be handled, he said, it was important for him to take time out for two promotion ceremonies.

"The men need reinforcement," said Mr. Parent, who put on his last clean uniform shirt for the ceremonies elevating 22 officers to the rank of captain. "They need to see their leader and understand that the department is still here and not going to pot."

 

Susan Saulny contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., for this article, and John DeSantis from New Orleans.

Law Officers, Overwhelmed, Are Quitting the Force, NYT, 4.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04police.html

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens to a Race Deferred

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By JASON DePARLE

 

WASHINGTON

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way," said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face version of something I already knew," he said. "All the people who don't get out, or don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society," Mr. Jencks said. "But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the city morgue.

Unusually poor ( 27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000), disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or suburb. "White people don't live in New Orleans," he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it was more complicated than that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at least four generations. "But is also a multicultural society riven by race and class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money," Mr. Colten said. "But in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the people in the low areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban studies program at Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would fracture along the same lines.

AT one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington -all burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society further apart.

``Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr. Carter. ``But that sense of extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical reconstruction of New Orleans."

    What Happens to a Race Deferred, NYT, 4.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/weekinreview/04depa.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens to a Race Deferred

NYT

4.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/weekinreview/04depa.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tumult in Gulf Region

but Little Early Effect

Across the Nation

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT
and EDMUND L. ANDREWS

 

The broad American economy has largely withstood the early effects of Hurricane Katrina, even as residents of the Gulf Coast suffer through a regional economic disaster with few equals.

The flooding has displaced about one million workers in the Gulf Coast region, many of whom will not be able to resume their jobs anytime soon. While some employees of large companies are still receiving paychecks, Wal-Mart stopped paying workers in the area four days after shutting its stores, and McDonald's and UPS have not paid regular wages to idled employees since the storm hit.

The hurricane has also bottled up grain shipments on the Mississippi River, hurting farmers and grain exporters, and saddled households with even higher energy costs.

The effect of the damage to oil rigs and refineries in the gulf is the greatest uncertainty. But contrary to early fears, the nation's transportation network has not become overwhelmed so far, and despite spot shortages drivers have generally been able to buy gasoline. The price of crude oil fell 2 percent on Friday - to $67.57, up only $1 from a week ago - as a large importing terminal off the coast of Louisiana reopened and the International Energy Agency announced that it would release emergency oil supplies.

As corporate executives scrambled to get in touch with employees who lived in Katrina's path, most said they had seen little overall effect on their businesses.

"It's a little too early to tell," said Fred Beljaars, an executive vice president of DHL, the shipping company. "But the first indications are that there is no real impact on trade."

Apple Computer, Intel and National Semiconductor all reported that their operations were running normally. So did Harley-Davidson and Whirlpool. Nissan halted production Monday morning at a plant in Canton, Miss., that builds Titan pickup trucks, but reopened it Wednesday.

Economists said that the storm and its aftermath had raised the risks of a downturn. One major question is whether the damage to oil refineries aggravates what had already been a growing burden caused by soaring energy prices.

No forecaster knows how consumers will react to seeing gas lines reminiscent of the 1970's and hearing the president urge people to drive less. If oil production or refining does not return to pre-storm levels for months, a spike in energy prices could prompt households to cut their spending and cause other hardships.

"The difference with this disaster is that we have an energy shock," said Laurence H. Meyer, a senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm.

But the most likely outcome, according to forecasts that Wall Street firms revised after the storm, is a slowdown in growth during the rest of this year and a pickup next year, as New Orleans and southern Mississippi are rebuilt.

"Clearly, this will be a challenging time for the economy," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said on Friday after meeting with Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, to discuss the storm's impact. But, Mr. Snow said, "The normal pattern is that after the negative consequences, we get into a rebuilding mode, and that rebuilding mode takes you to higher G.D.P. levels."

In a sign that the recovery could make the sprawling construction sector even busier than it has been during the recent housing boom, the price of lumber jumped last week.

"Personally, I'm loading up on everything," said Bruce Scanlon, manager of Boulder Lumber, a Colorado store that sells the bulk of its supplies to building contractors. "No one is taking any chances."

The fast economic recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks showed that traumatic events often have a relatively small economic impact. On the day of the attacks, the economy had been shrinking for about six months; it was growing again by the end of the year, at least outside of the New York area.

There is a major difference this year, however: the Fed and the Bush Administration have less in their arsenal to fight economic weakness today than they did in 2001.

A soaring budget deficit makes it harder for the White House to propose tax cuts than it was four years ago. Mr. Snow dismissed suggestions last week from the House Republican whip, Roy Blunt of Missouri, that Congress take up a stimulus package that goes beyond money for reconstruction.

And the Fed has been raising its benchmark interest rate since the start of last year to ward off inflation, a policy that Anthony M. Santomero, president of the Philadelphia Fed, said last week would probably continue.

But Katrina complicates the Fed's job.

"The problem, and every Fed official is fully aware of this, is that every recession since 1971 has been preceded by two things: higher oil prices and an increasing Federal funds rate," said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research. If Katrina leads to a sustained increase in oil prices, Mr. Yamarone said, the Fed could have to "navigate between skyrocketing prices and stagnating economic growth."

Consumers also have less of a cushion than they have had at many other points. In July, the nation's savings rate fell below zero, to its lowest level on record, the Commerce Department said last week, suggesting that households have little ability to absorb higher oil prices without cutting other spending.

But the forces supporting growth might be just as strong. Katrina's aftermath caused a fall in long-term interest rates, potentially prolonging the housing boom, which has been showing signs of slowing.

Americans have also been unwilling to change their driving habits, despite oil prices that had doubled between early 2004 and last month.

"You still have to get from Point A to Point B," said Paul Noonan, a 41-year-old engineer from Boston, while stopped at a rest stop in upstate New York on his way to Minnesota last week. People talk about traveling less, Mr. Noonan said, but he did not think they were really doing so.

But the economy has been growing at a healthy clip in recent weeks, and few forecasters think it is close to tipping into recession.

"Fortunately, this happened in a strong economy," said Henry A. McKinnell Jr., chief executive of Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker and the chairman of the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of chief executives. "But I don't think anyone would say it will be positive."

Even if the economic impact ends up being narrow, the storm has still created a challenge unlike any other the country has faced recently. A local economy that employed a million people has suddenly shut down.

Some of those people have been able to continue working elsewhere. Of the several thousand Wal-Mart employees from the 36 stores that were still closed on Friday morning, four have relocated to Pensacola, Fla., and are working for the company there, said Melissa O'Brien, a spokeswoman. Wal-Mart is also giving emergency grants, typically of about $250, to some employees.

UPS is helping Gulf Coast workers put in for holiday time or unused vacation so they could continue to be paid, said Norman Black, a company spokesman. Walt Riker, a McDonald's spokesman, said the chain was trying to locate workers and considering ways to help them financially.

DHL, Pfizer and Starbucks all said they were continuing to pay employees who were unable to work because stores and offices were flooded or destroyed. Other people - many employees of small businesses, for example - were not so fortunate.

At a church shelter in Houston, Paula Sanchez, 52, slowly cried as she said she was trying to locate her 24-year-old daughter. Ms. Sanchez, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who worked as a pipe insulator at Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans, also wondered whether she could start over in Texas. "I hear there is industry here," she said. "I hope there's something here for me. I'm ready to do almost anything."

The recovery in New Orleans is likely to take longer than it will in southern Mississippi, where there is much less flooding. About 600,000 of the region's 1 million workers are in New Orleans, according to Economy.com, a research company.

Outside the immediate area, the biggest economic problems have come along the Mississippi River corridor. The Port of New Orleans is the nation's fifth busiest, and its closure has left barges in the Midwest with nowhere to go.

River/Gulf Grain, a shipping company in Davenport, Iowa, sent only one barge of corn and soybeans down the Mississippi last week and planned to send none next week, compared with the four or five it usually sends this time of year, said Erol R. Melik, the company's president. With no way to get the corn and beans on their way to Asia, the company would not hire the extra four workers that it did last year during harvest season.

"We're just taxing our infrastructure in a way we could never envision," Mr. Melik said. "It's going to be a quagmire for a long time."

Manufacturers have been calling ports from Houston to Philadelphia to ask about their ability to accept steel, rubber and other goods that usually go to New Orleans. On Thursday in Houston, stevedores finished unloading 3,000 tons of rubber and timber from the Indotrans Flores, a freighter diverted from New Orleans and Pascagoula, Miss., after the shipping lanes there had closed.

"There are alternatives," Donald C. McCrory, executive director of Port of Memphis, said.

Still, the other ports will not be able to handle all of the New Orleans traffic easily, and many companies expect weeks of bottlenecks. The potential that those bottlenecks might worsen is one of the new risks facing the economy.

No matter how the hurricane had affected them, people outside the disaster zone said financial issues were not their biggest concern.

"We're not feeling sorry for ourselves," said Mr. Melik of River/Gulf Grain. The human tragedy of the storm was far bigger than any economic problems, he said.

 

David Leonhardt reported from New York for this story, and Edmund L. Andrews from Washington. Motoko Rich, Charles V. Bagli and Louis Uchitelle contributed reporting from New York, Micheline Maynard from Toledo, Ohio, Simon Romero from Houston, Susan Moran from Boulder, Colo., Danny Hakim from Buffalo, and Laurie J. Flynn from San Francisco.

    Tumult in Gulf Region but Little Early Effect Across the Nation, NYT, 4.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04econ.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina's Shock to the System        NYT        4.9.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04oil.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina's Shock to the System

 

September 4, 2005

The New York Times

By JAD MOUAWAD

 

DRIVERS waiting in line for hours, and occasionally in vain, to fill up their tanks. Gasoline prices shooting up 50 percent or more overnight. The president urging everyone to curtail driving and conserve energy at home. Dark rumors of hoarding and market manipulation starting to spread. Economists warning that soaring energy costs will certainly slow economic growth - and maybe snuff it out completely.

As those scenes played out across the country last week, they may have looked familiar, a bit like a replay of the fallout from the Arab oil embargo of 30 years ago. Many energy analysts and economists are not surprised. When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the oil rigs and refineries along the Gulf Coast last week, it not only killed at least hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars in damage. It also set off the first oil shock of the 21st century.

"This is a lot like 1973," said Daniel Yergin, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," and is the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Since Monday, we've had a supply shock on top of a demand shock."

And just as the 1973 crisis led to a global shortage of oil that sent prices soaring and pushed the American economy into recession, today's sudden shortfall of gasoline that is rippling through the economy is likely to slow American growth by as much as a full percentage point. And it leaves global energy markets vulnerable, analysts and economists said.

For two years, steadily rising prices barely weighed on global economic growth, in part because of the expanding economies of China and the United States, and not from a lack of supply. The price of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange doubled to $66 before the hurricane from $33 a barrel in January 2004. Demand, meanwhile, has grown by more than 2 percent annually over the last two years, twice the average annual pace over the preceding decade.

Then came Hurricane Katrina. With winds as high as 175 miles per hour, it shut down most offshore platforms and onshore wells in the region - which accounts for over a quarter of domestic oil production - and idled 10 percent of the country's refining industry. Those assets may be out of commission for months while the industry scrambles to repair battered platforms and underwater pipelines. But the effects of the current crisis will be felt around the world for much longer.

In less than a week, gasoline prices have jumped by as much as 60 cents a gallon, with stations selling premium grades at an average $3 a gallon, according to AAA. On average, gasoline is 50 percent more expensive than it was last year. "We're in uncharted territory," said John Felmy, the chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's main trade group. "We haven't experienced something like this since the 1980's."

That was when Iran sent oil markets roiling. With the departure of the shah, the establishment of the Islamic revolution, and, in 1981, the start of a long and bloody war between Iran and Iraq, oil exports from the Persian Gulf plummeted, sending oil prices to their highest-ever level of nearly $40 a barrel - about $86 a barrel in today's dollars.

Then, as now, drivers, factories, power plants and others were consuming oil as fast as oil companies could refine crude oil into fuel or other products. Any significant disruption to the supply was quickly magnified in the markets.

One problem today is the supply of crude oil. Years of underinvestment in exploration mean that producers now lack the capacity to bolster production in any significant way to make up for intermittent shortages. Even Saudi Arabia, which had millions of barrels of untapped production capability in the 1980's, is now pumping at close to full capacity.

But far more important for the current energy crisis, a lack of refining capacity constrains the industry's ability to turn crude oil, even when it is available, into usable products like gasoline or jet fuel.

The nation's strategic reserve is stocked with enough oil to last about 35 days, and refiners hold an additional 25 days' worth of supplies. But with hurricane-hammered refineries out of business for now, the immediate pinch comes in turning oil into gasoline. The shortage of refineries explains why gasoline futures surged 14 percent last week while crude oil prices gained only 2 percent. Oil touched a high of $70.85 on Wednesday and closed at $67.57 a barrel on Friday; gasoline futures on Nymex, which touched $2.92 a gallon at midweek, ended the week at $2.18.

From Aug. 26, when platforms were evacuated in anticipation of the storm, until Friday, the total amount of lost oil production was 8.7 million barrels - or about 1.3 million barrels a day. That's not much compared with what was lost during the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel. Then, an embargo on oil shipments to the United States led to a shortage of about five million barrels a day at its worst point, in December 1973.

The trouble was that America did not have any spare production capacity at that time, in contrast to the situation six years earlier, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. "Without it," Mr. Yergin wrote in "The Prize," "the United States had lost its critical ability to influence the world oil market."

Something very similar is happening today. But this time, the United States has no refining capacity to spare. "The hurricane created a crisis, but the roots of the problem are much deeper than that," said Robert Mabro, president of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and an authority on energy issues.

"The refining system is stretched, with no reserves, no excess capacity, no cushion," he said. "The fundamental problem is that we depend on oil companies that dislike the refining business because of historically low returns but whose deficit can produce an economic, social and political crisis."

But Mr. Mabro added: "There is an obligation to supply. For consumers, it's a public utility. If people can't get gas, they become furious, they become violent, they create trouble. Energy is a necessity."

No new refinery has been built in the United States since 1976. Over the last quarter-century, the number of refineries has fallen by more than half, to 149. Some, but not all, of that capacity has been made up by expanding or improving existing facilities. Refining capacity has declined by 10 percent, to 17 million barrels a day.

Over the same period, however, gasoline consumption has risen by 45 percent, to 9.5 million barrels a day. Domestic consumption of oil, including that used to make gasoline, is more than 20 million barrels a day.

The 1973 and 1979-80 energy crises revealed how vulnerable industrialized economies were to sudden spikes in oil prices, and to shortages in supplies. Both shocks led to lasting recessions, high inflation and dismal economic prospects. Oil producers realized how powerful the oil weapon could be but they also noticed that it was double-edged. The Arab oil embargo lasted from October 1973 through March 1974. Higher prices quickly led to recessions, which in turn lowered economic activity - and therefore lowered oil consumption.

As a sign of the seriousness of the current crisis, Western governments on Friday pledged to release their emergency oil stocks to help plug the oil gap in the United States. The International Energy Agency, which was created in 1974 in the aftermath of the first oil shock, said its members would release two million barrels a day for the next 30 days. This was only the second time that the agency, based in Paris, had taken such a step. The first was in 1991 during the Persian Gulf war.

"This historic response is a remarkable signal of international solidarity in the face of the largest national disaster in America's history," said Samuel W. Bodman, the secretary of energy.

With all the parallels, there are substantial differences between 1973 and 2005 that might soften the blow to the economy. For example, in the 1970's, oil purchases accounted for twice as large a share of the gross domestic product as they do today. And back then, the American government had price controls on oil as well as an allocation system intended to ensure that all regions were supplied evenly. That system backfired because it kept prices artificially low, thereby encouraging demand when supplies were short. Allocations from the government also did little to move supplies where they were most needed. The results were long lines at the gas pump and shortages in some places but not in others.

Still, with no government control over either prices or supplies - and despite the global emergency coordination, the pledges of rising European imports and the loans from American strategic stocks - the risks to oil markets remain very high, analysts and economists said. The economy may be able to withstand current prices, but energy markets are at the mercy of the slightest glitch anywhere around the globe that can push prices even higher.

"If we had a major disruption in supplies elsewhere on top of that we could definitely go to triple-digit oil prices, no problem," said Vincent Lauerman, the global energy analyst at the Canadian Energy Research Institute, in Calgary, Alberta. "What we have right now is a runaway freight train. There's nothing I can see between it and higher prices."

The idea of $100-a-barrel oil, which was scoffed at as recently as two weeks ago, is now not so far-fetched. And its effect would be substantial.

"If oil hit $100, it would have quite a debilitating effect," said William Hummer, the chief economist at Wayne Hummer Investments. "The economy would slow to a crawl. We'd have a return to stagflation, that cliché from the 1970's. We'd see a huge cutback in driving. The sacrifices would be severe. It would be another blow to the airlines and the whole transportation sector."

The Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in New York, identified potential events in nine countries that could send prices higher - from terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, to which it gave a 10 percent probability; to unrest by oil workers in Nigeria, a 30 percent probability; or attacks on Iraq's oil industry, with a 50-50 probability.

In other words, said Mr. Felmy of the American Petroleum Institute: "There is no question that this is a global issue. We're all in this together."

    Katrina's Shock to the System, NYT, 4.9.2005,
   
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04oil.html

 

 

 

 

 

New Orleans Quiets

With Guard on Patrol

and Offering Aid

 

September 4, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

 

Amid signs of progress in the struggle against the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, President Bush said today that he had ordered 7,000 additional troops to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast states to crack down on lawlessness and evacuate thousands of refugees.

Hours after signing a $10.5 billion package of assistance for the stricken region, calling it a down payment on aid to come, the president acknowledged again today that his administration had failed to promptly help many of the hurricane's most desperate victims and promised to resurrect this city and devastated coastal areas of several states.

"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," he said, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area in a radio broadcast before television cameras in the White House Rose Garden. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

The admission of shortcomings was another striking acknowledgment by the President, who made a similar statement in his visit to New Orleans and Mississippi on Friday and who has come under stiff criticism from both political parties for his handling of the crisis, and he appeared to be striving to make amends, particularly to those caught in the crisis.

"I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering," the president declared. "Many are angry and desperate for help. The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in our hour of need. And the federal government will do its part."

Hundreds of newly arrived National Guard troops patrolled the lawless streets of New Orleans on Saturday, beginning the task of wresting control from thugs and looters and restoring order in a city that had all but surrendered to death and disorder after Hurricane Katrina.

The deployment of the troops, the arrival of major convoys of desperately needed supplies, the speeded evacuation of tens of thousands of people from refugee centers and hospitals and progress in closing some of the breached levees brought glimmers of hope for the flooded and ravaged city.

But officials cautioned that New Orleans faced a long, difficult climb out of the crisis.

Maj. Gen. Don T. Riley, director of civil works for the Army Corps of Engineers, said work had begun to drain floodwater from the canals. Notches were cut in the levee walls. "We need to pump the canal out so we can get to the pump stations," General Riley said. He said crews had to dry out the generators and pumps at the stations to use them to help dry out the city.

It was unclear how many guardsmen were in the city. But on streets where gun battles, fistfights, rapes, holdups, carjackings and marauding mobs of looters had held sway through the week, the mere sight of troops in camouflage battle gear with assault rifles gave a sense of relief to many of the thousands of stranded survivors who had endured days of appalling terror and suffering.

"They brought a sense of order and peace, and it was a beautiful sight to see that we're ramping up," Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said. "We are seeing a show of force. It's putting confidence back in our hearts and in the minds of our people. We're going to make it through."

Six days after the hurricane decimated the Gulf Coast in a fantasia of howling winds and towering seas that weakened and then breached the city's protective levees, New Orleans was still a nightmarish town that had endured the unthinkable: 80 percent of its ground flooded, perhaps thousands of its citizens killed and numberless homes and businesses destroyed by water, fires, looters and scavengers.

At dawn today, as a brilliant orange sun rose over the Mississippi, two huge columns of smoke climbed over the city as major fires burned unchecked, one apparently at the scene of an explosion that ripped through a propane gas storage warehouse on Friday. Firefighters were handicapped by low water pressure and difficulty of getting around the flooded city.

The streets of downtown New Orleans were nearly deserted this morning. Troops were on patrol outside City Hall, all the federal buildings, at refugee centers and at key intersections, and there were only glimpses of the hoodlums who had ruled unchecked for days.

There were a few reports of violence, said Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Some of these kids think this is a game," he said. "They somehow got their hands on a weapon. They think they are playing Pacman or something and shooting at people. Those kinds of hot spots will continue, but I can tell you they will learn very quickly the 82nd Airborne does not like to be shot at. This is not a game."

Here and there, small groups of people pushed shopping carts, carried shopping bags or dragged suitcases holding their remaining possessions.

The absence of widespread disorder was only one of the positive signs. In addition to the arrival of hundreds of National Guard troops, which coincided with President Bush's visit and mea culpa on Friday, there were other signs of hope.

Convoys of trucks carrying food, water and other relief supplies rolled into the city and were greeted by cheers and sobs of relief by some of the exhausted, traumatized refugees. Others, like 46-year-old Michael Levy, one of the refugees at the convention center, were bitter. "They should have been here days ago," he said as others yelled in agreement.

After days of delay and broken promises, the goal of evacuating the stricken city also appeared to be more than just talk. Caravans of buses that for thousands meant deliverance from danger, hunger and misery were finally rolling in, and thousands more, including 100 New York City buses accompanied by New York police officers, were on the way.

Seventy of the New York buses left today and 30 more were to leave Sunday on 20-hour, 1,300 mile non-stop trips to New Orleans. Each bus carried two drivers and a police officer, and more than 100 other officers were preparing to make the trip in their own cars. The convoy, including a tow truck and a communications bus, was carrying 11,000 bottles of water and other supplies.

"Fellow Americans need help and they have responded in the finest tradition of the Police Department," Commissioner Raymond Kelly of New York said of the officers, all of whom will be authorized by the government to carry weapons and exercise full police powers in Louisiana.

The evacuations of Tulane University and Charity Hospitals were completed, officials said. The evacuation of the Louisiana Superdome, which had become a fetid shelter of last resort for 25,000 people, was nearly completed by daybreak today, with most of its refugees taken to the Astrodome in Houston, 350 miles away. But an unexplained hitch halted the buses with 2,000 people still left in the Superdome, and it was unclear when they would get out.

There were untold thousands of people still holding out elsewhere in the city, including 25,000 at the New Orleans Convention Center, where heat, filth and gagging stench were overpowering. But troops moved in and chased out hoodlums who had terrorized many of the refugees, and food, water and other supplies were reaching those who desperately needed them.

Patrick Rhode, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN today that significant progress had been made at the convention center, and that 95 percent of the refugees in the Superdome had been evacuated. He said aid had also arrived in Mississippi and other stricken areas along the Gulf Coast.

At a late night news briefing at the state capital in Baton Rouge, Governor Blanco said she had sent a list of needs to President Bush in a letter, including the return of the headquarters unit of the Louisiana-based 256th Brigade Combat Team from Iraq, where its mission has been completed.

The governor also asked the White House to open a new military staging base in Baton Rouge, supplementing another in Pineville, La., and to maintain a minimum of 40,000 troops there.

She also asked for 200 military trucks to carry food, water and other supplies, Humvees and other vehicles and for aerial and ground firefighting equipment.

"I think we turned a corner today," said the governor, clearly in an upbeat mood.

Col. Jeff Smith, a retired Army officer who is deputy director of the Louisiana office of homeland security and emergency management, said that 5,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were on duty and that more than 3,400 other soldiers from around the country would join them shortly.

But Terry Ebbert, the retired Marine colonel who is director of homeland security for New Orleans with authority over the police and fire departments and other emergency services, said there were only about 1,000 National Guardsmen in the city as of today morning.

Colonel Ebbert said the city hoped that 2,000 more would begin arriving later in the day, but that was far short of the 10,000 soldiers the city had requested. Other officials said it appeared the city would not get more than 3,000 guardsmen and no regular troops at all.

The Corps of Engineers said that crews had gained control over the breach in the 17th Street Canal levee, where the heaviest floodwaters had entered the city, and said they expected to close a second gap in another canal over the weekend.

But Brig. Gen. Robert Crear said it might take months to remove floodwaters from the swamped city. "We're looking at anywhere from 36 to 80 days to being done," he said.

Joseph B. Treaster contributed reporting from New Orleans for this article, Elisabeth Bumiller from Washington andCampbell Robertson from Gulfport, Miss.

    New Orleans Quiets With Guard on Patrol and Offering Aid, September 4, 2005, NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/national/nationalspecial/04storm.html

 

 

 

 

 


President Bush's

Address to the Nation

 

September 3, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

The following is the transcript of President Bush's weekly address, as recorded by Federal News Service.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Good morning. Yesterday I saw the aftermath of one of the largest natural disasters ever to strike America. A vast coastline of towns and communities are flattened; one of our great cities is submerged. The human costs are incalculable.

In Biloxi, I met Bronwynne Bassier and her sister, Kim. Bronwynne told me that the only earthly possessions she has left were the clothes on her back. I also met relief and rescue workers who are performing heroically in difficult circumstances. They've been working around the clock, risking their own lives to save the lives of others. Yet despite their best efforts, the magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans, and that is unacceptable.

During my visit I discussed these problems at length with Governor Riley of Alabama, Governor Barbour of Mississippi, Governor Blanco of Louisiana and Mayor Nagin of New Orleans. Each state will have its own set of challenges and issues to solve. Yet all of us agree that more can be done to improve our ability to restore order and deliver relief in a timely and effective manner.

This morning I received a briefing on the latest developments on the ground. Right now there are more than 21,000 National Guard troops operating in -- and -- Louisiana and Mississippi, and more are on the way. More than 13,000 of these troops are in Louisiana. The main priority is to restore and maintain law and order, and assist in recovery and evacuation efforts. In addition to these National Guard forces, the Department of Defense has deployed more than 4,000 active- duty forces to assist in search and recovery, and provide logistical and medical support.

Hour by hour, the situation on the ground is improving. Yet the enormity of the task requires more resources and more troops. Today I ordered the Department of Defense to deploy additional active-duty forces to the region. Over the next 24 to 72 hours, more than 7,000 additional troops from the 82nd Airborne, from the 1st Cavalry, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force will arrive in the affected areas. These forces will be on the ground and operating under the direct command of General Russ Honore.

Our priorities are clear -- we will complete the evacuation as quickly and safely as possible. We will not let criminals prey on the vulnerable, and we will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives.

Yesterday I also signed a $10.5 billion emergency aid package to fund our ongoing relief efforts. This is a down payment on what will be a sustained federal commitment to our fellow citizens along the Gulf Coast. I want to thank the Congress for their quick, bipartisan action, and I look forward to working with them in the days and weeks ahead.

I know that those of you who have been hit hard by Katrina are suffering. Many are angry and desperate for help. The tasks before us are enormous, but so is the heart of America. In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need. And the federal government will do its part. Where our response is not working, we'll make it right. Where our response is working, we will duplicate it. We have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters all along the Gulf Coast, and we will not rest until we get this right and the job is done.

This week we've all been humbled by the awesome powers of Mother Nature. And when you stand on the porch steps where a home once stood, or look at row upon row of buildings that are completely under water, it's hard to imagine a bright future. But when you talk to the proud folks in the area, you see a spirit that cannot be broken.

The emergency along the Gulf Coast is ongoing. There's still a lot of difficult work ahead. All Americans can be certain our nation has the character, the resources and the resolve to overcome this disaster. We will comfort and care for the victims. We will restore the towns and neighborhoods that have been lost in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We'll rebuild the great city of New Orleans. And we'll once again show the world that the worst adversities bring out the best in America.

May God bless you, and may God continue to bless our country.

    President Bush's Address to the Nation, R, 3.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03BUSH-TEXT.html

 

 

 

 

 

Newcomer Is Struggling

to Lead a City in Ruins

 

September 3, 2005
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

 

He has been camped out for days on the 27th floor of a structurally damaged and powerless hotel in New Orleans, sending runners to communicate with the few staff members who remain in an increasingly futile effort to run some semblance of a municipal government.

Like many others in New Orleans, Mayor C. Ray Nagin is a man with a home under water, a man whose family has fled to higher ground, a man who is worried about food and clean drinking water.

But at this moment, what defines Mr. Nagin is that he is a mayor without a city.

When he was elected three years ago, he was the great hope of New Orleans, a popular newcomer unfettered by ties to old-line political organizations, an energetic redeemer swept into office on the promise that he would rid the city of corruption.

Now New Orleans is in ruins. And Mayor Nagin is steadily losing what little power he has to govern the desperate and dispossessed citizens who remain under his care.

On Thursday, four days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the personal toll of this harsh reality became clear.

For a moment, Mr. Nagin's customarily calm demeanor dissolved into anger, and he lashed out at the federal government for what he called its slow response in sending the National Guard to help control the growing crisis.

"Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here," he said. "They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."

The interviewer, Garland Robinette of WWL-AM Radio, responded, "I bet that the people listening to you are on your side."

Even a week ago, when the mayor's approval rating was over 60 percent, most would have agreed.

But among the uncertainties that have followed in the hurricane's wake is what Mr. Nagin's legacy will be. Will he ultimately be viewed as a strong leader in crisis, a Southern version of Rudolph W. Giuliani, who guided New York through the dark days after Sept. 11? Or will he be remembered as a mayor who was not up to the task?

In recent days, Mayor Nagin has been under attack inside and outside of the city.

His decision to stay at a Hyatt hotel near the Superdome has met with both praise and criticism. To his supporters, it is evidence that he is a captain who refuses to abandon his ship, even as it sinks. To his critics, it is proof of his stubbornness, a refusal to go with the rest of his government to makeshift quarters in the state capital, Baton Rouge, where he might have been in a better position to communicate with others and coordinate the relief effort.

Many hurricane victims, living on the streets or huddled in unbearable conditions in the Superdome, had nothing but harsh words for the mayor. They blamed him, along with President Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as failing to respond more quickly to their plight. And they called him a coward for not setting foot inside the putrid hallways of the stadium but instead speaking to people outside.

"We've been in here for five days, and he still hasn't shown his face to us," said Donnieka Rhinehart, 26, as she prepared to board a bus outside the domed stadium.

"I support the mayor," said Jason Magee, a golf professional from the New Orleans area living temporarily in Baton Rouge, 75 miles to the west-northwest. "I think a lot of us do. I think this is a federal-level problem. I'm displaced and I'm not happy, but I'm not angry at the mayor."

Mr. Nagin could not be reached for comment despite repeated efforts through his staff members, who are working out of their cars or in temporary offices in Baton Rouge or Houston. He did meet with President Bush on Friday.

Perhaps the strongest complaint against Mr. Nagin, himself an African-American, is that he did not move aggressively enough to evacuate the poorest, most vulnerable, predominantly African-American citizens from their low-lying neighborhoods in New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward.

Inside the Superdome, a rumor circulated that Mr. Nagin and other city officials deliberately dynamited levees after the hurricane so floodwater would be diverted from the French Quarter into the impoverished Ninth Ward.

"They saved the tourist area but ruined the Ninth Ward," said Ashan Jacobs, 25, a bartender.

Louisiana officials have rallied to Mr. Nagin's side, emphasizing that the magnitude of the disaster would have overwhelmed any mayor.

Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said Mr. Nagin's best efforts were felled by the communication system that collapsed all around him.

"No matter how great a mayor is, and this mayor is great, they cannot function well without good communication," Ms. Landrieu said. "No mayor could have kept control of this city without a functioning communication system. He couldn't call a press conference or the chief of police."

The city's head of intergovernmental relations, Kenya Smith, is among Mr. Nagin's closest aides. Mr. Smith, speaking from the state police headquarters in Baton Rouge, said he had never seen the mayor on the attack in quite the way he was in the radio interview on Thursday. But he questioned whether the mayor's outburst was strategically planned.

"It was probably designed to put a little fire under those who can get resources to the city," Mr. Smith said. "I don't think it was so much him venting as trying to ensure the delivery of resources. It was not done without thought."

Rodney Braxton, the city's chief legislative lobbyist, added, "It's important that people understand how frustrated he is."

Mr. Braxton added: "Right now, he's very upset and agitated. I'm seeing a different Ray Nagin."

In March 2002, when Clarence Ray Nagin was elected with 58 percent of the vote, the city seemed to welcome him as an independent-thinking reformer who was not part of the cronyism that had in the past held so much sway over mayoral races.

Disgusted with corruption in local government, voters gave him a chance, despite his lack of political experience.

Mr. Nagin had been an executive with Cox Communications, which operates the local cable television system.

"New Orleans is going to do things different," Mr. Nagin, a Democrat, told cheering supporters on election night after defeating his closest opponent, Richard Pennington, the former chief of police.

A product of the New Orleans public school system, Mr. Nagin seemed like someone waiting to give back. "I'm not in it for the money; I'm in it for our children and grandchildren," he said after his election victory.

In his three years in office, Mr. Nagin has begun to act on his campaign promises. He has started building and economic development programs valued at about $4 billion and was a proponent of homeownership in the city's poorest neighborhoods - the ones that were most affected by the flooding.

While working at Cox, Mr. Nagin was credited with turning around the faltering regional operation. As mayor, he said he would use his business acumen to create a larger black middle class by restructuring a local economy that had too many low-wage jobs in the tourism and hospitality industry, and not enough of anything else.

Now, low-wage jobs are the least of Mr. Nagin's concerns. When the city finally dries out, many wonder if there will be any tourism industry left.

"There are lots of people who want to be the mayor of New Orleans," Mr. Braxton, the lobbyist, said, "but I bet they don't want to be the mayor right now. I've asked him to come up here to Baton Rouge. But Ray said he is not going to leave New Orleans, period."

He added: "It's exactly like this: The ship is full of water, but the captain is not leaving. Not without the crew. The crew are those poor people you see on TV in wheelchairs at the Superdome. That's his crew."

James Dao contributed reporting from New Orleans for this article.

    Newcomer Is Struggling to Lead a City in Ruins, NYT, 3.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03mayor.html

 

 

 

 

 

Bush orders more troops

to chaos of New Orleans

 

Sat Sep 3, 2005
12:32 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - President George W. Bush ordered thousands more troops to New Orleans on Saturday to help pull desperate refugees out of the hurricane-ravaged city, force looting gangs off the streets and find the dead.

Under fire for his government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, which wrecked one of the world's most famous cities and may have killed thousands of people, Bush said he will send in 7,000 additional active duty troops in the next three days.

"Many of our citizens are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans, and that is unacceptable," said Bush, who planned to return to the stricken region on Monday, a week after Katrina hit.

The Pentagon said it would send an additional 10,000 National Guard troops to Louisiana and Mississippi to assist in hurricane relief efforts in the coming days, bringing to 40,000 the number of such troops there.

After days of broken promises, U.S. troops have finally started moving emergency relief supplies into New Orleans and are now trying to halt widespread looting and horrific violence even as they feed evacuees and move them to shelters in Texas.

Survivors were still trying to leave the city on Saturday. Corpses lay in the streets, including a woman's bloated body lying face down in shallow floodwaters at the Superdome, a stadium where thousands endured brutal conditions after taking shelter there.

Thousands of people were told overnight to get out of the city convention center, where feces and urine filled corridors and up to 22 bodies were stored inside a makeshift morgue. There was still no medical care for evacuees at the convention center, who desperately waited for a bus ride out of the city.

"There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave," said 32-year-old Africa Brumfield.

The misery and destruction combined with widespread looting presented jarring images of death and despair in the world's richest and most powerful country.

There was blistering criticism at home and abroad of the slow response to one of America's worst natural catastrophes.

Most of Katrina's victims are poor and black, unable to evacuate the area as the storm raced in, and the tragedy has highlighted the vast race divide in the United States.

Bush promised on Saturday to fix the failings of the emergency efforts.

"Where our response is not working we'll make it right. Where our response is working we will duplicate it," he said. "This week we have all been humbled by the awesome powers of Mother Nature."

 

DANGER IN THE DARK

As army troops and National Guard units establish control of New Orleans, they will seek to drive looting gangs off the streets and disarm them, but Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned the streets are not yet safe.

"There's still some danger because power's not up and the nights are dark," she said. "We have a lot to go through before we get comfortable."

Jim Letten, the U.S. attorney in New Orleans, said law enforcement agencies were beginning to get a grip on the situation after the mayhem of the past five days.

"Now that civil order has been restored ... we are going to bring these guys to justice," he said.

Across the United States, gas prices vaulted to over $3 a gallon after Katrina's 140 mph (225 kph) winds shut eight oil refineries and crippled several others. U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said Katrina may slow U.S. economic growth for a few months, but would not have a lasting impact.

The political ramifications might last longer, with widespread criticism of the government's relief work and suggestions that Washington would have moved much quicker if it were rich whites in danger.

"We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in this great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"Shame, shame on America. We were put to the test, and we have failed," said Rep. Diane Watson, a black Democrat from California.

During an NBC benefit concert on Friday night for Hurricane Katrina victims, black rapper Kanye West accused the president of racism.

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," he said.

Bush signed a $10.5 billion relief package for Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina, and lawmakers said they planned to allocate more money in the coming weeks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it might take months to remove floodwaters that swamped New Orleans.

Work crews gained control over one of the breaches in the levee and expected to have another major gap closed on Saturday, said Brig. Gen. Robert Crear.

"We're looking at anywhere from 36 to 80 days to being done," Crear said.

The U.S. military said on Saturday it was bringing home about 300 Air Force personnel mainly from Iraq and Afghanistan whose home base area in Mississippi was hit by Katrina.

    Bush orders more troops to chaos of New Orleans, R, 3.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T163324Z_01_HO481242_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

In New Orleans,

desperation blights stranded poor

 

Sat Sep 3, 2005
10:03 AM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Friday night in New Orleans was never like this.

Known for its raucous Mardi Gras festival, distinctive jazz, Francophile culture and unique architecture, New Orleans is still in crisis from floods that devastated the city following hurricane Katrina, leaving thousands homeless and desperate to leave. And on some less glamorous streets, the stench of death permeates everything.

As dusk fell on Friday evening, a woman's bloated and brutally distorted figure lay prostrate on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street in a poor neighborhood.

The black woman lay, arms flaccid, feet splayed, one shoe gone, her face distended from swelling and her chest swollen as gas filled her decaying corpse. Someone had covered her body in a plaid blanket in an anonymous gift offering some dignity.

A woman across the street shouted at photographers taking pictures of her, "She's been there for five days, since Monday." Then she approached to beg for bottled water, or anything at all that might help.

A convoy of five sport utility vehicles passed by, each packed with police training rifles with laser sights on the scant few residents out walking. They sped past the corpse without taking any notice.

Such bodies still litter New Orleans and they stand as a testament to the depth of the disaster here. After all, The Big Easy is renowned for celebratory funerals with marching jazz bands and quirky cheer - a death here is supposed to be both happy and sad at once.

At the nearby Superdome, where thousands who had lost everything in the floods camped out this week awaiting evacuation, another black woman's bloated body lay in full view face down in shallow floodwaters even as hundreds of National Guard troops were stationed there to keep the site secure.

While water has receded from some parts of the city, even those districts now free from deluge are strewn with debris. In the Garden District where multimillion-dollar Greek Revival mansions still stand, the deserted streets are littered with downed trees, destroyed cars and garbage. Nearby boutiques are boarded up, with "Looters Will Be Shot" painted on their facades.

In the downtown business district, U.S. Marshals guard a nondescript building, setting up their headquarters and base of operations at the almost 20-story-high BellSouth building.

One federal agent who asked not to be named said the building is the hub for all long-distance telephone communications for the Southeastern United States.

Without the technology housed in that one structure, he said, there would be no long-distance calls in the region -- something that would blight commerce even further and a dynamic making the bland concrete edifice "a vital national security interest."

On the corner where that building stands, a frantic woman approached a federal officer and pleaded to be allowed past, saying, "I heard there were evacuation buses at the Superdome." In her arms was a 5-year-old child, his naked, black back scarred and pitted with welts and burn marks, his arms wrapped tightly around her neck.

She was let through and joined scattered groups of families trudging with their few remaining possessions toward the stadium.

As the evening light grew dimmer they desperately walked on in search of an elusive seat out of town, just like tens of thousands still stuck in the city.

    In New Orleans, desperation blights stranded poor, R, 3.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T140421Z_01_KWA345898_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-DESPERATION-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Conditions in New Orleans Still Dire

- Pumping May Take Months

 

September 3, 2005
The New York Times
By JAMES DAO
and N. R. KLEINFIELD

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 2-Military vehicles bearing food and supplies sloshed into the drenched heart of this humbled and stricken city on Friday, while commercial airplanes and cargo planes arrived to lift beleaguered hurricane survivors from the depths of a ghastly horror.

Five days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the chaotic scene at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport evoked the mix of hope and despair that has gripped this city. Disorder prevailed, as thousands of survivors with glazed looks and nothing more than garbage bags of possessions waited in interminable lines for a chance to get out.

Patrolmen yelled out the number of available seats on each flight, and passengers boarded planes not knowing where they would land, and not caring. An increasing number of cities and states across the country were offering to take them in.

The airport was a stark landscape of triage, with rows of people on stretchers and others bound to wheelchairs, including someone already dead, in a wing that had been converted into the world's largest emergency room. A morgue had been set up in one concourse.

The fresh wave of relief efforts came on a day when President Bush toured the ravaged region by helicopter and walked through the residue of Biloxi, Miss., before ending up in New Orleans, where he told survivors, "I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen." Scores of amphibious vehicles and Humvees carrying thousands of freshly dispatched, armed National Guardsmen pushed through New Orleans in a daylong parade, hoping to replenish the dire needs of the stranded and try to restore order to a city that had devolved into wantonness. In one sign of the boundless despair, police officials acknowledged that some New Orleans officers had turned in their badges, refusing to risk their lives to try to right the city.

Another new ingredient was a spate of fires that broke out and were left to burn, because hydrants were not working and there was no way in the water-soaked city that firefighters could get to them.

Dan Craig, director of recovery for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, estimated that it could take six months to drain the city and another three months to dry it. State officials said that it would take more than a month, and that pumping would begin on Monday.

In a city too bruised to know what to feel, many of the famished survivors applauded the arrival of the relief trucks, though others, enraged at how long their wait had been, showered them with profanities.

A critical juncture was reached when the overwhelmed Superdome, site of unimaginably squalid conditions, was mostly emptied by day's end. Thousands of other survivors, though, remained stranded in the putrid convention center. Others were said to remain perched on roofs, even this long after the storm.

No one could convincingly say when the last of the living would be removed from the city, though state officials said that they hoped to complete the process by Sunday. Dead bodies continued to present themselves at every turn. Medical authorities said 8 to 10 people an hour were dying at the city's hospitals.

The supply convoy showed up just hours after Mayor C. Ray Nagin exploded in a radio interview on Thursday night, castigating the federal government, particularly FEMA, for what he felt was a lame and puny response to his city's needs.

By Friday, about 19,500 National Guard troops had arrived in Louisiana and Mississippi, and 6,500 in New Orleans itself, mostly military police officers, though Mr. Nagin maintained that was still not enough.

Senior Pentagon and military officials said that the Guard presence in the hurricane zone would grow to 30,000 in coming days, mostly in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the rest to Alabama and Florida.

The guardsmen were posted at major intersections, and Army vehicles patrolled the streets, seeking to quell the looting and unrestrained crime that has shocked the nation. Some 300 members of the Arkansas National Guard, just back from Iraq, were among those deployed from foreign assignments specifically to bring order.

"I have one message for these hoodlums," Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary."

In the radio interview, Mayor Nagin blamed much of the widespread crime on crazed drug addicts cut off from their fixes.

Lt. Gov. Steven Blum said in Baton Rouge, the capital, "I am confident that within the next 24 hours we will see a dramatic improvement."

Buses continued to wheel out of the city loaded with refugees from the squalid Superdome and from around the convention center, the two principal shelters for those left behind, moving them to new makeshift lives in the Houston Astrodome and other far-flung evacuation quarters like Reunion Arena in Dallas and a warehouse at KellyUSA, a city-owned complex in San Antonio.

One evacuation bus carrying 50 people to Texas overturned on Interstate 49, near Opelousas, the police said, killing one person and injuring 17 others.

Admissions to the Astrodome were halted after about 11,000 people had been accepted, fewer than half of what was planned, because officials felt it had become crowded enough.

The Superdome, where upward of 25,000 people had sweltered in conditions described as unfit for animals, was mostly emptied, though 1,500 were still there late Friday. They had renamed the place, rife with overflowing toilets and reports of murder and rape, the Sewerdome.

Edgar John Thead, 68, who sat with his 65-year-old wife, said he had been in line for the buses at 4 a.m., but had to withdraw because his diabetic wife could not stand the heat. "I'll be the last one in line," he said.

Throughout New Orleans, thousands of people, many of them among the city's poorest and most marginalized citizens, were still unsure when and how they would get out.

An estimated 20,000 were to be at the four-story convention center, which at some points apparently attracted as many refugees as the Superdome but was ignored much longer by rescue operations. Conditions there were even worse than at the Superdome, with armed thugs seizing control and, the authorities said, repulsing squads of police officers sent to retake it.

On Friday morning, people huddled in small groups inside the center or sat on orange folding chairs outside, a gruesome mockery of an actual convention. Amid overflowing toilets, an elderly women and a teenage boy were having seizures in the arms of relatives.

Evacuees said that seven dead bodies littered the third floor. They said a 14-year-old girl had been raped.

There was a pervasive feeling of abandonment. "The trucks kept passing us up; they just kept going further east," said Louis Martin Sr., a truck driver who had been at the center since Tuesday.

In the afternoon, P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, drove by on the running board of a van and shouted that food and buses were on the way. Some people responded with soft applause, while others jeered. A woman ran alongside the van, shrieking: "We don't need food! Get us out of here!"

Throughout the city, where it was dry enough, people wandered in dazes. Along St. Charles Avenue, clumps of people trudged with plastic bags of belongings. Some had fled the violence of the convention center. Others searched for vans.

Outside the Hyatt hotel next to the Superdome, scores of tour buses in ankle-deep water waited to evacuate people who had been living in and around the stadium. "It's been hell," said Donnieka Rhinehart, 26, a nursing assistant who said she had lived in the stadium with her two small children since Monday. She said she saw a rape and heard that a girl's throat had been cut.

The quickest way out of the city on Friday seemed to be the airport, after government officials arranged for more than a dozen airlines and cargo operators to volunteer planes to fly people to safety. But the lines never seemed to diminish. As soon as one flight took off, seven or eight helicopters would land on the tarmac with additional batches of survivors.

Airport authorities did not know where the helicopters came from. "Helicopters just appear," said Carolyn Lowe, a deputy director of the airport.

Other cities and states continued to extend interim refuge and other forms of aid for the affected areas. Philadelphia announced that it was willing to take in a thousand families from New Orleans, and Detroit offered refuge as well. New York, Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, Georgia, California, Utah, Virginia and Washington were among other states offering general support or to take refugees. Some states promised to allow children of evacuees to enroll in their schools.

During his tour of the area, President Bush kissed two weeping women who said they had lost everything in Biloxi, and he then walked down the street with his arms around them.

Speaking about the rescue and relief efforts before leaving Washington, Mr. Bush acknowledged that "the results are not acceptable" and pledged to do more, saying the $10.5 billion in aid authorized by Congress was but a "down payment" on the disaster relief.

In Washington, members of the Congressional Black Caucus called the federal response shameful, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle promised hearings on what had gone wrong.

That there was much peril remaining in New Orleans was without question. Before daybreak, an explosion tore through a warehouse along the Mississippi River, a dozen blocks or so from the French Quarter. And a fire at an oil storage facility across the river sent a plume of smoke across the city.

The situation was terrifying at some of the city's hospitals for much of the day. Doctors, nurses and patients at Charity Hospital had to plead for help for more than 100 patients, who were later evacuated amid unconfirmed reports that violence was preventing rescuers from getting in.

Corpses were said to be strewn about the hospital. Staff members were still inside, and some were reportedly keeping others alive with intravenous fluids.

Those who call New Orleans home and cherish its idiosyncratic stamp on the American landscape could only guess at what their city would look like and how broken it would be when the day came that the waters went away.

The Army Corps of Engineers kept at the repair work on the broken levees that had allowed Lake Pontchartrain to thunder into the bowl-like city after it seemed that damage from the hurricane had ceased. And after three days of delays, the Corps and a swelling army of private contractors slowly began to set the stage for the draining of hundreds of billions of gallons of floodwaters from the city.

The plan was to close the holes that the storm tides had opened and break open new holes in places where the levees were holding water in the city rather than letting it out.

A train of dump trucks and a yellow bulldozer began laying a narrow temporary road of black rubble and gravel from dry ground to the north end of the 300-foot breach in a wall of the 17th Street Canal, through which most of the floodwaters passed. At the same time, heavy-lift helicopters lowered hundreds of huge sandbags into the south end of the gap.

The height of the water in the streets and the adjoining lake had leveled off, so water was no longer rising. The authorities were hopeful that the breach could slowly, if temporarily, be blocked. At the same time, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, said that he was concerned about storms forming in the Atlantic.

"We want to make sure that we don't catch ourselves with levees open and have another storm front move in on us," General Strock said.

Efforts to set life right again persisted throughout the Gulf Coast, as hundreds of thousands went on without electricity, and in many cases, homes. Relatives still sought feverishly to find loved one. The number deaths remained unknown, with estimates continuing to run into the thousands.

Researchers who flew 180 miles of coast between Pensacola, Fla., and Grand Isle, La., said that along the beach for blocks inland there was nothing left but concrete slabs and chunks of asphalt. Often, they said, it was impossible to tell what they had been before they were destroyed.

There were more and more scattered signs of the crippling economic impact. A preliminary assessment from the oyster industry, one of Louisiana's flourishing seafood businesses, found that while the eastern side of the state fared well, everything east of Bayou Lafourche to the Mississippi line was ruined. The area accounts for two-thirds of the state's oyster harvesting, or $181 million a year. With federal aid, officials said it could take two to three years for the crop to return.

The frenzied pursuit of gas by motorists in the region did not slacken, and disruptions of routines continued. In Hancock County, Ga., schools were closed on Thursday because of a gas shortage.

Governor Sonny Purdue of Georgia signed an executive order temporarily halting state collection of all motor fuel taxes, effective after midnight Friday. This should reduce gas prices by about 15 cents a gallon. The governor said he hopes to keep the moratorium in effect through September, but needs the approval of the general assembly, which will convene a special session starting on Tuesday.

"I believe it's wrong for the state to reap a tax windfall in this time of urgency and tragedy," Governor Purdue said.

Other states were contemplating actions of their own. California announced that it was beginning a probe into gas price gouging in the state.

Meanwhile, in scattered camps in increasingly far-flung locations, countless thousands of refugees were fumbling to understand the next steps in their lives.

Barry Mason, 54, of New Orleans traded a spot in the Superdome for a seat by the 40-yard-line in Houston's Astrodome. The Superdome was "filled with all kinds of unbelievable filth, a screaming mess," but spending the night in a chair was not much better, he said.

"This is what they brought us to?" said Mr. Mason.

James Dao reported from New Orleans for this article, and N. R. Kleinfield from New York. Reporting was also contributed by Felicity Barringer and Joseph B. Treaster in New Orleans and Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, La.

    Conditions in New Orleans Still Dire - Pumping May Take Months, NYT, 3.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03storm.html

 

 

 

 

 


Across U.S.,

Outrage at Response

 

September 3, 2005
The New York Times
By TODD S. PURDUM

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 - There was anger: David Vitter, Louisiana's freshman Republican senator, gave the federal government an F on Friday for its handling of the whirlwind after the storm. And Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared, "We cannot allow it to be said that the difference between those who lived and those who died" amounted to "nothing more than poverty, age or skin color."

There was shock at the slow response: Joseph P. Riley Jr., the 29-year Democratic mayor of Charleston, S.C., and a veteran of Hurricane Hugo's wrath, said: "I knew in Charleston, looking at the Weather Channel, that Gulfport was going to be destroyed. I'm the mayor of Charleston, but I knew that!"

But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world's sole remaining superpower could not - or at least had not - responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government's worst-case possibilities for years.

"It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad," said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. "I'm 84 years old. I've been around a long time, but I've never seen anything like this."

Around the nation, and indeed the world, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina's devastation stretched beyond the usual political recriminations and swift second-guessing that so often follow calamities. In dozens of interviews and editorials, feelings deeper and more troubled bubbled to the surface in response to the flooding and looting that "humbled the most powerful nation on the planet," and showed "how quickly the thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away," as The Daily Mail of London put it.

"It's very disappointing," said Dr. Kauser Akhter, a physician from Tampa, Fla., who was attending a convention of the Islamic Society of North America outside Chicago.

"I think they were too slow to respond. Maybe the response would have been quicker if it had occurred in some other area of the country, for example in New York or California where there's more money, more people who are going to object, raise their voices," she said. "Those people are the poorest of the poor in Mississippi and Alabama, and it seems they had no access to anything."

Jonathan Williams, an architect in Hartford, originally from Uganda, said the delayed arrival of relief and aid supplies in New Orleans made him wonder about how the United States responds to disasters abroad.

"I am in utter shock," he said in an interview at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on Friday. "There is just total disarray. This far into the cleanup and they are still understaffed? I am just so disappointed. It's just a terrible, sad situation."

But Mr. Williams added: "You cannot just blame the president, or any one person. Everyone is partly to blame. It's the whole system."

It was the combination of specific and systemic failures that many of those interviewed - experts and ordinary people alike - echoed.

Andrew Young, the former civil rights worker and mayor of Atlanta who was Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, was born in New Orleans 73 years ago, walked on its levees as a boy and "was always assured by my father that the Army Corps of Engineers had done a masterful job." But, Mr. Young said, "they've been neglected for the last 20 years," along with other pillars of the nation's infrastructure, human and physical.

"I was surprised and not surprised," he said of the failures and suffering of this week.

"It's not just a lack of preparedness. I think the easy answer is to say that these are poor people and black people and so the government doesn't give a damn," he said. "That's O.K., and there might be some truth to that. But I think we've got to see this as a serious problem of the long-term neglect of an environmental system on which our nation depends. All the grain that's grown in Iowa and Illinois, and the huge industrial output of the Midwest has to come down the Mississippi River, and there has to be a port to handle it, to keep a functioning economy in the United States of America."

Mr. Riley, the Charleston mayor, whose Police Department on Monday sent 55 officers to help keep order in Gulfport, Miss., said he had long advocated creating a special military entity - perhaps under the Corps of Engineers - that could respond immediately to disasters.

"It's not the police function," he said. "It's that it's an entity that knows how to quickly restore infrastructure and the essentials of order." He said his own experience with the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when he had the National Guard on standby and then requested Army troops and marines, had convinced him that civilian bureaucracy was sometimes too caught up in the niceties.

"With the eye of Hugo over my City Hall, literally, I said to a FEMA official, 'What's the main bit of advice you can give me?' and he said, 'You need to make sure you're accounting for all your expenses," Mayor Riley recalled. "The tragedy of these things is the unnecessary pain in those early days, the complete destruction of normalcy."

Few suggested the challenges of this particular storm had been easy.

Priscilla Turner, 55, of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., is a registered Democrat, but she said President Bush was being saddled with some unfair blame. "There is an instinct to be so negative," Ms. Turner said, "to wish for the worst, to anticipate the worse, to glory and wallow in the worst." If Mr. Bush had sent troops to New Orleans too quickly, she said, his detractors would have portrayed him as "going in with guns blazing."

As it is, criticism of Mr. Bush has been unsparing, especially abroad. European newspaper headlines used words like "anarchy" and "apocalypse" and some ordinary citizens in less fortunate parts of the world spoke with virtual contempt for what they saw as an American failure to live up to its professed ideals.

"I am absolutely disgusted," said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, watching a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka, according to the Reuters news agency. "After the tsunami, our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S., we can easily see where the civilized part of the world's population is."

There was anger closer to home, too, especially among blacks.

"Babies, the elderly are dying on the streets," said Rebecca Chalk, 60, financial aid director at Sojourner-Douglass College in Baltimore. "It doesn't speak well of America."

Ms. Chalk added: "People are desperate; they're hungry and panicky and they lost everything. The bureaucracy seems like it has to go through all these channels. They should have just gotten the people help by now."

Calvin Kelly, 40, works in a San Francisco food bank warehouse but was born in New Orleans and has been unable to reach elderly family members, including two grandmothers and a 99-year-old aunt, who still live there. "The National Guard is just now getting there," Mr. Kelly said, shaking his head. "The government should have been there when the storm first hit."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an unusual foray into domestic affairs, sharply disputed any suggestion that storm victims had somehow been overlooked because of their race. "We're all going to need to be in this together," she said in announcing offers of foreign aid. "I think everybody's very emotional. It's hard to watch pictures of any American going through this. And yes, the African-American community has obviously been very heavily affected."

But noting her own roots in Alabama, and her father's in Louisiana, Dr. Rice announced plans to visit the region this weekend and said, "That Americans would somehow in a color-affected way decide who to help and who not to help - I just don't believe it."

By no means did all the criticism come from blacks, or from Mr. Bush's political opponents.

Senator Vitter spent part of Friday touring the devastation with Mr. Bush and told reporters that he hoped a turnaround was in the offing. But earlier in the day, news agencies reported, he said the "operational effectiveness" of federal efforts to date deserved a failing grade, or lower.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who also spent part of the day with the president and went out of his way to praise the government's response, offered a sober assessment.

"We're going to be fine at the end of the day," Mr. Barbour said, "but the end of the day's a long way away."

 

Reporting for this article was contributed by Gary Gately in Baltimore, Laurie Goodstein in Chicago, Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco, and Jennifer Medina and Marek J. Fuchs in New York.

    Across U.S., Outrage at Response, NYT, 3.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03voices.html

 

 

 

 

 

Promises by Bush Amid the Tears

 

September 3, 2005
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

 

President Bush, facing searing criticism over the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina, toured New Orleans and the Gulf Coast yesterday in his first on-the-ground look at the desperation that has gripped the region for the last five days.

"I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen," Mr. Bush said in remarks at the end of the day on the tarmac at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. "I understand the devastation requires more than one day's attention. It's going to require the attention from this country for a long period of time."

Mr. Bush's arrival coincided with long-awaited deliveries of aid to the flood zone. But the president did not interact much with storm victims, and at one site, a Salvation Army truck in Mississippi, those he did see had first been screened by Secret Service agents with metal detectors.

Mr. Bush flew back to Washington from New Orleans without paying a visit to the chaotic makeshift trauma center set up in one terminal at the airport, where many patients evacuated from the city's hospitals were dying before they could be airlifted to other cities.

For the first time, Mr. Bush acknowledged that the government response to the catastrophe had fallen short. "The results are not acceptable," the president said as he left the White House about 9 a.m., his face grim.

Later, however, after a walking tour of Point Cadet, a poor neighborhood of flattened one-story bungalows in Biloxi, Miss., Mr. Bush amended his remark to say, "I'm certainly not denigrating the efforts of anybody." He added, "I am satisfied with the response, I'm not satisfied with all the results."

Mr. Bush toured Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana as he was coming under some of the harshest attacks of his presidency - from Democrats, Republicans, local officials, hurricane victims and the general public, who have been shocked by scenes of bodies floating in floodwater and the elderly left dead in their wheelchairs in the world's most powerful nation.

"I don't think anybody can be prepared for the vastness of the destruction," Mr. Bush told reporters in Biloxi, after walking through streets of crushed cars and the occasional concrete stairway to nowhere. "You can look at a picture, but until you sit on that doorstep of a house that used to be, or stand by the rubble, you just can't imagine it."

He also declared that the United States had the resources to fight this disaster as well as the war in Iraq. "Somebody questioned me the other day, 'Do we have enough National Guard troops?' " Mr. Bush said. "Of course we do."

In Biloxi, Mr. Bush hugged and kissed two weeping sisters on a street where a house had collapsed, telling them to "hang in there," and later passed out bottles of water to residents at a Salvation Army truck.

It was the first time that the president encountered a storm victim since the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast on Monday and Lake Pontchartrain flooded 80 percent of New Orleans on Tuesday.

Mr. Bush toured the city by helicopter with Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana and C. Ray Nagin, the New Orleans mayor, who on a local radio station on Thursday night urged federal officials to "get off your asses and do something."

Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of the city's devastation, where thousands of largely poor, black refugees have raged at the government's response to one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The White House cited security concerns and worries about causing more chaos as the reasons for keeping Mr. Bush away from the streets and the New Orleans Superdome, where refugees have lived in squalor and lawlessness for days.

"The president wanted to see as much as he could without impeding the relief efforts," said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman.

Throughout his day, Mr. Bush did not address the shocking images of the desperate and dying on television, even when he was asked by a reporter in Biloxi "why the richest nation on earth can't get food and water to those people that need it."

Mr. Bush sidestepped the question and responded that helicopters had rescued people from rooftops and "thousands of peoples' lives have been saved immediately, and that's good news."

He did stop to see the work going on to repair the breach in the city's levee that caused much of the flooding, and said at the airport that "there's a lot of people working hard, and they're making good progress."

The president's goal for the day seemed to be one of spreading hope and encouragement, which he offered publicly in New Orleans to Michael D. Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who has been sharply criticized for its response to the disaster.

White House officials had said that Mr. Bush, in cutting short his monthlong vacation, would tour the region either Friday or Saturday, and in the end he chose the day on which he could arrive simultaneously with the first convoys of relief supplies. As Mr. Bush appeared in Biloxi, cable television channels ran a split-screen image of National Guard trucks bringing food and water to desperate people in the Superdome.

In Biloxi, many residents of the Point Cadet neighborhood said they had been buoyed by the president's visit. "He's going to give us all the help he can. I think he's seen enough devastation," said Valerie Owens, who had received a hug and a kiss from Mr. Bush when she went to get food from the Salvation Army truck. The president teared up, Ms. Owens said, as she told him how she and her family and neighbors, including two children, ages 2 and 5, had ridden out the storm for five hours on a small flat boat, named the S.S. Minnow, just like on "Gilligan's Island."

"The only one not crying," she said, "was the 5-year-old girl."

Ellen Robertson, 51, met the president with her 7-year-old niece. "He said he's trying to get everything back on track for us," Ms. Robertson said. She and her family live in four houses along a nearby street and all had their roofs crushed by trees, debris and wind. "I believe him because I have to," she said. "I have no choice for right now."

But on the edge of the neighborhood, people sat in their yards grumbling about relief efforts and declining to go meet the president. "It's been three days; there's still no ice this side of town," said Mack McCormack, who was living with three other men in a small home where mud stains six feet up the side were evidence of Hurricane Katrina's visit. "There are people who are hurt. They can't get out to get ice. We're making two trips today with these coolers with wheels to get it for them."

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington for this article. Kate Zernike contributed reporting from Biloxi, Miss.

    Promises by Bush Amid the Tears, NYT, 3.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03bush.html

 

 

 

 

 

Airlines ferrying hurricane victims out

 

Sat Sep 3, 2005
12:00 AM ET
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. commercial airlines plan to ferry more than 25,000 New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina from the city to safer locations, the airline industry and the U.S. government said on Friday.

Airlines including financially strapped carriers like Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines are participating in the operation and will dispatch residents initially to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

Both major runways at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport were open and four flights per hour were going in and out, according to Department of Transportation spokesman Greg Martin. That includes military aircraft.

The airlines are volunteering dozens of aircraft and crews are offering their time to fly the planes, according to the Air Transport Association. Some of the aircraft are arriving with relief workers as well as law enforcement officers.

"The airlines' resounding offer of support will help us move more people to safety and more supplies to relieve suffering," Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said in a statement.

Additionally, the agency is working to restore the Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi airport to full operating status.

The Transportation Department said it has sent more than 500 buses to New Orleans and there is an attempt to arrange for Amtrak to take some evacuees out by train.

Additionally, federal rules have been waived that limit the hours repair crews and truck drivers hauling gasoline, diesel and jet fuel can work, the agency said.

The airline industry has been hard hit since the September 11, 2001, attacks and have been facing additional difficulties with soaring fuel prices. Several airlines are either in bankruptcy or could seek such protection soon.

Other airlines aiding the evacuation effort are: Alaska Airlines; America West Airlines; AMR Corp.'s; JetBlue; Southwest Airlines; UAL Corp.'s United Airlines; US Airways and Air Canada.

Cargo carriers are also assisting, including FedEx, United Parcel Service and ASTAR Air Cargo.

    Airlines ferrying hurricane victims out, R, 3.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T035940Z_01_MCC282833_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-AIRLIFT-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smoke billows from a fire as another blaze (rear) rages

in downtown New Orleans on September 2nd, 2005.

 

Explosions rang out and fires blazed

early Friday in southwestern New Orleans,

as authorities battled to restore order

after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast.

 

Photograph: DAVID J. PHILLIP

AFP/Getty Images

 

The Boston Globe > The Big Picture

Remembering Katrina, five years ago        August 27, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/remembering_katrina_five_years.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Troops bring relief

to stricken New Orleans

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
11:16 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Military convoys rolled into New Orleans on Friday, carrying troops to try to stamp out lawlessness and supplies for desperate survivors of Hurricane Katrina after days of delays and broken promises.

President George W. Bush, facing fierce criticism over the government's slow response to the one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, signed a $10.5 billion measure late on Friday to speed federal aid to Gulf Coast areas devastated by the storm.

Earlier, Bush toured the stricken area and vowed to fix relief efforts he admitted had been "not unacceptable."

"We're going to make it right," he said.

A caravan of camouflage-green trucks carrying National Guard troops and escorted by helicopters brought a glimpse of hope to New Orleans, which quickly fell into chaos and desperation after the storm surge broke its protective system of levees, and floodwaters inundated the city.

Thousands of people are feared killed and scenes of decomposing corpses, rampant looting and widespread destruction have shocked Americans and aroused angry complaints from politicians and local residents about the lack of aid in the world's richest country.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the federal government in an angry radio interview, saying he was "pissed" at the lack of help his city had received. "Get off your asses and let's do something," he said.

The arrival of the military convoy raised hopes the government might finally be getting a grip on the crisis.

"We got food, water and medical attention. We are gonna get you people out of here," a National Guard officer told thousands of hungry and frustrated people who have waited days at New Orleans' convention center for evacuation buses that never came.

Some cheered but others demanded to know why it had taken so long. Many stranded evacuees recounted horrific tales of murder, rape, death threats and near-starvation inside the filthy, reeking shelter this week.

 

'THROW-AWAY PEOPLE'

Leroy Fouchea, 42, said two infants were among those who perished because help was too slow in coming. "They died right here, in America, waiting for food."

"We are throw-away people," said Sherman Wright, 69.

A short distance away the corpse of a woman sat in a lawn chair, a towel draped over her head. She had been there since Thursday, people nearby said.

There seemed to be no end to the misery for some. One person died and several others suffered critical injuries when a bus carrying storm refugees to safety flipped on a highway near New Orleans.

Bush and Congress described the relief measure as a downpayment on what will be a larger amount of money to be made available in coming weeks.

Music lovers were glad to hear rock 'n' roll pioneer Fats Domino, who was unaccounted for after the storm, was rescued by boat from floodwaters near his New Orleans home. Domino was "stressed out" but safe, his agent said.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it may need up to 80 days to drain the floodwaters from the city after the hurricane struck Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Monday with 140-mph (225-kph) winds and a huge storm surge.

As people lined up to receive food and water from the troops, a soldier recently back from Iraq said the scene was eerily reminiscent of Baghdad.

"There were always people in the streets always asking for water and food," said Chad Blocker, 21, of the Arkansas National Guard. "It is kind of the same here except here it is your own people."

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the troops were going in with shoot-to-kill orders to stop looting. "These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded."

 

'NEVER THE SAME'

Nagin questioned why they had not come sooner. "People are dying, people have lost their homes, people have lost their jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same," he said.

Bush walked down a storm-damaged street in downtown Biloxi, Mississippi, and comforted a sobbing woman who told him, "I don't have anything."

The woman, Bronwynne Bassier, 23, and her sister Kim, 21, escaped the storm but her house was in ruins. She clutched a black plastic bag she hoped to use to collect some items from what was left of her home.

"Sorry you're going through this," Bush said, hugging both women.

Dozens of foreign governments offered help ranging from cash donations and helicopters to tents and medical teams. Even as the offers came in, the U.S. government was widely criticized abroad for failing to move more effectively.

Stunned New Orleans residents stumbled around bodies that lay untouched. Others trudged along flooded and debris-strewn streets toward the Superdome football stadium where they hoped to be bused to safety.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said Amtrak passenger trains would join buses and aircraft helping evacuate people trying to escape the historic jazz city.

Most of the victims were poor and black, largely because they have no cars and were unable to flee the city before Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast. The disaster has highlighted the racial and class divides in a city and a country where the gap between rich and poor is vast.

Civil right leader Jesse Jackson, speaking in Baton Rouge, said the government had been "grossly insensitive" to the needs of New Orleans' poor.

"We've sent our National Guard, our helicopters, our resources to secure Baghdad and manufacture a democracy, but leaving New Orleans vulnerable," he told reporters.

(Additional reporting by Mark Babineck in New Orleans, Erwin Seba, Paul Simao and Jim Loney in Baton Rouge, Peter Cooney in Houston, Steve Holland, Charles Aldinger and John Whitesides in Washington)

    Troops bring relief to stricken New Orleans, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T031524Z_01_HO481242_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-WRAP-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Murder and mayhem

in New Orleans' miserable shelter

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
11:45 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - With the rotors of President George W. Bush's helicopter sounding overhead, New Orleans' poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.

Ending days of abandonment since the hurricane struck on Monday, the U.S. National Guard handed out military rations and a bottle of water to thousands of evacuees -- the first proper meal most had eaten in days.

But as the masses lined up outside, herded by Army troops toting machine guns, inside the convention center where these people slept since Monday was the stench of death and decay.

Leroy Fouchea, 42, waited in the sweltering heat for an hour to get his ration -- his first proper food since Monday -- and immediately handed it over to a sickly friend.

He then offered to show reporters the dead bodies of a man in a wheelchair, a young man who he said he dragged inside just hours earlier, and the limp forms of two infants, one just four months old, the other six months old.

"They died right here, in America, waiting for food," Fouchea said as he walked toward Hall D, where the bodies were put to get them out of the searing heat.

He said people were let die and left without food simply because they were poor and that the evacuation effort earlier concentrated on the French Quarter of the city. "Because that's where the money is," he spat.

A National Guardsman refused entry.

"It doesn't need to be seen, it's a make-shift morgue in there," he told a Reuters photographer. "We're not letting anyone in there anymore. If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq."

As rations were finally doled out here on the day President Bush visited the devastated city, an elderly white woman and her husband collapsed from the heat.

"I had to walk two blocks to get here and I have arthritis and three ruptured discs in my back," said Selma Valenti, 80, as her husband lay beside her, being revived by a policeman in riot gear. The two had eaten nothing since Wednesday.

Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.

Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children.

She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center.

"She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."

Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the abuse and murder of children, but they could not be independently verified.

Many complained bitterly about why they received so little for so many days, and they had harsh words for Bush.

"I really don't know what to say about President Bush," said Richard Dunbar, 60, a Vietnam veteran. "He showed no lack of haste when he wanted to go to Iraq, but for his own people right here in Louisiana, we get only lip service."

One young man said he was not looking forward to another night in the convention center and wondered when conditions would improve. "It's been like a jail in there," he said. "We've got murderers, rapists, killers, thieves. We've got it all."

    Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' miserable shelter, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T034445Z_01_MCC313503_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-MAYHEM-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Bush signs $10.5 bln spending bill

for Katrina

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
9:28 PM ET
Reuters

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush signed a $10.5 billion measure on Friday to speed federal aid to Gulf Coast areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Bush and Congress have described the measure as a downpayment on what will be a larger amount of money to be made available in coming weeks.

The package was signed into law just hours after a few dozen of the 435 members of the House of Representatives met in an emergency session to approve the spending. The Senate passed the measure on Thursday.

Bush signed the bill after returning from a trip to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, where he got a first-hand look at the hurricane's destruction.

Facing scathing criticism over the government's slow response to the disaster, Bush said the relief effort so far had been unacceptable but he pledged to fix it.

    Bush signs $10.5 bln spending bill for Katrina, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T012734Z_01_FOR305269_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RELIEF-BILL-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Bush:

Katrina response unacceptable

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
8:13 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland

 

MOBILE, Alabama (Reuters) - President Bush, facing scathing criticism of the government response to Hurricane Katrina, acknowledged on Friday the results were unacceptable as he toured the ravaged Gulf Coast and flooded New Orleans.

"Where it's not working right, we're going to make it right," Bush said as he spoke with officials about the recovery effort then took a helicopter tour of the Alabama-Mississippi coast.

"We are going to restore order in the city of New Orleans," he said.

Bush was blunt in his appraisal of what had been done in the four days since the storm struck on Monday, saying in Washington before he left, "The results are not acceptable."

Later, he walked down a storm-damaged street in downtown Biloxi, Mississippi, and comforted a sobbing woman who told him, "I don't have anything."

The woman, Bronwynne Bassier, 23, and her sister Kim, 21, managed to escape the storm but her house was in ruins. She clutched a black plastic bag she hoped to use to collect some items from what was left of her home.

"Sorry you're going through this," Bush said, hugging both women.

Bush toured the stricken region as criticism mounted of his administration's response to likely the nation's worst natural disaster, including the adequacy of its funding for New Orleans' levees and its readiness for the emergency.

Concerns were also growing over the U.S. economy as gasoline prices surge above $3 a gallon. On Capitol Hill, a fellow Republican, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist asked for hearings on the federal response to the hurricane once immediate needs were met.

"The levees broke on Tuesday in New Orleans. On Wednesday and Thursday, we started evacuating people ... I am satisfied with the response. I am not satisfied with all the results," Bush told reporters in Biloxi.

Anarchy and looting have broken out in flooded New Orleans, tens of thousands across the area remain stranded and without adequate food and water, and local officials are warning of a death toll that could number in the thousands. Only half of the 30,000 National Guard and military troops so far dispatched are in place.

Katrina's aftermath presents Bush with his greatest emergency since the September 11, 2001, attacks. He has already been struggling with the lowest approval ratings of his presidency amid rising discontent with the Iraq war.

Bush rejected criticism that his administration had devoted too many resources to Iraq and not enough to domestic preparedness.

"I just completely disagree," he said.

Bush cut his vacation short by two days to return to Washington Wednesday to oversee the recovery. His request for a quick $10.5 billion in aid was approved by the Congress and Bush said he would sign it on Friday night.

"We'll get on top of this situation and we're going to help people who need help," he insisted.

In Biloxi, Bush also met 35-year-old Kevin Miller, who clung to a tree for three hours until the storm receded, holding onto a woman and a dog with his arms until he became too exhausted and let them go.

"I spent a long time in that tree," he said.

    Bush: Katrina response unacceptable, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-03T001304Z_01_BAU247611_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-BUSH-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina stops the music

in New Orleans

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
4:11 PM ET
Reuters
By Sue Zeidler

 

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Katrina not only felled a city: it stopped the music.

While the human toll of Hurricane Katrina defies imagination, New Orleans is also reeling from a cultural loss from which it might not recover.

The city is home to a rich, thick musical gumbo of styles from rhythm and blues to zydeco and the birthplace of jazz, the American music that started in the brothels of the city's Storyville section and spread around the world.

Now streets where jazz funerals would parade past and where smoky clubs would jam through the night are under water.

Many wonder whether the great musical tradition forged by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers has been drowned by the savagery of Katrina.

"New Orleans was a cultural phenomenon that created the birth of jazz -- the first, great unique American art form," said Shelton Berg, professor of jazz studies at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.

"So anything that wipes out something that defines a unique part of the American existence is a side tragedy," Berg said.

"It's comparable to what we saw in (Afghanistan) when fundamentalists tore down statues and icons. You're wiping from the earth the cradle of a culture," he said.

Although there is some debate, many historians believe jazz emerged in New Orleans not far from the French Quarter in the city's Treme district, which includes Storyville, after the end of the Civil War when former slaves started arriving in the city in late 1800s.

"I've heard the whole area of Treme's underwater. It's such a loss. It's one of the most culturally significant neighborhoods, the cradle of jazz," said Michael Murphy, a New Orleans filmmaker whose documentary, "Make It Funky," chronicles the evolution and influence of black music from its roots in New Orleans.

Treme is home to Louis Armstrong Park, dedicated to the city's most famous native son. While the park and the neighborhood had languished for some time, it had recently picked up, featuring some popular clubs and jazz parades.

"Treme has been a very vibrant area in terms of nurturing jazz through the generations," said Murphy, who had hoped his documentary would introduce new audiences to the city.

"The irony is I finished it and the now city might be destroyed," said Murphy.

Some believe jazz was first commercialized in the raucous Storyville section of Treme in the late 1890s when it boasted many 24-hour bordellos. "The music was born on the pianos of the front parlor of the brothels," said Los Angeles-based comedian Harry Shearer, who has strong ties to New Orleans.

Band leaders and composers of that time, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and "Jelly Roll" Morton, soon became the larger-than-life founders of Jazz.

The Marsalis Family, Harry Connick Jr., the Neville Brothers, and Fats Domino have continued the tradition of keeping music and jazz in the vanguard of New Orleans culture at various clubs around the city.

Connick said he believes the city will rebuild. "One thing about New Orleans, these people are freakishly strong and passionate about this city," he said on NBC.

While New Orleans claims jazz among its proudest accomplishments, its architecture, food and propensity for throwing parties like Mardi Gras have also put it on the map.

Its residents' ability to overcome adversity is what fuels the culture, natives of New Orleans like to say.

"Cultural diversity gives it a flavor not like any other city in the world. But you're also talking about a city built in the middle of swamps," said filmmaker Murphy.

"This gave the city a love of life, music, food and architecture. These people embrace life to its fullest and Mardi Gras is an extension of this," he said.

"You go all over the world and you see the most beautiful places. But I always like it when I'm coming home and see the swamps," said singer Aaron Neville, calling the disaster "heartwrenching."

    Katrina stops the music in New Orleans, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2005-09-02T201041Z_01_SCH272625_RTRIDST_0_ENTERTAINMENT-WEATHER-KATRINA-CULTURE-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Health crisis grips New Orleans

even as help lands

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
4:24 PM ET
Reuters
By Mark Babineck

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Lethornia J. Whiticar was lying all alone in the end zone of New Orleans' famed Superdome stadium, very sick and in great need of help.

As relief supplies finally began arriving on Friday and other evacuees scrambled for a seat on a bus out of the flooded and devastated city, there was nothing Whiticar could do but wait.

"I want to get out of here, but I need fluid pills because I just can't stand up right now," the 52-year-old diabetes sufferer said as he lay in the end zone, his feet bloated.

A military convoy with food and emergency supplies finally reached New Orleans on Friday, but a health emergency is raging after Hurricane Katrina tore in from the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week, sending deep floodwaters surging through much of the historic city.

Thousands are feared dead, and the city's hospitals are without electricity or key medical supplies, struggling to keep critically ill patients alive.

Conditions are appalling at New Orleans' two main emergency shelters -- the Superdome and the convention center -- with abandoned dead bodies on the ground or propped up in chairs.

The stench of human feces and urine was overwhelming, and many sick people waited listlessly on the ground or in wheelchairs to be fed and evacuated. Many complained about the federal government's slow response to the disaster.

"They left us here to die," said Tony Hatcher, a 48-year-old who looked around and pointed out a woman with a half-bandaged open sore on her left leg and a boy with bad skin condition on his arms. Neither had received medical attention.

Katrina's victims were predominantly black and poor, a fact that was not lost on many.

"We are throw-away people," said Sherman Wright, 69, who abandoned his home as flood waters rose dangerously high on Monday and still has no idea if anything is left. "Our politicians are not doing an damn thing for us."

Federal and state officials still have very little idea how many people are dead or where the bodies are, and experts warn of a huge health threat posed by toxic floodwaters, human waste in the streets, low supplies of clean drinking water and New Orleans' customary heat.

"We have a recipe for disease and we want to avoid that. It would make a devastating tragedy even worse," Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told the CBS "Early Show" on Friday.

"Many of the hospitals are dysfunctional. We are rushing to develop medical shelters. We anticipate over time to move as many as 10,000 beds into that area," he said, adding that the government has set up 10 medical shelters up in the New Orleans area, the first of a planned 2,500.

Hopes for relief were raised on Friday afternoon as troops brought food supplies into the city and prepared to start distributing them. More people were also loaded on buses to go to new shelters in neighboring Texas.

The mood began to change and some of the tension eased, but there was still resentment over the government's slow response and the way evacuees were treated.

Terri Dorsey said the response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington had showed authorities could handle a major disaster but it had not happened this time around.

"Why don't they take care of us?" she said, sitting with two grandchildren and a grandniece in front of the convention center. "They just got out to us yesterday. They dropped things to us out of a helicopter like we were animals".

    Health crisis grips New Orleans even as help lands, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-02T202335Z_01_FOR273384_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-WEATHER-KATRINA-SICK-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

Katrina images

echo developing world disasters

 

Fri Sep 2, 2005
5:22 PM ET
Reuters
By Lesley Wroughton

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Images of desperate people clamoring for food dropped from military helicopters, armed soldiers in the streets and bodies floating in fetid water are usually associated with the world's poorest countries.

But this time, the scenes of death and despair are coming from a major city in the world's richest economy.

The suffering of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has shaken even hardened development experts at the World Bank, who deal with extreme poverty and disaster daily.

"In many ways this is turned into a developing country," said Margaret Arnold, the World Bank's natural disaster expert, who has dealt with some of the world's biggest natural disasters, including the Asian tsunami.

"I am shocked that this is happening in the U.S."

Arnold said Americans must take a hard look at how events have unfolded in the past few days.

"When all of this has calmed down, a lot of U.S. cities will have to do some real soul-searching," she said.

Arnold, whose sister lost her home in the hurricane, said it was clear the city was unprepared to weather the storm, although officials had long warned such a disaster was inevitable.

She believes that even in some of the world's poorest nations, where disasters are commonplace, government officials would have moved more quickly to evacuate people.

"One thing we tell our client countries is to have clear institutional arrangements in place for having rapid response and effective coordination," Arnold said.

"This has been the first real test since FEMA (U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) was put under Homeland Security and obviously it didn't work and I think they will want to reexamine how they respond to disasters."

Just as in the developing world, it is the poorest residents who have suffered most this time.

"It is the poor that are hit the hardest and they have the least coping mechanisms and probably don't have insurance," said Arnold. "Their homes are completely gone and they probably won't be able to rebuild and regain their livelihoods."

Experience has taught the bank that rebuilding after disasters can take years and billions of dollars.

"This is going to take some time and the poorest will not recover," she said, estimating economic costs could be well above $25 billion.

"With disasters, the poor are kept in this kind of cyclical poverty, because even the smallest events that don't register on the international scene impact them tremendously."

One positive in the rebuilding of New Orleans is that it should give authorities a chance to correct faults in the system that allowed the floodwaters to spill into the city.

"In (the) tsunami-affected region, we are trying to do that, to say 'This is an opportunity to go about things the right way and take the time to do it right,"' Arnold said.

Katrina images echo developing world disasters, R, 2.9.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-02T212115Z_01_BAU276870_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ECONOMY-KATRINA-WORLDBANK-DC.XML

 

 

 

 

 

The damage

that Katrina could still wreak

 

Sep 1st 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

 

Officials say they can only guess at the death toll
after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf of Mexico coast,
but it is likely to be in the thousands. Besides its devastating cost in lives, Katrina could do substantial damage to the American economy

 

 

 

 

The damage that Katrina could still wreak

The Economist        Sep 1st 2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE natural catastrophe is past, but the human catastrophe in the wake of Hurricane Katrina seems to be worsening still. Around four-fifths of New Orleans was still under water on Thursday September 1st, three days after the storm slammed into Louisiana, with winds roaring up to 140mph. Much of the city is below sea level and its ageing levees—a system of flood walls, earthworks and pumping stations designed to hold the waters back—could not resist Katrina's might.

As the hurricane travelled on across Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama, it left a trail of death and devastation there too. Officials say it is impossible to know how many people have been killed, but the official count has already moved into the hundreds; at least 30 died in a single catastrophic collapse of a seaside apartment building in Biloxi, Mississippi. In New Orleans, reports of bodies floating in the floodwaters herald a dreadful accounting to come; the mayor has said that the final death toll may be in the thousands. With many roads blocked by the floods and fallen trees, rescue workers and volunteers are working round the clock to reach the uncounted number in need of food, medical attention and uncontaminated drinking water. But while catastrophes often bring out the best in people, in this case it has brought out some of the worst, too. Looters stalk New Orleans, fires started by arsonists rage as desperate refugees clamour for rescue, and CNN has reported shots fired at medical convoys evacuating the sick and helpless.

Some are warning that it could be a matter of weeks, or even months, before electricity is restored to all of the millions who lost it in the wake of the storm. The army's chief engineer says it could take up to 30 days to remove the water, and New Orleans officials have said it could be several months before those who fled before Katrina hit are able to return.

Though most of the city's residents left before the storm, huge efforts are now being made to rescue and evacuate those who remained behind to care for pets or ageing relatives and neighbours, or simply because they had nowhere else to go. The Superdome, a downtown sports arena, was a temporary home for at least 20,000, but heat, humidity, failed plumbing and a lack of supplies have turned it into a festering nightmare. Buses are now being brought in to transport the refugees to a stadium in Houston, but violence and the overwhelming number of the needy have slowed this and other evacuation efforts. Reports have begun to emerge of people dying in the crowds of refugees waiting for busses to take them to safety.

More worrisome still is the toll of disease on those who are trying to wade to safety. The floodwaters are now a toxic stew of raw sewage, household and industrial chemicals, and the rotting corpses of the people and pets who drowned as the waters rose. Doctors worry that this may mean an increase in the sorts of gastrointestinal diseases commonly seen only in the poorest countries. The water is also an excellent breeding ground for mosquitoes, particularly in the warm, wet climate of the Gulf Coast, which could mean a spike in mosquito-borne illnesses such as West Nile virus.

Once the floodwaters have been pumped out of the city—which may take weeks—insurers expect a deluge of claims. Estimates of the losses range from $9 billion to $25 billion. The high end of this range would make Katrina the most expensive natural disaster in America’s history for underwriters, topping the $21 billion paid out after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

To the insurers’ losses must be added the cost to the government of rescue operations, plus many uninsured losses that will ultimately be met by private individuals or the taxpayers. For instance, homeowners’ insurance typically does not include flood coverage, which is underwritten by the federal government, and business-interruption insurance may not cover losses from looting. There will undoubtedly be wrangling between insurance adjusters, homeowners and the feds over what water damage was due to the storm, and what is attributable to the rising flood.

 

The ripples widen

Nor will the effects of Hurricane Katrina be limited to the Gulf Coast and the offices of a few agitated insurers. Analysts are busy rewriting their forecasts of America’s fourth-quarter GDP growth to take into account the expected economic repercussions of the devastation. The affected area’s ports move a large fraction of the nation’s imports—including critical oil and gas supplies—as well as roughly half its exports of agricultural commodities like corn and soyabeans. Action Economics, a market-analysis firm, has already nudged its forecast for GDP growth down to 4.4% from 4.6%, at an annualised rate, for the current (third) quarter.

While big hurricanes like Katrina destroy wealth, they sometimes lead to a temporary surge in GDP as the downturn immediately after the storm is made up for by the burst of economic activity that takes place when the rebuilding begins. In the case of Katrina, however, any output boost will be balanced by the effect on the area's energy infrastructure. In a research report from Merrill Lynch, David Rosenberg says that while rebuilding could add $40 billion to America's GDP, disruptions to energy supplies could raise prices enough to claw back $30 billion of that gain.

The Gulf of Mexico provides about a tenth of all the crude oil consumed in America; anod almost half of the petrol produced in the country comes from refineries in the states along the gulf's shores. Some three-quarters of the region's natural gas production, and over 90% ofoil output, are still shut down, and the Department of Energy repored on Wednesdays that nine refineries, processing 1.8m barrels per day, are out of action. Oil companies are busy assessing how much damage was done to drilling rigs, refineries and port facilities; but even if the infrastructure is largely intact, shipping delays are already idling refinery production in some areas.

This is bad news considering that refineries have been running flat out in recent months to keep up with high demand. The White House has said it will tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to supply refiners caught short by the hurricane, and the Environmental Protection Agency has moved to alleviate the refining bottleneck by temporarily lifting some fuel standards until September 15th. Nonetheless, average petrol prices nationwide will probably hit $3 a gallon heading into this weekend's Labour Day holiday. Prices are already well above that in some areas, particularly in the South.

The real concern, however, is how long they will remain there. On Wednesday, the American Petroleum Institute said that the effect of Katrina on oil and natural gas production would be “significant and protracted” as reports came in of drilling rigs damaged and adrift in the Gulf. By Thursday, oil was trading at just under $69 a barrel, below the record $70.85 it hit on Tuesday as the extent of the damage became clear, but high enough to worry economists. Though in real (inflation-adjusted) terms prices are still lower than in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, that reassuring mantra has worn thinner in recent months as real prices have edged closer and closer to those historical highs. Furthermore, while much of the recent oil-price increase was demand-driven, and thus expected to have relatively benign economic effects, any sizeable outages owing to Katrina could cause a supply shock similar to those that repeatedly battered the world economy in the 1970s.

Those fears may be overdone, not least because the damage from Katrina will not be as enduring as the OPEC-induced shocks of earlier decades. But with oil bobbing near $70, and household spending already at unsustainable levels, some analysts think that consumers will have to retrench at least temporarily—especially since the refinery troubles have caused petrol futures to keep climbing even as crude oil prices have fallen back. Another report by Mr Rosenberg calculates that every one-cent rise in the price of a gallon of petrol takes $1.3 billion out of consumers’ pockets, which could trim as much as a full percentage point off consumer spending this winter. That would not be good for the GDP numbers.

It would also be bad news abroad, where many nations, particularly in Asia, are already heavily dependent on robust American demand for their exports. Those countries are also being hit by higher oil prices. Indonesia's central bank was forced to tighten the money supply sharply on Tuesday, raising interest rates by three-quarters of a point and increasing banks’ reserve requirements, to stem a near-10% drop in the rupiah. Partly thanks to lavish fuel subsidies, Indonesia’s oil imports, financed in dollars, have touched off fears of a balance-of-payments crisis, driving the currency sharply downwards. On Wednesday, Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said that the government would need to curtail its fuel subsidies in order to stave off a currency crisis. While rich countries are much less dependent on oil than they used to be, thanks to increases in fuel efficiency and a shift from manufacturing to services, middle-income countries are still big energy guzzlers: India and South Korea use more oil per dollar of GDP today than they did in the 1970s.

There are also fears that Europe’s recovery could be choked off in its infancy by the steady upward march of prices for petrol and heating oil. That would weaken another of Asian exporters’ main markets and leave the world economy looking vulnerable. If the damage Katrina has done to America’s oil-pumping capacity forces Americans to shop abroad for more fuel to feed their appetites, it could be a long cold winter for everyone.

    The damage that Katrina could still wreak, E, Sep 1st 2005,
    http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4339099

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stranded

For 12 years the Justice Center in New Orleans

campaigned for poor inmates facing the death penalty.

Now it has been completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer who founded it,

says hope is also lost for scores of its clients

 

The Guardian > G2        pp. 6-7

Friday September 2, 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/02/hurricanekatrina.usa9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Margins of Society

to Center of the Tragedy

 

September 2, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

 

The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.

"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States' poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.

"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."

The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and message boards, and many black officials say it is a prime subject of conversation around the country. Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that there has yet to be a response equal to that which followed the Asian tragedy.

Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and the president of the National Association of Black Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act faster.

"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said. "Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no one has answered their cries."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few urban votes.

"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with Louisiana officials yesterday. "I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."

In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would force people to confront inequality.

"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."

That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman from New York City, who said it was made all the worse by the failure of government officials to have planned.

"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to the levees was clear.

"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.

Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.

"Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."

Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."

That sentiment was shared by members of other minority groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.

"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."

This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together and pray for those who lived and those who died. They will seek to understand something that has yet to be fully comprehended.

Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But others have already noted the absence of a human one.

"Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things."

That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis.

"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."



Contributing reporting from New York for this article were Andy Newman, William Yardley, Jonathan P. Hicks, Patrick D. Healy, Diane Cardwell, Anemona Hartocollis, Ronald Smothers, Jeff Leeds, Manny Fernandez and Colin Moynihan. Also contributing were Michael Cooper in Albany, Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago, Brenda Goodman in Atlanta and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco.

    From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy, NYT, 2.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02discrim.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Refugees swamp city aid centres

The Guardian        p. 5        2.9.2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/02/
hurricanekatrina.usa7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Local Officials Criticize

Federal Government Over Response

 

September 2, 2005
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
and DEBORAH SONTAG

 

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 1 - Despair, privation and violent lawlessness grew so extreme in New Orleans on Thursday that the flooded city's mayor issued a "desperate S O S" and other local officials, describing the security situation as horrific, lambasted the federal government as responding too slowly to the disaster.

Thousands of refugees from Hurricane Katrina boarded buses for Houston, but others quickly took their places at the filthy, teeming Superdome, which has been serving as the primary shelter. At the increasingly unsanitary convention center, crowds swelled to about 25,000 and desperate refugees clamored for food, water and attention while dead bodies, slumped in wheelchairs or wrapped in sheets, lay in their midst.

"Some people there have not eaten or drunk water for three or four days, which is inexcusable," acknowledged Joseph W. Matthews, the director of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness.

"We need additional troops, food, water," Mr. Matthews begged, "and we need personnel, law enforcement. This has turned into a situation where the city is being run by thugs."

Three days after the hurricane hit, bringing widespread destruction to the Gulf Coast and ruinous floods to low-lying New Orleans, the White House said President Bush would tour the region on Friday. Citing the magnitude of the disaster, federal officials defended their response so far and pledged that more help was coming. The Army Corps of Engineers continued work to close a levee breach that allowed water from Lake Pontchartrain to pour into New Orleans.

The effects of the disaster spilled out over the country. In Houston, the city began to grapple with the logistics of taking tens of thousands of refugees into the Astrodome. American Red Cross officials said late Thursday night that the Astrodome was full after accepting more than 11,000 refugees and that evacuees were being sent to other shelters in the Houston area.

Elsewhere, San Antonio and Dallas each braced for the arrival of 25,000 more, and Baton Rouge overnight replaced New Orleans as the most populous city in Louisiana and was bursting at the seams.

The devastation in the Gulf Coast also continued to roil oil markets, sending gasoline prices soaring in many areas of the country. In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley called on citizens to conserve fuel while two big pipelines that supply most of the state's gasoline were brought back on line.

Throughout the stricken region, scores of frantic people, without telephone service, asked for help contacting friends or relatives whose fates they did not know. Some ended up finding them dead. Others had emotional reunions. Newspapers offered toll-free numbers or Web message boards for the searches.

Meanwhile, the situation in New Orleans continued to deteriorate. Angry crowds chanted cries for help, and some among them rushed chaotically at helicopters bringing in food. Although Mayor C. Ray Nagin speculated that thousands might have died, officials said they still did not have a clear idea of the precise toll.

"We're just a bunch of rats," said Earle Young, 31, a cook who stood waiting in a throng of perhaps 10,000 outside the Superdome, waiting in the blazing sun for buses to take them away from the city. "That's how they've been treating us."

Chaos and gunfire hampered efforts to evacuate the Superdome, and, Superintendent P. Edward Compass III of the New Orleans Police Department said, armed thugs have taken control of the secondary makeshift shelter at the convention center. Superintendent Compass said that the thugs repelled eight squads of 11 officers each he had sent to secure the place and that rapes and assaults were occurring unimpeded in the neighboring streets as criminals "preyed upon" passers-by, including stranded tourists.

Mr. Compass said the federal government had taken too long to send in the thousands of troops - as well as the supplies, fuel, vehicles, water and food - needed to stabilize his now "very, very tenuous" city.

Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, concurred and he was particularly pungent in his criticism. Asserting that the whole recovery operation had been "carried on the backs of the little guys for four goddamn days," he said "the rest of the goddamn nation can't get us any resources for security."

"We are like little birds with our mouths open and you don't have to be very smart to know where to drop the worm," Colonel Ebbert said. "It's criminal within the confines of the United States that within one hour of the hurricane they weren't force-feeding us. It's like FEMA has never been to a hurricane." FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Federal officials took pains to defend their efforts, maintaining that supplies were pouring into the area even before the hurricane struck, that thousands of National Guard members had arrived to help secure the city and that thousands more would join them in coming days.

Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said some 300 National Guard members from Arkansas were flying into New Orleans with the express task of reclaiming the city. "They have M-16's and they are locked and loaded," she said.

Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, said that the Superdome had "crowd control issues" but that it was secure. He referred to what he called "isolated incidents of criminality" in the city.

Mr. Chertoff said Hurricane Katrina had presented a "double challenge" because it was really two disasters in one: the storm and then the flooding.

"For those who wonder why it is that it is difficult to get these supplies and these medical teams into place, the answer is they are battling an ongoing dynamic problem with the water," he said.

On Thursday, the Army Corps of Engineers was battling the water problem by finishing a metal wall across the mouth of the 17th Street Canal, the source of most of the flooding. Once finished, the wall was expected to staunch the flow from Lake Pontchartrain into the canal, which would allow engineers to repair a breach in the levee and to start pumping water from the city.

The federal government's other priority was to evacuate New Orleans, Mr. Chertoff said. To that end, some 200 buses had left the Superdome for the Astrodome in Houston by midday, he said, adding that another 200 buses were expected to start loading passengers later Thursday and that Louisiana was providing an additional 500 school buses.

On the receiving end in Houston, though, the Astrodome looked at times like a squatters' camp in a war-torn country. The refugees from Louisiana, many dirty and hungry, wandered about aimlessly, checking bulletin boards for information about their relatives, queuing up for supplies and pay phones, mobbing Red Cross volunteers to obtain free T-shirts. Many found some conditions similar to those that they left behind at the Superdome, like clogged toilets and foul restrooms.

But in Houston, there were hot showers, crates of Bibles and stacks of pizzas, while in New Orleans, many refugees scrounged for diapers, water and basic survival.

The Senate convened a special session at 10 p.m. Thursday to pass the an emergency supplemental spending bill providing $10.5 billion for relief efforts.

Senator Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he had just returned from his home state. "The whole coastal area of the state has been destroyed, virtually destroyed," he said. "It was quiet. It was eerie. It was horrible to behold."

House leaders intended to hold a special session Friday to approve the measure.

Even as administration officials pledged vast resources to the region, however, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, told a local newspaper, The Daily Herald, that he was skeptical about using billions in federal money to rebuild New Orleans, given its vulnerability. "It doesn't make sense to me," Mr. Hastert said. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."

He later sought to clarify his comments, saying in a statement: "I am not advocating that the city be abandoned or relocated. My comments about rebuilding the city were intended to reflect my sincere concern with how the city is rebuilt to ensure the future protection of its citizens."

Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, had stayed in his Garden District home through the storm and its immediate aftermath. But on Thursday his generator was running out of fuel, and he was tiring.

"People have only so much staying power with no infrastructure," Dr. Penland said. "I am boarding up my house today and will hopefully be in Baton Rouge or the north shore tonight."

 

Joseph B. Treaster reported from New Orleans, and Deborah Sontag from New York. Jeremy Alford contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La.; Felicity Barringer from Metairie, La.; Christine Hauser from New York; and Simon Romero from Houston.

    Local Officials Criticize Federal Government Over Response, NYT, 2.9.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02storm.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Dave Martin/AP

 

Mayor issues SOS as chaos tightens its grip

The Guardian        p. 1        2 September 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/02/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Government Saw Flood Risk

but Not Levee Failure

 

September 2, 2005
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
and ERIC LIPTON

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - When Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, returned in January from a tour of the tsunami devastation in Asia, he urgently gathered his aides to prepare for a similar catastrophe at home.

"New Orleans was the No. 1 disaster we were talking about," recalled Eric L. Tolbert, then a top FEMA official. "We were obsessed with New Orleans because of the risk."

Disaster officials, who had drawn up dozens of plans and conducted preparedness drills for years, had long known that the low-lying city was especially vulnerable. But despite all the warnings, Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the very government agencies that had rehearsed for such a calamity. On Thursday, as the flooded city descended into near-anarchy, frantic local officials blasted the federal and state emergency response as woefully sluggish and confused.

"We're in our fifth day and adequate help to quell the situation has not arrived yet," said Edwin P. Compass III, the New Orleans police superintendent.

The response will be dissected for years. But on Thursday, disaster experts and frustrated officials said a crucial shortcoming may have been the failure to predict that the levees keeping Lake Pontchartrain out of the city would be breached, not just overflow.

They also said that evacuation measures were inadequate, leaving far too many city residents behind to suffer severe hardships and, in some cases, join marauding gangs.

Large numbers of National Guard troops should have been deployed on flooded streets early in the disaster to keep order, the critics said. And some questioned whether the federal government's intense focus on terrorism had distracted from planning practical steps to cope with a major natural disaster.

Disaster experts acknowledged that the impact of Hurricane Katrina posed unprecedented difficulties. "There are amazing challenges and obstacles," said Joe Becker, the top disaster response official at the American Red Cross.

Under the circumstances, Mr. Becker said, the government response "has been nothing short of heroic."

But he added that the first, life-saving phase of hurricane response, which usually lasts a matter of hours, in this case was stretching over days.

While some in New Orleans fault FEMA - Terry Ebbert, homeland security director for New Orleans, called it a "hamstrung" bureaucracy - others say any blame should be more widely spread. Local, state and federal officials, for example, have cooperated on disaster planning. In 2000, they studied the impact of a fictional "Hurricane Zebra"; last year they drilled with "Hurricane Pam."

Neither exercise expected the levees to fail. In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."

Some lapses may have occurred because of budget cuts. For example, Mr. Tolbert, the former FEMA official, said that "funding dried up" for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise, cutting off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors.

Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's "low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people.

At disaster planning meetings, he said, "the answer was often silence."

Inevitably, the involvement of dozens of agencies complicated the response. FEMA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, were in charge of coordinating 14 federal agencies with state and local authorities. But Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans complained Wednesday on CNN that there were too many cooks involved.

Unlike a terrorist attack or an earthquake, Hurricane Katrina gave considerable notice of its arrival. It was on Thursday, Aug. 25, that a tropical storm that had formed in the Bahamas reached hurricane strength and got its name.

The same day, Katrina made landfall in Florida, dumping up to 18 inches of rain. It then moved slowly out over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, growing by the hour.

Though its path remained uncertain, the Gulf Coast was clearly threatened, with New Orleans a possible target. Officials from the Pentagon, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA and the Homeland Security Department said they were taking steps to prepare for the hurricane's arrival.

Army Corps personnel, in charge of maintaining the levees in New Orleans, started to secure the locks, floodgates and other equipment, said Greg Breerwood, deputy district engineer for project management at the Army Corps of Engineers.

"We knew if it was going to be a Category 5, some levees and some flood walls would be overtopped," he said. "We never did think they would actually be breached." The uncertainty of the storm's course affected Pentagon planning.

"We did not have precision on where it would make landfall," said Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, the head of the National Guard Bureau. "It could have been anywhere from Texas all the way over to Florida."

Some 10,000 National Guard troops were mobilized, 7,000 of them in Louisiana and Mississippi. But the Defense Department could not put soldiers and equipment directly in the possible path of the storm, General Blum said.

On Saturday, at the urging of FEMA, Mr. Bush declared an emergency in Louisiana, allowing the agency to promise financial assistance to state and local governments and to move ready-to-eat meals, medicine, ice, tarpaulins, water and other supplies to the region.

By Sunday, Katrina had become a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 175 miles per hour. The president extended the emergency declaration to Mississippi and Alabama. Mayor Nagin, who had urged New Orleans residents to flee on Saturday, ordered a mandatory evacuation.

It would have been up to local officials, a FEMA spokeswoman said, to hire buses to move people without transportation out of the city.

Rodney Braxton, the chief lobbyist for New Orleans, said many of the city's poorest "had nowhere to go outside the region and no way to get there." He added: "And there wasn't enough police power to go to each house to say, 'You have to go, come with me.' "

In a city with so many residents living in poverty, the hurricane came at the worst possible time: the end of the month, when those depending on public assistance are waiting for their next checks to be mailed on the first of the month. Without the checks, many residents didn't have money for gasoline, bus fare or lodging.

City officials said they provided free transportation from pick-up points publicized on television, radio and by people shouting through megaphones on the streets. In addition to the Superdome, officials opened schools and the convention center as shelters.

Mr. Braxton said he believed the city was "aggressive enough" in conducting the evacuation. "We had everything we thought we needed in place," he said. "I don't think anybody could ever plan for the magnitude that Katrina ended up being."

But Susan Cutter, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina and an emergency preparedness expert, said Mayor Nagin should have ordered a mandatory evacuation on Thursday or Friday.

"Evacuation is a precaution," she said. "I don't think they would have taken a political hit if they had ordered it, and it helped."

While New Orleans residents fled the city or gathered in the Superdome, federal agencies positioned search and rescue teams and medical assistance teams from Tennessee to Texas, according to Michael Chertoff, secretary of homeland security.

Before it made landfall on Monday, the storm turned slightly to the east, avoiding a direct hit on New Orleans. The winds had eased slightly to 140 miles per hour, reducing Katrina's strength to Category 4, and officials counted themselves lucky.

But on Tuesday, when the levees breached, a desperate situation became catastrophic. There was no fast way to fix them, Mr. Breerwood of the Army Corps said, because delivery of heavy-duty equipment was hindered by the destruction.

The National Guard was having similar troubles. While troops were stationed in the region, they could not move quickly into the New Orleans area. And in Mississippi, the zone of destruction was so widespread, it was difficult to cover it all quickly, officials said.

"It is not a function of more people, but how many people can you move on the road system that exists now in Louisiana and in Mississippi," said General Blum of the National Guard. "How many people can you put through that funnel that a storm has taken four lane highways and turned them into goat trails?"

On Wednesday, Mr. Bush, having cut short his vacation, convened a federal task force. With looting spreading throughout New Orleans, Guard officials said they were doubling the call by this weekend, to 21,000 forces, one-third of them military police officers. On Thursday, General Blum said more than 32,000 Guard members would be deployed in the gulf region by Monday.

Currently, the states' governors control their National Guard, with the Pentagon and other federal agencies like FEMA, coordinating operations with the state. The administration has resisted federalizing the relief operation, in large part because officials say it would severely limit the National Guard's ability to conduct law enforcement missions for which they are specifically trained.

"Federalizing the National Guard for purposes of law enforcement would be a last resort, not a first resort," said Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland security, told reporters on Thursday.

A 1878 law restricts active-duty military forces from performing domestic law enforcement duties. But in extreme emergencies, like some of the race riots and civil disorders in the 1960's, federal troops have been sent in to restore order.

The administration has also balked at ordering active-duty military forces, such as the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., to intervene in a civilian law enforcement role to stop looting and restore order. Late Tuesday, the Pentagon dispatched five ships to the gulf, but four of the ships are coming from Norfolk, Va., four days' sailing time away.

Some military analysts criticized the Pentagon's response.

"Is the problem that they are only just now beginning to understand how serious the damage was?" said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity .org, a national security policy group in Washington. "Did they not have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude?"

The chaotic response came despite repeated efforts over many years to plan a coordinated defense if the worst should occur. As recently as July 2004, federal, state and local officials cooperated on the Hurricane Pam drill, which predicted 10 to 15 feet of water in parts of the city and the evacuation of one million people.

Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality from 1987-1988, said that the potential for disaster was always obvious and that "FEMA has known this for 20 years."

"Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent, in studies, training and contingency plans, scenarios, all of that," said Ms. Madden, now a consultant in strategic planning.

The Army Corps, she said, should have had arrangements in place with contractors who had emergency supplies at hand, like sandbags or concrete barriers, the way that environmental planners have contracts to handle oil spills.

While his agency is facing harsh criticism, Patrick Rhode, FEMA's deputy director, defended its performance as "probably one of the most efficient and effective responses in the country's history."

He recalled that after Mr. Brown, his boss, returned from his tsunami tour, he asked if the United States was better prepared for a disaster than the ravaged countries he had visited. "We felt relatively comfortable that this country could mobilize the response necessary," he said.

 

Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker and Matthew L. Wald from Washington; Christopher Drew and Susan Saulny from Baton Rouge; Joseph B. Treaster from New Orleans; and David Rohde from New York.

Government Saw Flood Risk but Not Levee Failure,
NYT, 2.9.2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02response.html

 

 

 

 

 


Storm Erased

Most of Set of Barrier Islands

 

September 2, 2005
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

The Chandeleur Islands, a narrow string of sandy barriers in the Gulf of Mexico about 70 miles east of New Orleans, were virtually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, according to federal researchers who flew over the area yesterday.

Abby Sallenger, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey, said researchers reported that the uninhabited islands had turned into marshy outcrops, denuded of sand.

By the standards of Louisiana, where coastal barriers have been suffering serious erosion for decades, the Chandeleurs, which make up most of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, had been relatively robust, with sand dunes of perhaps six to nine feet, Dr. Sallenger said. As such, they offered some storm protection for the Louisiana coast.

But measurements with a radarlike instrument called lidar show that the sand "is just gone," he said.

Dr. Sallenger said scientists would not know for sure what happened on the islands until they do a more thorough study with wind records, mathematical models and other data.

The islands may recover somewhat with the return of calm weather, Dr. Sallenger said. The marshy sediments that remain still hold some sand, which could potentially form new dunes.

Storm Erased Most of Set of Barrier Islands,
NYT, 2.9.2005,
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/
us/nationalspecial/storm-erased-most-of-set-of-barrier-islands.html 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'It's like a war zone here.

There was shooting and looting'

G

p. 3

1 September 2005

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/sep/01/
usnews.naturaldisasters2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related > Anglonautes > History > Early 21st century

 

Hurricane Katrina > 2-11 September 2005

 

Hurricane Katrina > 12 September - 30 November 2005

 

Hurricane Katrina > Maps

 

Hurricane Katrina > Picayune frontpages

 

Hurricane Katrina > Diaspora

 

Hurricane Katrina > Rebuilding

 

Hurricane Katrina > Aftermath

 

 

 

 

 

Related > Anglonautes > Vocapedia > Earth > Natural disasters

 

hurricanes

 

 

 

 

 

Related

 

The Guardian > Hurricane Katrina timeline

– how the disaster unfolded 10 years ago - 17 August 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/aug/17/
hurricane-katrina-timeline

 

 

The Guardian > After Katrina: New Orleans then and now

– interactive photographs - 13 August 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/13/
after-katrina-new-orleans-then-and-now-interactive-photographs

 

 

NPR > hurricane Katrina: 10 years of recovery and reflection

http://www.npr.org/series/429056277/
hurricane-katrina-10-years-of-recovery-and-reflection

 

 

 

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