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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.