Katrina: The Third Storm
By Pat Cleary Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (20) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
A year ago this week we all watched as Hurricane Katrina unleashed it terrible force on the Gulf Coast, the most destructive natural disaster in US history. This was storm #1. The second storm -- purely political -- was unleashed soon thereafter as the left began its ritualistic finger-pointing, a big partisan voice-over as we watched images of people massively dispossessed by the storm. The MSM piled on, making fantastic (and ultimately false) claims of its own -- of mass murders, astronomical body counts, rescuers under fire -- you name it. The third storm -- also political, like the second -- comes this weekend as the revisionists gather like the furious storm of twelve months ago. Think of it as a revisionist/finger-pointing gumbo, all weekend long.
Some facts, if we dare:
-- The US Government has provided $110 billion dollars to the Gulf Region, for such things as relocation, rental assistance, infrastructure repair, education, removal of debris, you name it. This is an amount larger than the Gross Domestic Product of Hungary;
-- The Administration is spending $6 billion -- an amount roughly equal to Bermuda's GDP -- for the Army Corps of Engineers to repair the levees. As a result of the Corps of Engineers' work this far, the New Orleans hurricane protection system is in equal or better condition than it was before Katrina hit;
-- 103 million cubic yards of debris have been removed. This is an amount that would fill the New Orleans Superdome to the roof about 25 times over;
-- All ports are re-opened and fully operational;
-- All petroleum pipelines are back up and running and nearly all refineries are, too;
-- As someone noted in a comment to an earlier post, FEMA is not a first responder agency -- that's not their role. But this will be overlooked -- again -- in the commentary and the post-mortems on the occasion of the anniversary. The President had to wait for the Governors to declare a disaster. Some acted more quickly than others.
Today, on her site, Louisiana Governor Blanco thanks the President -- among others -- for the recovery to date. Gov. Barbour of Mississippi has a full report that isn't very whiny. And this link to "Bring New Orleans Back" on the City of New Orleans site inexplicably directs the reader to the Dallas Junior Hockey Association. Some things never change.
In any event, we thought these fact might be useful to keep in mind as you watch the anniversary coverage. In among the finger-pointing and the fight for political advantage, we ought not lose sight of the fact that an enormous response has been made to an enormous disaster. Maybe some day the various pundits and gadflies will dispense with the name calling and focus on the important work of rebuilding the Gulf Coast.
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"Everybody needs money! That's why they call it money!"
...that don't already have a political agenda, these facts are not surprising. Despite my conservative bona fides, I have never held the feds blameless in the debacle that was the initial response (fully aware of FEMA's function). However, I have also assigned the lion's share of the blame where it belongs: at the state and local level. The recovery efforts have done nothing to dissuade me from that evaluation (other than to assign MORE blame to the state and local goverment).
I have been to New Orleans four times since the storm. Once in January, and three times in the last month. They have progressed no further in the last 8 months than they had 5 months after the storm. It's truly pathetic. What is worse is that New Orleans was handed a golden opportunity to really make some changes that were LONG overdue. A fresh start. Instead, they have said "No Thanks...send more money...we will do things just like we did before the storm hit."
those murders in the superdome.
I would kind of like to see a Fact/Fiction type show on Katrina, but I think I would get tired of the commercials for that one too.
I am not a mean person, and I understand and know first hand how difficult it is to be hit with a hurricane. But I am sick of tv specials and State Farm commercials about it-do I really need a stinking State Farm commercial about Katrina in New Hampshire?
From:
Reports of New Orleans mayhem probably exaggerated, police say
By MICHELLE ROBERTS, Associated Press
Sept. 28, 2005
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3372672.html
The ugliest reports - children with slit throats, women dragged off and raped, corpses piling up in the basement - soon became a searing image of post-Katrina New Orleans. The stories were told by residents trapped inside the Superdome and convention center and were repeated by public officials. Many news organizations carried the witness accounts and official pronouncements and in some cases later repeated the claims as fact, without attribution. But now, a month after the chaos subsided, police are re-examining the reports and finding that many of them have little or no basis in fact. They have no official reports of rape and no eyewitnesses to sexual assault. The state Department of Health and Hospitals counted 10 dead at the Superdome and four at the convention center. Only two of those are thought to have been slain. One of those victims - found at the Superdome - appears to have been killed elsewhere before being brought to the stadium, said Bob Johannessen, the agency spokesman.
From:
Myth-Making in New Orleans
By Brian Thevenot
American Journalism Review, December/January 2006
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3998
"When I was at ABC, nothing got on the air without having the piece read in to us," he says. "Now, they're on the air 24-7 and they have to fill airtime, and that leads frequently to the reporting of rumor and speculation... Rather than saying, 'Let's wait five minutes,' they just go with it because it's in front of them. They keep learning that lesson and forgetting that lesson." Then the mistakes feed off one another and multiply, Westin says. "There's something I call the 'out there syndrome' - it's okay for us to publish it because someone else already has, so it's 'out there,'" he says, rather than each media outlet confirming its own facts. "With 24-7 news, the deadline is always now, you go with whatever you've got, you stick it on the air."
[...]
Many have given Nagin and Compass a pass, saying they probably repeated exaggerations by mistake in a desperate attempt to get help for a truly desperate situation. Carr, however, suggests they were driven in part by political motives. "Usually the first reaction of officials in crisis is to obfuscate and tamp down the rumors," he says. "Nagin and Compass stood there with a can of gasoline... In part what they were trying to do was explain that they had a mess on their hands - and that the feds had dropped the ball - by communicating an atmosphere of chaos that rendered their inability understandable." In the worst of the storm reporting, tales of violence, rapes, murders and other mayhem were simply stated as fact with no attribution at all. I am among those who committed this sin. In my previous AJR piece, although I attributed the account of bodies in the freezer and added that it could not be confirmed, I got loose with the attribution at another point in the story, describing the Convention Center as "a nightly scene of murders, rapes and regular stampedes." What I later confirmed is that occasional gunfire, stampedes and terror did indeed plague the Convention Center. But only one death could be called a suspected homicide, a body with a gunshot wound, according to Kristen Meyer, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals. Meyer also confirmed that four bodies were retrieved from just inside the food service entrance, the same place I witnessed the four bodies lying under sheets. Widespread reports of rapes could not be confirmed.
even than I usually am; more than needing NO to be a "chocolate" city, many need it to be a Democrat city. The only way to do that is to keep it a mess. Blanco, Nagin, et al. have zero incentive to really fix much beyond some basic level necessary to get poor, dependent, victim-fixated people back into the place so that they'll vote to keep them in the big chairs. True recovery in NO will ultimately cost the Ds a mayor, a governor, and a senator when the NO vote ATM is shut off.
It is a beautiful, historic city and were its economy and property values not so depressed by bad government and massive slums, there'd be Galleria Malls, fancy hotels, and spendy condos where there once were public housing ghettos and now are ruins.
In Vino Veritas
...despite Congressional Dems' repudiation (banishment from Ways & Means Committee), Louisiana's open primary system practically guarantees him a spot on the run-off ballot on name recognition alone. He has something like 15 challengers in the primary.
Your analysis is basically correct. New Orleans and the state have blown (so far) a golden opportunity to rebuild the city on a new plan. Political expediency and resistance to change are prevailing. On the state level, there has been a regular legislative session plus a special session; all meaningful reforms died a quiet death. Contrary to popular opinion, the problem is not so much corruption as it is Provincialism (with a capital "p").
Another issue is that many white collar jobs have permanently left New Orleans. The city's future is tourism, and a key constraint on the rebound of the hotel & restaurant industries is the lack of affordable housing in the city. I would like to see the "Galleria Malls, fancy hotels, and spendy condos" as much as anyone, but just as in Santa Fe or other resort cities, the folks that bus the tables & change the linens have to live somewhere.
and didn't mean to gloss over it, but I think the housing would come, though it may not. We certainly have that problem here in Juneau with its tourism dominated economy. Young people provide most of the service staff in a tourism town, and they simply cannot afford to live here without piling a half dozen in a two br apartment or living with parents.
In Vino Veritas
Women workers, especially African American women workers, continue to bear the heaviest burden of harm from the storm. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that the percentage of women in the New Orleans workforce has dropped. The number of single mother families in New Orleans has dropped from 51,000 to 17,000. Low-income women remain displaced because of the lack of affordable housing and traditional discrimination against women in the construction industry. [Huh? Anyway, emphasis & italics mine.]
That's a staggering/revealing/appalling/sobering statistic; take your pick. In a city of 485,000 pre-Katrina, somewhere around 25% of the population lived in single mother households. The construction industry is too backward to employ these women as hod-carriers (!), so they suffer in silence, but from a distance.
The fact is, this segment of the population has a disproportionate drag on society: chronically underemployed or unemployed, welfare dependent, public health care dependent, etc. These are exactly the people who should stay away during the rebuilding phase. (Don't call me racist; I'm only echoing N.O. city councilman Oliver Thomas.)
After things settled down a little bit post-Katrina and businesses started reopening, businesses were DYING to hire people - hamburger flippers were getting $10/hr plus weekly bonuses, etc. As one of my sisters who lives in that area put it, there are always help wanted signs for good paying jobs everywhere, yet there were always plenty of apparently able-bodied people who'd only show up when there was any sort of organized protest about how poorly they were getting treated.
Ever see an interview where they ask one of these single moms why she isn't working? The answer is usually some combo of:
- Who's going to provide my transportation?
- Who's going to provide child care for all my kids?
- What about the welfare or FEMA benefits I might lose?
It's like a mini version of the whole welfare reform debate all over again.
which comes with much lower pay, but the construction industry is a bottom up kind of industry. You don't start out making good money and doing the important stuff, you start out at $8 an hour fetching, carrying and cleaning up behind the crew.
It is the kind of job a lot of people don't last very long in.
Its as if the state has a giant abused woman problem. They regularly elect the most corrupt politicians imaginable, because they feel they are charming.
Its baffling
Nat'l Assn of Manufacturers
www.shopfloor.org
Thanks!
And did you ck out that BNOB link? Hilarious -- it's on the City of New Orleans website, next to Nagin's photo, you'll see a thing for "BNOB". Click on it and it takes you to a hockey site!
in feeling the whole purpose of the anniversary coverage is an attempt to politicize what happened all over again.
Unfortunately, the first time around was an off year... that's why we need the instant replay at the one year anniversary. All it is doing for me is reminding me how much I dislike the MSM.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
after the disgraceful coverage of the recent Lebanon conflict. They're getting more and more blatant.
that has significant sections below sea level and a poor levee system? Additionally, the delta low lands used to provide some storm surge protection but they have been reclaimed by the Gulf of Mexico due to the reduction of silt caused by Mississippi flood control efforts. Time to move on.
Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum
CA is prone to earthquakes. Should we say the same when some massive one devastates LA or SF? What about any coastal town that is subject to damage from flooding? What about areas of the great plains that might be flood-prone in spring? What about all of Florida - why build anything there given it's a matter of time before it will get blasted by a hurricane?
You can build a pretty long list. I'm not saying you don't have a point, but it's a touchy subject.
"CA is prone to earthquakes. Should we say the same when some massive one devastates LA or SF?" Yes.
"What about any coastal town that is subject to damage from flooding?" Yes.
"What about areas of the great plains that might be flood-prone in spring?" Yes.
"What about all of Florida - why build anything there given it's a matter of time before it will get blasted by a hurricane?" Yes.
People who choose to live on a fault line, or in a historic flood plain, or in the path of annual tropical storms, know what they are getting into. Subsidizing living in such places is madness.
--
If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
It is a mathematical calculation. It is not stupid to build in California because earthquakes, while measurable, are still a small risk. It is 100 years since the last major quake in SF, and most buildings have a lower life expectancy than that anyway. But DO expect your earthquake insurance to be higher than elsewhere.
I have had this fight on FreeRepublic with Floridians who think that everyone else should subsidise their hurricane insurance. They whine that it is more expensive than in other states.
Yes, it is. It costs more to insure against hurricanes in Florida. The only question is whether Floridians or other people should pay that cost. The answer is that Floridians should.
It also costs more to provide water supplies in New Mexico and home heating in Alaska. None of the Floridians on FR thought that was their problem. Despite these facts, the overall cost of running a home is greater in Manhattan than in Florida, New Mexico or Alaska.
It happens. Make your choices and pay your own way.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
runa special recounting the false claims and inaccurate reporting the MSM dumped on the nation. Also, a survey of what the Katrina kids have done to Houston and the other cities they have squatted in since being rescued from their own incompetance in NO would be enlightening.