View Full Version : Katrina and emergency management
belgareth
09-23-2005, 08:16 AM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/chitribts/offerofbusesfellbetweenthecracks;_ylt=A86.I0PPGjRD EQkAZ
RxvzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl (http://news.yahoo.com/s/chitribts/offerofbusesfellbetweenthecracks;_ylt=A86.I0PPGjRD EQkAZRxvzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTB
iMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl)
Offer of buses fell between
the cracks
By Andrew Martin and Andrew Zajac Washington Bureau
Two days after
Hurricane Katrina made landfall, as images of devastation along the Gulf Coast and despair in New Orleans flickered
across television screens, the head of one of the nation's largest bus associations repeatedly called federal
disaster officials to offer help.
Peter Pantuso of the American Bus
Association said he spent much of the day on Wednesday, Aug. 31, trying to find someone at the Federal Emergency
Management Agency who could tell him how many buses were needed for an evacuation, where they should be sent and who
was overseeing the effort.
"We never talked directly to FEMA or got a
call back from them," Pantuso said.
Pantuso, whose members include
some of the nation's largest motor coach companies, including Greyhound and Coach USA, eventually learned that the
job of extracting tens of thousands of residents from flooded New Orleans wasn't being handled by FEMA at
all.
Instead the agency had farmed the work out to a trucking
logistics firm, Landstar Express America, which in turn hired a limousine company, which in turn engaged a travel
management company.
Over the next four days, those companies and a
collection of Louisiana officials cobbled together a fleet of at least 1,100 buses that belatedly descended on New
Orleans to evacuate residents waiting amid the squalor and mayhem of the Superdome and the city's convention
center.
The story of the bus evacuation of New Orleans is partly one
of heroism by a handful of people who, when called upon, acted quickly and improvised in the face of desperate
need.
But the story also underscores a critical failure in the
disaster plan: the inability of government to provide even the most rudimentary transportation to take people out of
harm's way.
The day before the storm hit Aug. 29, the city of New
Orleans had ordered its residents to flee but had not made provisions for upwards of 100,000 residents too old, too
poor or otherwise unable or unwilling to leave.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin
has acknowledged in television interviews that the city had hundreds of transit and school buses available to at
least begin an evacuation ahead of Katrina's arrival but couldn't find enough drivers willing to chance getting
caught in the huge storm.
When Katrina's storm surges breached the
city's levees, putting much of the city under water, it was up to state officials and FEMA to oversee a gigantic
evacuation.
But they, too, were caught
unprepared.
Though it was well-known that New Orleans, much of it
below sea level, would flood in a major hurricane, Landstar, the Jacksonville company that held a federal contract
that at the time was worth up to $100 million annually for disaster transportation, did not ask its subcontractor,
Carey Limousine, to order buses until the early hours of Aug. 30, roughly 18 hours after the storm hit, according to
Sally Snead, a Carey senior vice president who headed the bus roundup.
Landstar inquired about the availability of buses on Sunday, Aug. 28, and earlier Monday, but placed no
orders, Snead said.
She said Landstar turned to her company for buses
Sunday after learning from Carey's Internet site that it had a meetings and events division that touted its ability
to move large groups of people. "They really found us on the Web site," Snead
said.
A Landstar spokeswoman declined comment on how the company
responded to the hurricane.
Messages left for a FEMA spokeswoman were
not returned.
Snead said she tapped Transportation Management
Services of Vienna, Va., which specializes in arranging buses for conventions and other large events, to help fill
an initial order for 300 coaches.
"It's like taking your phone book
and dividing it in half and saying, `You take half and I'll take half,'" Snead said.
Looking for way to help
Unbeknownst to them, two key players who could reach the owners of an estimated 70 percent of the nation's
35,000 charter and tour buses had contacted FEMA seeking to supply coaches to the evacuation effort.
The day the hurricane made landfall, Victor Parra, president of the
United Motorcoach Association, called FEMA's Washington office "to let them know our members could help out."
Parra said FEMA responded the next day, referring him to an agency
Web page labeled "Doing Business with FEMA" but containing no information on the hurricane relief effort.
On Wednesday, Aug. 31, Pantuso of the American Bus Association cut
short a vacation thinking his members surely would be needed in evacuation efforts.
Unable to contact FEMA directly, Pantuso, through contacts on
Capitol Hill, learned of Carey International's role and called Snead.
Pantuso said Snead told him she meant to call earlier but didn't have a phone number.
Finally, sometime after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Pantuso and Parra had
enough information to send an SOS to their members to help in the evacuation.
By the weekend, more than 1,000 buses were committed to ferrying stranded New Orleans residents to
shelters in Houston and other cities.
Executive linked to lobby
In a regulatory filing last week, Landstar Express said it has
received government orders worth at least $125 million for Katrina-related work. It's not known how much of that
total pertains to the bus evacuation.
Landstar Express is a
subsidiary of Landstar System, a $2 billion company whose board chairman, Jeff Crowe, also was chairman of the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the nation's premier business lobbies, from June 2003 until May 2004.
Pantuso said changes for the better may be afoot, perhaps even in
time to aid the response to Hurricane Rita, now bearing down on Texas' Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border.
"I have been getting a tremendous amount of follow-up from Landstar
over the last two days . . . looking for ways to work together in the future," Pantuso said Thursday, adding that he
feels "much better about . . . our opportunities to work in a more coordinated fashion."
Whatever happens likely will be good for Landstar's bottom line.
Landstar's regulatory filing also said that because of Hurricane
Katrina, the maximum annual value of its government contract for disaster relief services has been increased to $400
million.
DrSmellThis
09-28-2005, 01:59 PM
http://www.washingtonpo
st.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/28/AR2005092800260.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/28/AR2005092800260.html)
DrSmellThis
02-10-2006, 02:09 PM
White
House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm
By
ERIC LIPTON (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ERIC%20LIPTON&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ERIC%2
0LIPTON&inline=nyt-per)
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush
administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee
had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans.
But Congressional investigators have now learned that
an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's
headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight.
The Federal Emergency
Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday
afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to
confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the
Homeland Security Department.
"FYI from FEMA," said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff
describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, "are far more serious than
media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought —
also a number of fires."
Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on
Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that
night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to.
White House officials have confirmed to
Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White
House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting
reports.
But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush was feeling relieved
that New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to
Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in
New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday.
The federal government let
out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an "all hands on deck" alarm, the investigators have
found.
This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has
for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have
assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators
now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what
is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American
history.
On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that
Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were
overwhelmed.
"There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how
grave the situation was," Mr. Brown said in the interview.
The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA
when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003.
"The real story is with this new
structure," he said. "Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do
what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?"
Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had
notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department
did with that information, or when the White House was told.
Missteps at All Levels
It has been known
since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government — from the White House to the Department of
Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall — were unprepared, uncommunicative and
phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the
latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning
points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the
committees' investigative reports.
Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were
these:
¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans
had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how
to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population.
¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal
official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to
investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a
conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly
informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators
said.
¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the
evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, "We put no
plans in place to do any of this."
¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a
mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done
so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from
the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people
away from the storm.
¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years'
worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its
emergency workers.
¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for
the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open
it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15
trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating
the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which
correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said.
"The president is still at
his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine," Mr.
Davis said. "In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better
leadership. It is disengagement."
One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has
been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal
officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding.
Eyewitness to
Devastation
As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no
mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the
collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of
the scene with a small camera.
"The situation is only going to get worse," he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the
FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour.
"Thank you," he
said Mr. Brown replied. "I am now going to call the White House."
Citing restrictions placed on him by his
lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White
House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top
advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors.
But investigators have
found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of
staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was
issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security.
Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee
collapse.
Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff
stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to
explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared.
"The
hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to
flood into New Orleans," Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the
hurricane hit.
Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official
confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of
Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted
that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe.
Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman,
said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight
report. "Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours," he said.
But
Senator
Susan Collins (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/susan_collins/index.html?inline=nyt-per), Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr.
Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response
to the disaster may have been slowed as a result.
"Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process," Ms.
Collins said in an interview.
Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday,
he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on
helicopter tours of the damage.
Senator
Jos
eph I. Lieberman (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/joseph_i_lieberman/index.html?inline=nyt-per) of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government
confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Information was in different
places, in that case prior to the attack," Mr. Lieberman said, "and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a
coordinated way for them to take action."
Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr.
Chertoff had been "intensely involved in monitoring the storm" he had not actually been told about the report of the
levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta.
"No one is satisfied with the response in the early
days," Mr. Knocke said.
But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was
disengaged.
"He was not informed of it," Mr. Knocke said. "It is certainly a breakdown. And through an
after-action process, that is something we will address."
The day before the hurricane made landfall, the
Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New
Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials
acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing
homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars.
Focus on Highway Plan
Mr.
Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway
evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from
hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal
government.
In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences.
Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost
in hospitals and nursing homes.
One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it
never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked
for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department
official told investigators.
Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue
effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his
small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising
water.
The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until
Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for
perhaps two more days longer than necessary.
Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in
retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of
Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and
distribution of water, food and ice.
"In hindsight I should have done it right then," Mr. Brown told the House,
referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.
***
Also, check this one out. Brown is also starting to sing
about DHS:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/10/katrina.brown/index.html
tim929
02-16-2006, 05:11 PM
Im just gonna throw this out
here...Its alittle late but better late than never.The mayor of the city was wringing his hands regarding evacuation
plans,if I am not mistaken.And whatever plan was supposed to be in place or conjured up never happened and as a
result huge numbers of people ended up stranded.Its interesting to note that the city government itself never took
any time to figure out a proper evacuation for anybody but the city counsel and the mayor.He wasnt even there when
the storm hit,and where I come from leaders lead from the pointy end of the stick,not the camp in the rear.
While the mayor evacuated his family and thier possesions,an estimated six hundred school busses became the
largest fleet of U-boats in the world in a matter of a few hours...sitting idle in thier parking
spots/berths.Preperations at the various evacuation shelters amounted to opening the doors so people could get in
and then pulling all the city employees out befor anything could happen.Even the police pulled up stakes and bailed
out of town.The handfull that did stay behind were so overwhelmed that all they could do was watch and hide.
While all this is going on,its important to remember that NewOrleans wasnt the ONLY place in the whole world being
slammed by the same storm.Katrina did severe damage in several states and took lives all over the gulf coast.It
inundated many towns and cities,swamped the emergency services of many cities and drew tons of people and equipment
to places OTHER THAN NewOrleans.NewOrleans and its residents need to understand something...they arent the only
people in the whole world that matter!
Its very easy to be upset and bothered in a time of crissis and wonder why
nobody is saving me...RIGHT NOW!
Earthquake victems do it all the time.The quake hits,emergency services are
strained to respond to anything because of crumbling infrastructure,and some poor bastard on the edge of town cant
understand why they arent here yet.The firestation has partialy colapsed,the roads are blocked with traffic and
debris,phones are out,power is out,water is out,the bodies are piling up like chordwood but those jerks are sure
taking thier sweet time getting to me to help me with my problem.They ran into that in Kobe Japan some years
ago.They ran into that in Turkey,Pakistan and in a couple quakes in South America.
Katrina was no different.As a
lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest,we have regular wind storms that knock power out to huge numbers of
people.Sometimes for many days.I learned as a child that you need to have certain things on hand in the event of an
emergency.Flashlights,batteries,candles,cook stove,canned foods,water,blankets,tarps,rolls of visquene,TOILET
PAPER,clothes,work clothes,rain clothes,a good pair or two of boots,chain saw,axe,hatchet,shovel,pick...yeah...no
joke...all that crap comes in real handy when trees are down and power is out.And the trees around here are the kind
they use to mill into lumber for houses,not little pulp wood trees (we call those brush.) All of these various tools
and supplies come in handy when theres a storm or in the event of a huge,earth shattering quake of biblical
proportions.Many folks keep generators on hand too just so the stuff in the freezer wont spoil.
On the flip side
of the coin,this area has become a very popular place for city folk to move to for its relative seclusion yet close
proximity to a major city.They get to have "the country life" while never realy being inconvenienced.The problem
that I have seen and had to help many neighbors with is the fact that NONE of these folks seem to think about making
any sort of personal preperations until its way too late.As a result,nice folks like me and the other learned
residents get to go to bail them out of thier crissis instead of staying home and sitting by the fire and listening
to the rain patter and the wind howl.And its these same helpless people who scream the loudest when the
local,county,state or federal authorities dont imediately swarm to thier aid.
There was once a man named
Darwin,who proposed the idea that natural selction was...well...you get the idea.
belgareth
02-16-2006, 08:14 PM
We saw the same mentality a
number of years ago when the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit the bay area. Buildings were collapsing in San Francisco,
the bay bridge was trying to fall down and a whole section of freeway in Oakland pancaked trapping people between
the layers. The outskirts where I lived lost gas and electricity for several days and people were pissed.
A few
years later we lost power for about a week after a windstorm. I gave away close to a cord of firewood to my
neighbors. The majority couldn't even prepare a hot meal because they hadn't planned a little ahead.
(Federal)
Government services are all well and good but we need to plan to take some of the load ourselves, especially in the
event of a major disaster. We can't just sit there and wait for somebody to come bail us out. No matter what
resources you have, when you have a wide spread disaster you are going to have delays getting help to an awful lot
of people.
The bit about the school busses in New Orleans is a good example. Anybody who can drive a U-Haul
truck can drive a school bus. It isn't difficult. How many lives would have been saved if that mayor had got his
thumb out and evacuated people using the resources he had? Yes, everybody screwed up big time before, during and
after Katrina. But big government and its resources are not an excuse for sitting and waiting for somebody else to
do all the work.
tim929
02-16-2006, 09:21 PM
There was a time in America when
there was no "big government" to count on and you were pretty much stuck with whatever you and your neighbors could
cobble together for survival.Lets not all forget that the "emergency services" folks have families and friends
too,and that inspite of thier so called "job" of protecting you,they will drop you like a dirty shirt to help thier
own people out first.In a disaster,you are your best bet for survival.Realisticly,If I am a young firefighter with a
young beautiful wife and new child,all the nice people in my community can go straight to hell for all I care if my
family is in distress.It is pure foolishness to expect these folks to drop thier needs in favor of yours
because,lets face it...its a job,not a calling from the Creator.The worst the might face is getting fired.So what?
My family is safe and that all that matters when the earth decides to try and swallow a city.
Alot of people
dont realize that when you dial 911 and ask for the police to come to your home,they are NOT required to respond!
PERIOD! They literaly volunteer.That way,if you call and they are late and you die,its not thier fault and your
family cant sue the government for your death.That puts the leagal responsability for your safety firmly in YOUR
hands.Not someone elses hands.These folks that are whining about how the governement didnt rescue them realy need to
get a life.Its not the national guards job realy,but the governor has the power to use them and they do it to retain
funding.Otherwise people might get the idea that the national guard isnt worth all the money we spend on them.In
point of fact,the national guard is a reserve COMBAT force.Not a wet nurse or a nanny.They arent there specificly to
bail our sorry butts out every time it rains and we arent smart enough to open an umberella.
The more I hear
people whining about the government not responding properly,the more I start thinking that its time for natural
selection to help us to thin the herd out.Brutal? Yes. Needed? More than ever in the history of man! Watch a nature
documentary about lions chasing down and killing the weak and feeble for food.Notice how cute baby gazelles are? But
they get ripped appart anyway.Thats nature,and its beautiful in its perfection!
Netghost56
02-18-2006, 09:53 PM
Have any of you read about
the FEMA trailers?
It's been all over the local news for weeks. My mother said the trailers that are at her
workplace have been steadlily shipped out, but no word on where they're going. But the trailers in Hope (over
11,000 in one place) are supposedly sinking in the mud. Sen. Landrieu told Chertoff to either give the trailers to
the Katrina/Rita victims, sell them, auction them off, or give them to other needy people. But Chertoff wants to
destroy them, since they're "cheaply made" and "not the right size for large families". All the while my aunt in
Houston went to Lake Charles, LA, and she said people are still living in tents in places like Beaumont and Orange.
This government is so screwed up it boggles the mind.
a.k.a.
02-19-2006, 12:23 PM
The Hurricane Hit That Hit the
Poor
Katrina's New Underclass
By Rep. CYNTHIA McKINNEY
There is an ongoing national emergency that
demands our immediate attention.
In the absence of decisive Executive action, an under-funded FEMA made its
own executive decision to shelter hundreds of thousands of survivors in hotels, paying in some cases rates in excess
of $400 per night, resulting in a windfall for hotel chains during their slow season, but depleting FEMA's budget.
Now, with summer business coming, the hotels want the survivors out and FEMA is evicting tens of thousands of
families from temporary housing.
As a result of the President's failure to act, Secretary Chertoff's
failure to act, and the failure of Congress to act, it appears we are about to see a new underclass of "Katrina
Homeless" in America, even as Halliburton and other contractors take fifty per cent off the top of their sweetheart,
no-bid Katrina contracts before subcontracting the work out at rock bottom rates.
Given the vast amounts of
money that has gone "missing"-billions of dollars-from this Administration's Iraq misadventure, it is scandalous
that we won't provide housing to the survivors.
What Katrina survivors facing homelessness need is enough
assistance to rebuild their lives. Why did we offer a Victims Compensation Fund to 9/11 families but not to Katrina
survivors? And why hasn't the Congress moved swiftly to pass or at least held hearings on HR 4197, the Hurricane
Katrina Recovery, Reclamation, Restoration, Reconstruction and Reunion Act of 2005?
What left so many at the
mercy of Katrina was poverty. In the greater New Orleans area, 65,000 minority residents lived in poverty before
Katrina, compared with 85,000 whites. Thus, contrary to the stereotyping, poverty is not specific to race, even
though Orleans Parish, which was 67% black, was hardest hit by the flooding.
The poor, the elderly, the
infirm, the disabled, these were the people who could not obey the mandatory evacuation order. If we wish to see
that there is never another disaster like Katrina, we need to take urgent action to deal with poverty in this
country. And here, I would suggest that the Congress hold hearings on House Concurrent Resolution 234, Congresswoman
Barbara Lee's Poverty Bill.
Evacuation plans failed these people, as did the National Response Plan. We need
a new National Response Plan.
Rather than attempting to defend the indefensible, Secretary Chertoff needs to
resign and allow this Administration the opportunity to get this straight-for the sake of the innocent people of the
Gulf States and New Orleans.
We need a National Response Plan that is sensitive to poverty and ethnicity. It
is unconscionable that DHS would have a partnership with Operation Blessing, but not with a single black
organization.
Poverty cuts across ethnic divisions, but there is another side to this story. In the testimony
at our hearings and in my report, there is a very clear pattern. In numerous instances, whites were evacuated before
blacks while blacks were detained or turned back, as happened on the bridge to Gretna. The media stereotyped blacks
as "looters" and whites as "takers" and fueled fears of blacks that led to the "invasion" of New Orleans, shockingly
by hired mercenaries.
Shoot-to-kill orders were issued in a city whose police have a history of abuse, and
who will spare no excuse to jail young black men for petty offenses.
Another area completely untouched by the
Congress is the toxic aftermath of Katrina. Decades of pollution has made the sediment layer at the bottom of the
Gulf and other water bodies highly toxic.
Hurricane Katrina lifted this sediment sludge out of the water and
spread it across all the affected regions of the Gulf. Not since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 has this happened on such a
scale. As a result, arsenic and other highly dangerous chemicals are present at levels sufficient that much of the
Gulf Coast could be declared a Superfund site. But the EPA is sitting on its hands, and will not act unless Congress
instructs it to initiate a clean-up process necessary to protect the health and safety of the people of the Gulf
Coast. I have introduced legislation to accomplish this, and I wish the Congress would consider it for the health
and safety of our fellow Americans.
There is much more to discuss. We have between 60,000 to 70,000 survivors
in metro Atlanta right now, and the needs are tremendous.
But let me conclude by saying that what we are left
with is the fact that while the hurricane washed its "toxic gumbo" ashore, it also stripped away the veil that often
hides issues of poverty and persistent racism in America. We can choose to ignore these issues and hope they go
away, but we know they won't.
Alternately, we can rise to the challenge and work together to tackle these
very difficult problems head on. The choice is ours.
DrSmellThis
03-04-2006, 06:21 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060301/ap_on_go_pr_wh/katrina_video
belgareth
03-04-2006, 08:36 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060303/ap_on_go_ot/katrina_video;_ylt=AmGeLxL3rF8ar1TQEn6v_fWyF
z4D;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060303/ap_on_go_ot/katrina_video;_ylt=AmGeLxL3rF8ar1TQEn6v_fWyFz4D;_y lu=X3oDMTA5
aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA)--
tim929
03-09-2006, 08:38 PM
I thought I would throw this in
here and see who gets angry....The next time you hear a politician use the word "billion" in a casual manner, think
about whether you want these "politicians" spending
your tax money.
A billion is a difficult number to
comprehend, but one
advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its
releases.
a.. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
b.. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
c.. A billion
hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone
Age.
d.. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two
feet.
A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20
minutes,
at the rate our government is spending it.
While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let's take a
look at New Orleans - It's amazing what you can
learn with some simple
division ............
Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the
Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans.
Interesting number, what does it mean?
Well, if you are one
of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every
man,woman, child), you each get $516, 528.
Or, if you have one of
the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your
home gets $1, 329,787
Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets
$2,066,012.So tell me again where the problem is?:think:
Netghost56
03-09-2006, 09:12 PM
250b for NO is kinda high,
but not insane. Consider the environmental damage, the rebuilding (and replanning against future problems), new job
opportunities, new tourist opportunities, not to mention the levees, emergency crew management, and definitely a new
emergency plan.
I think all the homes lower district should be built on poles, like they do in Galveston or
other coastal areas. If not, then take all that debris and elevate that area so it won't flood so much. They also
need a government-run fleet of emergency rescue boats and choppers manned by people with rescue training. There's
lots they could do to prevent this and all it takes is some money.
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