Category: Katrina & Rita

He Held Their Lives in His Tiny Hands

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Los Angeles Times

Wal-Mart 1 FEMA -3

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. FEMA–we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, “Come get the fuel right away.” When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. “FEMA says don’t give you the fuel.” Yesterday–yesterday–FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, “No one is getting near these lines.” Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America–American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.

— Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press yesterday. From transcript.

Race and America

Here’s the bottom line: Race is central to the story of the United States. I didn’t inject that into the narrative. Race is an issue today in NOLA and it was an issue two weeks ago and it has been an issue for roughly four centuries. We had a war over it. We had a century of Jim Crow and then a Civil Rights movement. Someone tell me when race ceased to matter. Just because your favorite athlete is Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods doesn’t mean you have an exemption from ever thinking about race again. The “colorblind” society is perhaps a noble goal, but it doesn’t exist yet.

Joel Achenbach

Killed by Contempt

Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I’m not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.

Here’s one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday – without patients.

Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a “strange paralysis” set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.

The above begins today’s column by Paul Krugman, who conludes:

That contempt, as I’ve said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.

The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren’t caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?

Photo op

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — black and white, rich and poor, young and old — deserve far better from their national government.

Excerpt from Press Release — Senator Mary Landrieu

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?

Powerful, powerful tribute to her native city from Anne Rice.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Sums it up

Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Thank you for calling 911, this is George, hold please.
Whoa! Lunch time!

From TBogg, who has lots of righteous indignation.

Some reporters at least start to grow cojones

ANDERSON COOPER: Excuse me, Senator [Mary Landrieu], I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap — you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there’s not enough facilities to take her up.

Do you get the anger that is out here?

When [Secretary Chertoff] cautioned [NPR’s Robert] Siegel about the danger of relying on “anecdotal” “rumors” of people in dire straits, Siegel said, no—these are facts presented by reporters who have covered war zones. There are 2,000 people at the convention center in need, he said. Having finally broken through the steel plate that is Chertoff’s skull, the secretary confessed he hadn’t heard those reports—reports that the television networks were documenting, live, with their cameras. Chertoff promised he’d look into the matter.

CNN ANCHOR SOLEDAD O’BRIEN [to FEMA Director Brown]: How is it possible that we’re getting better intel than you’re getting? …

FEMA has been on the ground for four days, going into the fifth day. Why no massive airdrop of food and water? In Banda Aceh, in Indonesia, they got food dropped two days after the tsunami struck. …

It’s five days that FEMA has been on the ground. The head of police says it’s been five days that FEMA has been there. The mayor, the former mayor, putting out SOS’s on Tuesday morning, crying on national television, saying please send in some troops. So the idea that, yes, I understand that you’re feeding people and trying to get in there now, but it’s Friday. It’s Friday. …

Above from Slate, “The Rebellion of the Talking Heads – Newscasters, sick of official lies and stonewalling, finally start snarling.” By Jack Shafer

Louisiana 1927 Lyrics

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through cleard down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tyrin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame
What the river has done
To this poor crackers land.”

CHORUS

Randy Newman – Louisiana 1927 Lyrics

The hack’s hack

So, just to recap, [FEMA Director Michael] Brown had no experience whatsoever in emergency management. He was fired from his last job for incompetence. He was hired because he was the new director’s college roommate. And after the director — who himself got the job because he was a political fixer for the president — left, he became top dog. And President Bush said yesterday that he thinks Brown is “doing a helluva job”.

Talking Points Memo

Our elected representatives and their priorities

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island.

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times

Outrage at Response

From a report in The New York Times:

There was shock at the slow response: Joseph P. Riley Jr., the 29-year Democratic mayor of Charleston, S.C., and a veteran of Hurricane Hugo’s wrath, said: “I knew in Charleston, looking at the Weather Channel, that Gulfport was going to be destroyed. I’m the mayor of Charleston, but I knew that!”

But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world’s sole remaining superpower could not – or at least had not – responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government’s worst-case possibilities for years.

“It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad,” said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. “I’m 84 years old. I’ve been around a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”