Category Archives: New Orleans Catastrophe 2005

New Song: Democracy

Just released a brand new song: Democracy.
This song comes with its own page to help explain the lyrics.
It’s about what has become our sorry excuse for a democracy, and thinking about it for five minutes, in the context of the world at large.
I recorded the guitar and vocals for this on my mac laptop, using Audio Recorder. (I did mix it in protools, but I didn’t do anything special that would have required protools.)
Hope you like it. I’ve made all the source files available for remix, and it’s all under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
I decided to allow commercial use of the work. Let’s see how far it can get!

Shrub Caught In Another Lie: He Knew About Katrina The Night Before

Did the White House make a conscious decision to do nothing about getting Katrina rescue efforts to the people of New Orleans?
If not, how could Bush have been relieved on Tuesday morning when he mistakenly thought that New Orleans had “dodged the bullet?”
This article is from Friday, February 10, 2006.
Now we can’t give the reorganization of the Department of Home Security all the credit for single handedly screwing up the rescue system that Clinton had taken 8 years to build. The Shrub gets some credit for cutting a lot of FEMA funding too, straight across the board.
So in many areas, it didn’t matter who was in charge, there was no money for the program anyway. (Here’s factcheck.org and washington monthly for some more good information on that.)

White House Knew of Levee’s Failure on Night of Storm
By Eric Lipton for The New York Times.
via
t r u t h o u t

Washington – 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, on vacation in Texas, 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.

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Ex-FEMA Dork Still On Federal Payroll

And now, from the “shoot me now, this isn’t really happening” department, we have ex-FEMA dork Michael Brown being paid an extra consulting fee to explain how he fucked up the evacuation.
Hey I got an idea, how ’bout we get him to tell us that before we fire him. Sheesh!

Brown serving as consultant to FEMA
By Ed Henry for CNN.

A congressional panel on Tuesday is expected to
scrutinize the decision to keep ousted Federal Emergency Management
Agency chief Michael Brown on the federal payroll.
Brown told congressional investigators Monday that he is being paid as a consultant to help FEMA assess what went wrong in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, according to a senior official familiar with the
meeting…
Brown’s comments were made to investigators for Rep. Tom Davis,
R-Virginia. Davis leads a House select committee probing the federal,
state and local response to Katrina, and Brown is scheduled to appear
before the panel Tuesday in a highly anticipated appearance…
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent
agency, said last week that Brown would be paid for about a month for
“transitional purposes.” The spokesman, Russ Knocke, said he did not
know how much Brown was being paid.
Brown’s 2004 salary was $145,600, according to the Plum Book, a
congressional reference guide to executive branch salaries.

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A Great List Of Local Organizations That Can Get Help To New Orleans – Maybe Faster Than The Red Cross

These organizations are set up for faster, local service for those that need it in the gulf region. You can send money, apply your hotel points for housing, or send actual goods (see list of what’s needed and addresses below).
1.
Grassroots / Low-income / People of Color-led Hurricane Katrina Relief

http://www.sparkplugfoundation.org/katrinarelief.html
2.
List of organizations based in the Black community, compiled by hip-hop artist Kevin Powell

http://www.wbai.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=6735&Itemid=0
3.
List of relief organizations compiled by AlterNet (alternative media site)

http://alternet.org/story/24938/
4.
Offers of Housing to the Uprooted: MoveOn.org

http://www.hurricanehousing.org/
5.
Operation USA
“They can provide medical supplies and cash grants to smaller local clinics who are not Red Cross affiliates.”
http://www.opusa.org
6.
Jazz Foundation of America
Helping jazz musicians in New Orleans

http://www.jazzfoundation.org/new_orleans.php

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Report From An EPA-connected Boing Boing Reader – Clusterfuck Still In Full Swing In New Orleans

This isn’t new. It’s from around September 8, 2005, but it still seemed relevant when I read it this morning, so I bring it to you…

Katrina: account from an EPA rep
via BoingBoing and
Steve’s No Direction Home Page

A Boing Boing reader who owns an environmental cleanup services company — and asks to remain anonymous here — says,
Thanks for publishing my plea to get involved the other day. Unfortunately nothing has come of that. No one is proceeding at this point. However, plenty of opportunities to help refugees in Atlanta are now available, so that’s where my time has gone.
My company cleans up waste industrial gas cylinders and specialty chemicals. As such we are in contact with the EPA regularly and often work for the government. As you might imagine, there is expected to be a large number of cylinders recovered from Katrina, and many will probably be in bad shape, or even unknowns, which can present hazard. Today a consultant who works with us and the EPA came back from the Gulf region. Here are some of the things that he had to report:
* He said that the 30 elderly who died in the nursing home were simply forgotten. They were supposed to be rescued but someone dropped the ball and they died.
* There are now 130,000 people working in the Gulf region, including 60,000 National Guard. Conditions for these workers, especially the contractors, are extremely hard. Many are sleeping in their cars and have to supply their own food and water. There is as yet no infrastructure in place to support this group. 80% of these people have terrible diarrhea and some have been hospitalized.
* Under Homeland Security, FEMA is supposed to be in charge, but they have been marginalized due to their obvious screw ups. The National Guard is now in charge in the region and they have no experience in these matters. This is aggravating a bad situation.
* The plan going forward for New Orleans is to demolish all the houses and burn them. There is nowhere to bury the waste in the region so they will incinerate it all. Before that can go on, they will have to search every house for chemical hazards.
* They have found large numbers of seals in and around the houses in NOLA and no one is clear where they came from. An aquarium?
* They are shooting hundreds of dogs a day to protect search and rescue workers. The Humane Society shelters in the region have over 4000 animals.
* The entire Gulfport region is blocked by National Guard and only authorized contractors can get in. An RV campground has grown up outside the roadblock of 80 or more contractors hoping to get a piece of the action. These people have signs outside saying, “Mold Expert,” “Asbestos Contractor,” etc. They are having cookouts at their RVs just to try to get people to come and talk to them.
* Cell phone towers are on their way from Germany to get the communication infrastructure back in place. The EPA ordered 40 satellite phones to get their people in contact. Those phones have arrived, but no one ordered SIM cards and these phones are currently useless.
* This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.
* The Navy ship Bataan, which has been widely reported to be available for producing water, can only do desalination, but cannot handle contaminated water.
* All of the Army’s good gear, including vehicles and generators are overseas. Humvees and other vehicles in the Gulf region are breaking down frequently.
Certainly I cannot attest to the absolute reliability of all this information, but it is from a reliable source who has been involved with EPA response to hazardous situations for 20 years.
He confirms what everyone else has already said: the clusterfuck down there is beyond all imagining.

How The Guy Who Told Cheney To Go Fuck Himself Was Treated – By The Feds And EBay

And you can bet he wasn’t treated well by either one. While he’s looking through what’s left of his house, a couple goons with M-16s handcuff him for a while to let him know who’s boss. Meanwhile, E-bay removes his photos of the wreckage from his website.
Physician who told Cheney to go F*ck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney’s M-16-carrying Goons

By Jackson Thoreau for OpEdNews.

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in
alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since
he was the one who told Dick Cheney to “go fuck yourself” on Sept. 8,
that’s the least we can do.
Marble is a complex guy, to say the least. Some of the lyrics he writes
can be considered harsh by some ? personally what I’ve heard is very
much on target – but he has a softer side as an organizer of breast
cancer fund-raisers, not to mention an ER doctor.
When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane
Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life.
That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents
the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in
U.S. history…
“I had no intention of harming anyone but merely wanted to echo Mr.
Cheney’s infamous words back at him,” Marble wrote. “At that moment, I noticed the Secret Service guys with a panic-stricken look on their
faces, like they were about to tackle me, so I calmly walked away back
to my former house.”
His friend videotaped a little bit longer and then came back to Marble’s house. As they were salvaging a few things from Marble’s home, two military police waving M-16’s showed up and said they were looking for someone who fit Marble’s description who had cursed at Cheney.
“I told them I was probably the person they were looking for, and so
they put me in handcuffs and ‘detained’ me for about 20 minutes or so,” Marble wrote. “My right thumb went numb because the cuffs were on so tight, but they were fairly courteous and eventually released me after getting all my contact info. They said I had NOT broken any laws so I was free to go.”

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Thomas Friedman On New Orleans

In the NY Times:
Osama and Katrina

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the
argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S.
infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency – without
putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.
So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the
guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy
much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world’s worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

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Keith Olbermann On New Orleans

Continuing in his great tradition of being the only one to have the cahunas to say in plain english what needs to be said, Keith Olbermann had a few important words to say about the New Orleans situation — and Bush’s utter failure in dealing with it.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely
by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe.
These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country
to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and
defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even
keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure
collapse in New Orleans even though the government had heard all the
“chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers
and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern…
a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror
government. It promised protection or at least amelioration against
all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.
It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological
weapon called standing water.

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