Mike's Noise

Katrinamania

This is the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  In a few weeks it will be the five year anniversary of 9/11.  Interestingly, when it comes to discussing that awful day of terror, five years is "too soon."  Yet there seems to be no apprehension about discussing the death and destruction of Hurricane Katrina after only one year.  My opinion?  It's a chance for Democrats to dominate the news cycle for 24 hours and continually remind you that "George Bush hates black people."  And no one is going to give up an opportunity like that.

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(ADDED: Actually, most of the coverage I saw was pretty much devoid of anti-Bush bias, which I found rather surprising.  So I'll admit I was wrong about that prediction.)

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If you want to really know what happened a year ago, check out my Hurricane Katrina blog archive.  Click the link, scroll down to the bottom and start reading.  You'll find pretty much everything there:  the utter failure of the City of New Orleans to evacuate its indigent citizens, the complete collapse of New Orleans police and emergency response network, the grossly misleading and inaccurate reporting of the mainstream media (babies being raped and bodies stacked to the ceiling at the Superdome), the heroic and downright awe-inspiring rescue missions mounted by the National Guard, the idiocy of Sean Penn, the kooky conspiracy theories of Louis Farrakhan and Spike Lee, the failures and waste of FEMA, the utter incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers, and egregious finger pointing by federal, state, and local officials.

And don't forget the efforts of conservative bloggers to raise money for Katrina victims, while the left half of the blogosphere was engaged in full-tilt foaming-at-the-mouth Bush-bashing; the suffering of thousands in Alabama and Mississippi and in the suburbs surrounding New Orleans, who lost everything but whose stories were ignored because they failed to ignite a sufficient amount of Bush hatred; the thousands of volunteers who donated money, facilities, clothes and commodities, and time to help Katrina survivors; the cities like Houston who opened their doors to over 100,000 Katrina evacuees; the thousands of volunteers, mostly from churches, who have journeyed to New Orleans over the last 9 months and have helped hundreds of families clean out and rebuild their homes; and the struggling survivors who have returned to New Orleans and faced mold, slime, garbage, and a host of other ills as they try to rebuild their lives.

God bless the people of New Orleans.  Keep them in your prayers; they are still going to need them for some time.

ADDED: WizBang blogger Paul, an engineer and New Orleans resident, has compiled perhaps the best archive of writings about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina on the web.  His ultimate Katrina post presents a smoking gun home video that shows, conclusively, that the water levels at 17th Street Canal Floodwall were NOT at a critically-high level when the floodwall broke.  The wall was -- literally -- undermined by only a slight increase from the normal level of water.  It began seeping from underneath, then began to erode away and finally collapsed completely.

Besides the now-accepted (but criminally under-reported) conclusion that the Army Corps of Engineers built a poorly designed floodwall system -- and was therefore responsible for the flooding of New Orleans -- this video seems to underscore the fact that Katrina actually saved lives in New Orleans.  Why?  The approaching hurricane spurred the activation of emergency shelters and evacuation efforts before the flood occured.  Had the wall broken at another time (which now seems very likely) then tens of thousands would have died and rescue operations would have taken weeks longer.  Frightening indeed.

(Several WizBang commenters pointed out that other areas of the city were flooded by overspill or storm surge occurring at other containment walls.  Although Katrina caused only a moderate amount of wind damage in New Orleans, it did pack a pretty good storm surge.  But Paul's post seems to clearly show that the 17th Street floodwall, the one whose breach flooded most of the heart of N. O., collapsed without a significant increase in the water level.)

No good deed goes unpunished

Here is an interesting New York Times article that describes the strain felt by Texans who absorbed hundreds of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees, and then took a direct hit from Hurricane Rita.

In East Texas, state officials are seeking roughly $1 billion in new federal block-grant money to house people whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Rita.

Texas officials concede that their coast was not pummeled nearly as badly as their neighbors in Louisiana, but they argue that their residents did not evacuate and were now trying to live in squalid, mold-infested conditions.

"I have been to the Ninth Ward," said Mark Viator, chairman of the Recovery Coalition of Southeast Texas, speaking of the most devastated neighborhood in New Orleans. "There is debris in the Ninth Ward, but you don't have people. We say, send the money where the people are."

Henry Bowie, who lives in Port Arthur, a city with high unemployment and many poor residents, is the sort of person Mr. Viator thinks should get federal housing money. His house is a patchwork of broken roofing, and light is visible through the floorboards because the house is off its foundation. Black mold grows up the sides of the walls, but Mr. Bowie, who undergoes dialysis three times a week, remains there with his wife and teenage son.

... Mayor Guy N. Goodson of Beaumont, where thousands of homes were damaged, said he would like to see federal reimbursements for debris removal there rise to 90 percent of costs from 75 percent, equaling what it was in Louisiana. Mayor Goodson said his area suffered inattention because its residents had done the right thing: evacuating and rebuilding without complaint after Hurricane Rita cut its path.

"There is a great disjoinder in people's minds about disaster," he said. "You see wildfires, you see a tornado, and who can forget the pictures of the Ninth Ward. A vast majority of our area is wind damage. And unfortunately from a sensory standpoint, people just don't coordinate these two very similar disasters."

There's much more in the article about the problems Houston is facing, but I chose to excerpt some details about southeast Texas.  I'm a native of that area, and I have seen firsthand the destruction that Hurricane Rita caused.  Like the people living in Mississippi, the sensationalism-driven news media has simply ignored the plight of this area.  But it is real.

A final thought -- all of the people living in water-damaged and mold-infested housing along the Gulf Coast in the wake of these two hurricanes are going to provide doctors and other medical professionals with a living laboratory of diseases and health ailments caused by exposure to mold and chronically damp environments.  Many people (particularly in the construction and insurance industries) have dismissed the idea of mold-related diseases as a fantasy cooked up by greedy lawyers.  We'll see if they change their minds now.

Houston suffering from "compassion fatigue"

MSNBC/Newsweek is reporting that the city of Houston, whose schools, healthcare services, law enforcement, and housing have been over-burdened by, at times, up to 150,000 refugees from New Orleans, is nearing the breaking point.  The article calls it "compassion fatigue."

These situations only expose the dire circumstances that existed in New Orleans before Katrina struck.  Through its acclaim as a party town, New Orleans was able to keep tourists away from is impoverished neighborhoods and was largely able to sweep unemployment, shiftlessness, drug and gang activity, and the hopelessness of its residents under the rug for nearly a century.  Katrina blew the lid off these problems, and the refugee situation has exported them en masse to communities that are unable to absorb so many problem citizens on such short notice.

Many people suggested that Katrina was the best thing to ever happen to the poor people of New Orleans, since it forced them out of communities saturated with generational poverty and into situations where their chances of finding work and becoming productive members of society was greatly improved.  That sentiment is probably true, but it still doesn't account for the almost insurmountable difficulties involved in a radical lifestyle change.  Someone who has spent all their lives in generational poverty would find working and living on their own to be as difficult a task as trying to survive in a foreign country without being able to speak or understand the language.

These people, most of them with good hearts but without the skills or understanding to survive and prosper by themselves, need not only our prayers but our willingness to physically involve ourselves in their lives -- teaching them responsibility and stewardship, serving as role models, and offering to be advocates for them when they need help.

On a related note, Father John Whiteford notes the impending meltdown of Texas' welfare system here and here.

AP floats "misinformation=disinformation" meme in Katrina video controversy

UPDATE 3-4-06: From the Nelson Muntz "Ha-Ha!" department, WizBang Blog notes this retraction by the Associated Press after being hammered by bloggers for two days:

Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

Behold, the power of the blog.
_________________________________________________

All you need to know about the Bush Administration hack-job perpetrated by the AP and disguised as a "news" story is contained in the links below:

WizBang: ReWriting Katrina History, AP Style
PowerLine: More Leaks; This Time, Katrina

The AP claims to have acquired "new" video footage of briefings and teleconferences held during the six days prior to the August 30th landfall of Hurricane Katrina and attended by President Bush along with various state and federal government officials.  Funny, I thought Bush was on "vacation," "clueless" and "out of touch" before Katrina struck.  Silly me.

But according to the White House, complete transcripts of the exact same meetings have been available for months.  Isn't it funny that the mainstream media can't seem to get excited about a story unless they have pictures to look at?  (Unless those pictures are cartoons of Mohammed.)

This AP story is simply a venue for a new strategy: zeroing in on one word uttered by the President, and then building a flimsy case to prove that the word was uttered in error.  Then they will try to hold him "accountable" for making those grievous errors.  And I'll bet that sooner or later, one of those misstatements will be turned into an impeachable offense.

In their story, the AP sets up Bush by noting that after New Orleans flooded, he remarked "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."  Then the AP goes into great pains to discuss how many times the New Orleans levee system was discussed in the pre-landfall briefings.  Trouble is, the aspect of levee failure that was discussed was overspill, or "topping," not disintegration, or "breaching."  Over at Captain's Quarters blog, Ed Morrisey pored through pages of transcripts available through the New York Times and found the word "breach" appearing only one time.

In the normal course of human events, misstatements are routinely made, usually due to confusion or ambiguity with respect to factual circumstances.  Perfect case in point: today the AP released video of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco assuring the President and his staff that preliminary reports indicated that there were no levee breaches.

There is a vast gulf of difference between misinformation and disinformation, whose only purpose is deliberate deception.  Disinformation is usually a crime; misinformation, even when it is damaging, usually isn't.  And we will all be much better off if we don't try to change that.

FEMA - not exactly a heck of a job

I couldn't let this story go by without a few comments.  From the "tell us something we don't already know" department ...

Audits: Millions of dollars in Katrina aid wasted

WASHINGTON - In its rush to provide Katrina disaster aid, the Federal Emergency Management Agency wasted millions of dollars and overpaid for hotel rooms, including $438-a-day lodging in New York City, government investigators said Monday.

Reports released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department’s office of inspector general detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud or mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.

The two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA’s emergency cash assistance program — which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees — were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.

Nine hundred thousand out of 2.5 million -- that's over one third of them, folks.  Ready for more?

The audits included these findings:

• The $2,000 debit cards issued to hurricane evacuees for emergency supplies were often used for purchases unrelated to disaster aid, including: adult entertainment, gambling, a $450 tattoo, a .45-caliber handgun for $1,300 and a diamond engagement ring for $1,100.
• There was little or no verification of the names, addresses or Social Security numbers of applicants registering by phone or the Internet for the $2,000 in aid, resulting in thousands of checks issued to those with duplicate or bogus information.
• Duplicate payments were made to about 5,000 of the nearly 11,000 debit card recipients who received Katrina aid, first with debit cards and then again via electronic bank transfer. (That's NEARLY HALF. -Mike.)
• Although FEMA says it bought 114,341 trailers for $1.7 billion, discrepancies abound in FEMA’s documentation of the number ordered, received and occupied, making it difficult to ascertain the exact units available or whether government-owned property was otherwise accounted for.
• FEMA may have bought too many temporary homes — 24,967 manufactured homes obtained for $857.8 million and 1,295 modular homes at $40 million — resulting in 10,777 such homes sitting empty in Hope, Ark., in sinking mud without proper storage. “It was unclear how the decision was made,” the Homeland Security audit stated.

How about pure bloody incompetence?  That sounds like a plausible explanation to me.

Of course bloggers were all over the stories about Katrina victims friviolously spending their $2,000 handouts last October.

And I seem to distinctly remember liberals trying to smear anyone who would dare question the appropriation of Hurricane Katrina relief funds as racists who hate America.  As Glenn Reynolds would say, "heh."

To Build or Not To Build

A solemn look at the problems facing New Orleans can be found in this current Time Magazine article.  As someone who has done government paperwork in the past, all I can say is, "Welcome to the world of US Federal Government contracts."

I suppose liberals are going to have to choose between two possible outcomes in The Big Easy:

1)  Fast-track the recovery and restoration efforts by suspending competitive bidding, and thus allow eeeeevil Bu$hCo conspirators like Halliburton to make money

2)  Reinstate competitive bidding and let much of the city crumble from mold and wet rot while government bean counters squabble over bids, subsidies, quotas, and the like.

On second thought, they won't.  It's just too much fun to be able to blame Bush for everything.

New Orleans has an unenviable dilemma -- restore a historic though largely blighted city to an ill-conceived and dangerous location, or rebuild residential areas in safer zones that either already exist or that can be engineered by embarking on a massive landfill project.

Whatever New Orleans officials decide, I sincerely hope that they don't allow something like this to happen again.

The FEMA emails

Michelle Malkin has images of the email exchanges between FEMA headquarters and FEMA agents on the ground in New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina wrecked havoc in New Orleans.  Go read them now.

Overall they paint a rather grim picture for FEMA, providing direct evidence that FEMA had agents in the field before and during the flood who kept in constant contact with headquarters and who gave them hourly reports on the dire situation in the city and in the Superdome.  They also reveal that the FEMA PR team was more concerned with providing FEMA director Michael Brown with a cozy restaurant meal and a coast-to-coast TV interview than with getting him to New Orleans to personally manage the disaster response.

But was the New Orleans debacle all Michael Brown's fault?  His online resume states,

... Brown has led Homeland Security’s response to more than 164 presidentially declared disasters and emergencies, including the 2003 Columbia Shuttle disaster and the California wildfires in 2003. In 2004, Mr. Brown led FEMA’s thousands of dedicated disaster workers during the most active hurricane season in over 100 years, as FEMA delivered aid more quickly and more efficiently than ever before.

And that's a valid point that no one brings up.  Brown supervised the Federal responses to hundreds of declared disasters, and none of them dissolved into the swamp of utter incompetence that we saw in New Orleans.  In fact, I'd be willing to bet money that most of Brown's harshest critics (particularly Democrats) had never even heard of Michael Brown before Katrina.

So what really happened?

I believe that evidence clearly indicates that the City of New Orleans was completely unprepared for a major disaster.  This was, realistically, probably the first time that FEMA encountered such utter incompetence among local authorities, and such unwillingness among residents to recognize the magnitude of the potential disaster. 

Michael Brown failed to realized the seriousness of the New Orleans situation, partly as a result of poor communication within FEMA, but mostly because neither he nor anyone else in Washington had ever imagined that local authorities could have been so completely incapable of immediate disaster response.

Having said that, it's now time to jump on FEMA for a while. 

First of all, if your job is disaster response, doesn't it make sense that you would approach your job always assuming that the worst will happen?  Brown's lax attitude about the situation doesn't exactly inspire confidence that he would be able to handle another such crisis any better.

Secondly, we've dumped billions of dollars into "Homeland Security" during the last three years, and a fair-sized chunk of that money was supposed to be earmarked for disaster response coordination efforts between local and Federal authorities.  I thought that this meant that Federal teams were supposed to get together with local municipalities, review disaster response plans, and set up coordinated responses.  Maybe I was wrong.  It is obvious that no one at FEMA understood how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans was, or how stubborn and recalcitrant the New Orleans residents would be.  By the time the city started flooding, it was too late.

If anything, this whole episode proves conclusively that if you sit around waiting for the government to bail you out of every problem you are in, then you are in big trouble. 

It also proves that life doesn't give us a do-over.  Or a second chance to make a good impression.  FEMA is forever scarred by the behavior of Michael Brown.  Shame on him.

"Millions More" insanity begins

Whenever Louis Farrakhan steps up to a microphone, you can almost always be sure that he is going to say something like this:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan fueled a rumor that explosives, not Hurricane Katrina, broke New Orleans' dikes and flooded poor African American neighborhoods.

"A member of the Army Corps of Engineers saw burn marks on the concrete," Farrakhan told reporters, describing an e-mail he had received.

"They found two types of explosives used by the military," he said, without naming the source, adding that an eight-meter (25-foot) crater had been blown in the dike.

Farrakhan said locals had reported sounds of explosions, among other things, leading him to believe the rumors should be investigated.

"Wickedness exists in high places," he said. "The duty of the government is to prove the rumor to be false or that these suspicions are true." (emphasis added)

Actually, Mr. Farrakhan, the duty of leaders (as you consider yourself to be) is to refrain from making such idiotic and outlandish statements.  It is not the duty of government to waste its time trying to argue with stupidity.

This type of rhetoric is destructive and helps no one.

With regard to my previous post about this weekend's "Millions More March," organized by Farrakahn, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way against blacks coming together as a community or affirming one another.

What I am against, however, are meetings like this one, whose sole focus seems to be to blame President Bush and white people in general for every problem that blacks struggle with today.

I am particularly upset by the hateful rhetoric used by black leaders with reference to white Americans and the Republican party.  Go back and read any of the great speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, or his letters and writings, and you will not find him referring to white leaders of his day as Nazis or Klansmen.  King certainly had every right to compare men like Bull Connor to Hitler, but he didn't.  Modern day civil rights leaders have become so obsessed with tearing down whites that they have lost the focus of their movement's origin, which was peace and welfare among all men.

Black leaders are also obsessed with encouraging continual animosity toward white people for acts that took place 150 years ago and longer.  Slavery was an ugly stain on humanity, but it was one that was practiced on every continent and by every civilization until the nineteenth century.  It was the white Christian Europeans and Americans who worked for a world-wide end to the slave trade.  Insinuating that I or other white Americans somehow have a price to pay for something that happened so long ago is wrong and destructive.  Germany rid itself of Naziism and Japan rid itself of its imperial warlords within a generation.  They moved on.  It's time that black leaders encouraged their people to do the same.

And it's also time that black leaders began working to end the cultural isolation of their people, particularly the inner city poor.  The dysfunctional and destructive habits of poor inner city blacks have been turned into high-dollar pop culture by the film and record industries.  They promote a lifestyle of gangs, sexual promiscuity, drugs, and broken families that is complete with its own language, clothing, and music.  A handful have gotten rich off the misery of millions.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to stop it?

Cultural isolation also foments racism because it limits meaningful contact between blacks and whites.  The poor blacks living in the inner city rarely ever come in physical contact with whites, with the exception of interventions by white police officers, social workers, and the judicial system.  This only serves to perpetuate the stereotypes of whites as an evil menace whose systems serve only to punish and humiliate blacks.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to integrate whites into black society in a meaningful way?  I can tell you that there are millions of whites who would jump at the chance to befriend, mentor, and love the members of the black community, especially the children who are so much at risk.  I'm one of them.  All we ask for is a real chance.

Any gathering of black leaders that recognizes these problems and works to honestly correct them will always have my undying support.

But today's mainstream black leadership makes those things seem like an impossibility.

You tell me who suffers because of it.

Got 'im - "Man charged with firing gun at rescue helicopter arrested"

From WWL television:

      A man who allegedly fired a weapon at a rescue helicopter in the day following Hurricane Katrina's hit on New Orleans has been indicted by a federal grand jury.  

      Wendell Bailey, 20, of New Orleans, was charged with firearms possession by a felon and firing upon a military aircraft, prosecutors said. The grand jury accused Bailey of shooting through the window of his apartment as a helicopter flew over his neighborhood.    

      Authorities said they found two revolvers and a box of ammunition under a mattress in his apartment. The charges carry up to 30 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.    

      Bailey had been previously convicted of cocaine distribution, authorities said.

Bus photos prove the ineptness of Nagin, New Orleans officials

Everyone remembers this now-famous photo of the New Orleans school buses in the flooded parking lot, and the hullabaloo that followed when we realized that the city could have used those buses to evacuate stranded refugees from the Superdome:

But if you haven't been reading WizBang, then you don't know the whole story.  Wizblogger Paul, who is a New Orleans native, first broke this story last Tuesday after poring over satellite photos of New Orleans.  It seems that the city had at least 60 school buses parked in the Algiers Bus Barn, where they remained dry throughout the storm and flood, and were only a few minutes away from the Superdome.  Here is a detail of the satellite photo:

Then on Friday, Paul posted yet another satellite photo showing 150 City of New Orleans RTA buses parked at the Poland Avenue Wharf, also high and dry, and also just a few minutes away from the Superdome.  Here is the new photo:

To put this all into perspective, here is a satellite photo that I found some weeks ago via a link from Donald Sensing.  This high-resolution photo shows most of the city of New Orleans, and it shows all three groups of buses in question.  It will also help you to understand why the failure of New Orleans city officials to even have a plan to utilize these buses to transport refugees out of the city before the storm struck should be considered a crime.  I have marked pertinent areas with red squares.  (Warning: high-res image, 3 Mb download)

Paul from WizBang says,

They could have easily put 140 people per city bus. Or, to do the math, they could have moved 21,000 people in a single trip. There were an estimated 20,000 in the Dome. Between these buses and the 60 previously found school busses in Algiers, they could have made it in 1 trip with room to spare.

This -perhaps better than any other example- shows why local officials are in charge of first response and not the feds. Local officials (ahem, the Mayor) should have known who to call. Once they knew there were busses on the wharf, they should have known they were just minutes from the Dome and the areas around the river never floods. (The convention center is also on the river and everyone knew it was fine) Locals know their area (or should) and -in any other city- can manage the response better than some bureaucrat flown in from Washington. Instead of trying to find a solution, Nagin whined that he was a victim.

If Nagin had used the resources available to him properly, he could have had the Dome evacuated by Tuesday at noon and much of the chaos that broke out in the city would have been avoided. But he didn't.

Exactly.  And if either Ray Nagin or Kathleen Blanco run for re-election, they are fools.  Period.