down with murder inc

Life and death in a city unhinged

Matt Frei - British Journalism Review - Vol. 16, No. 4, 2005, pages 5-11

"Try to get to New Orleans at least once," one of my predecessors urged me before I took up the job of Washington correspondent for the BBC in 2002. "But it won't be easy," he added. "Your bosses always suspect you've gone to have a good time!" At least that is one charge they won't be making about my trip this summer.

I had been to the Big Easy once before. It was exactly one year before Hurricane Katrina and it was to cover another storm, Hurricane Ivan, a category 4 monster that spared New Orleans by veering 200 miles east. On that occasion we arrived on one of the last flights before Louis Armstrong International Airport was shut, drove into the city on Interstate 10 past a 15-mile traffic jam of evacuees heading in the other direction, and stayed in a hotel overflowing with residents who had abandoned their homes for the higher floors of the Comfort Suites on Tulane Ave. As the skies darkened, so did the mood of the deserted city. In the crowded lobby there was muffled talk of previous storms that had flooded New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast. The people of Mississippi and Louisiana tend to be on first name terms with the hurricanes that have visited them. Betsy (1965) and Camille (1969), the meteorological superstars of recent memory, were being discussed with intimate horror as though they were predator relatives.

New Orleans was lucky to dodge Ivan in 2004 and it almost looked as if its luck would be repeated in 2005, because Katrina's eye did not pass directly over the city. But this storm did whip up Lake Ponchitrane and the Mississippi to deliver the nightmare scenario: a storm surge of 20 feet and more that broke the levees. On Tuesday, August 30 the 80 per cent of a city that lies below sea level filled like a bathtub. In the Lower 9th Ward, the lowest - and poorest - neighbourhood, the wave was so strong it ripped the levee wall to shreds and flattened every house for half a mile. Even today, a giant, rust-coloured Mississippi barge sits on top of a yellow school bus, next to a warehouse that looks like something out of a closed pop-up book. In drier times, New Orleans was the only place I knew where you walked along the banks and looked up at the river.

The power of water took most people by surprise. It shouldn't have. Unlike earthquakes, hurricanes provide ample warning, and opportunity for evacuation. And because of its perilous location, New Orleans had even war-gamed a fictitious "Hurricane Pam" two years ago. The conclusion then was that a category 3 hurricane would have disastrous consequences for the city. Katrina was a category 4, and yet Ray Nagin, the outspoken, charismatic mayor of the Big Easy, ordered a mandatory evacuation only one day before the storm made landfall.

Dubious distinction

When Katrina hit I was in London on vacation with my family. The front pages of most British newspapers displayed the satellite image of a menacing blancmange, swirling through the Gulf of Mexico. I wondered if the storm was going to be as bad as predicted or whether another U.S. weather story had come along to fill a late summer news hole. By Tuesday night the extent of the damage was becoming obvious and I yanked my family on to a flight to Washington. Twenty-four hours after leaving the mayhem of Heathrow's Terminal 4 I found myself driving into a New Orleans resembling the film set of a Hollywood disaster movie. Don, my driver, had reluctantly left the quietude of nearby Baton Rouge and now needed to overcome two phobias. The first was a severe case of vertigo which he confessed to as we crossed the famous Huye Long bridge - as high as it is rickety - in driving rain. Then our car engine stalled.

The second phobia was the very legitimate fear of losing his SUV to thieves. The car radio was hyperventilating with reports of armed gangs, murders, rapes and pitched battles between police and looters. (Well, New Orleans had previously earned the dubious distinction of being "the murder capital" of the USA.) The radio chimed perfectly with the cacophony outside: Blackhawk helicopters swooped overhead, crowds of angry civilians near the now infamous Superdome demanded to know when buses were going to evacuate them. Policemen screamed at soldiers. Soldiers screamed at relief workers. A woman, who had visibly soiled herself, knelt on the Interstate, screaming at the sky. In this bedlam no shots were fired and no punches were thrown, but New Orleans seemed like a city unhinged.

We stopped a group of National Guardsmen and asked them the best way to reach Canal Street, where I had hoped to meet up with colleagues. "There is no safe way, sir. Leave this city. Now! It is not safe! It is NOT safe - there are areas where we don't dare to go." The high-pitched squeal seemed at odds with the well-armed square-jawed Louisiana guardsman making it. Don and I didn't know what was more perilous: to stay among people who were fast approaching boiling point, or to venture into the no-go areas of New Orleans. We carried on, driving gingerly down streets which were strewn with hurricane wreckage: torn aluminium siding, tree branches, power lines like tangled fishing nets, a Chevrolet crushed by a discharge of bricks, a dead man lying face down in front of an ATM machine.

On the corner of Poydras Street and S Broad Ave the movie experience turned acutely and alarmingly into reality TV. We were suddenly faced by two heavily armed and armoured SWAT teams, who emerged from either side of the street like a troupe of extras converging on a stage. "Get out, get out!" they shouted, pointing their guns first at us and then at the unseen enemy in the buildings beside us. "Looters on the roof!" The Darth Vaders looked scared and that scared us. I turned to see Don fiddling awkwardly under his seat. Like a rabbit conjured out of a hat, his own weapon appeared in his hand. "These guys don't know what they're doin'," Don pronounced with his customary drawl, cocking his Magnum. "I'm gonna be mountin' my own defence."

Oh for the mayhem of Terminal 4. I thought I had come to cover a weather story, but in New Orleans that day something entirely different was unfolding. It was a battle between fact and fiction, reality and rumour, fear and sanity. In the absence of working mobile phones and wireless communications, everyone was struggling. Even the military was reduced to employing "runners", last used in the Civil War. Ironically the city's few remaining pay phones, abandoned relics in the era of mobile technology, were working perfectly and experienced a brief resurrection. A colleague from The Daily Telegraph resorted to sitting on a stranded armchair in the middle of Canal Street, juggling quarters and dictating his story to a copytaker in London. Everyone was floundering and improvising. What surprised my colleagues and me is that the authorities - city, State and federal - floundered longer and improvised less than most. With the skies full of helicopters, 60,000 men under arms advancing on a rapidly emptying city, and aircraft carriers replacing steamers on the Mississippi, the superpower was getting into gear with the nimble dexterity of a supertanker.

There was something medieval about this Venice from Hell. Stranded citizens in various states of disrepair and distress, like the damned in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, littered the pavements. The smell of rotting food and putrid water was trumped here and there by the stench of a decomposing body. Outlandish rumours appeared plausible in a place where the bizarre had become normal. For instance, reports that children and babies had been raped careened through the ranks of evacuees and were then "confirmed" on the Oprah Winfrey Show by a tearful Eddie Compass, the police chief. He is the same man who told me that Katrina and the breaking of the levees was God's wrath for the sins of his city. With chiefs like him, it's not surprising that fear and fantasy ruled the day.

The most obvious example of this was the Convention Center. An ugly modern complex that stretches along the banks of the Mississippi for more than a mile, the Center is a cathedral of conference tourism. In the months before Katrina it had accommodated software experts, facial reconstruction gurus, and the Canadian Association of Nurses for their annual get-together. In the first week of September it became a mass convention of misery. Perhaps 8,000 residents - no one knows the exact number - had crowded in and around the complex. The vast majority were poor and black. They had not left the city for a variety of reasons. Sam Nutting and his family did not possess a car.

A dastardly plot

The patients of the Gus Tyler Nursing Home were only too anxious to be evacuated, but no one had bothered to put them and their wheelchairs on a bus. Melissa Armstrong was convinced that the evacuation was a dastardly plot to remove her and other black residents from the city and never allow them to return. If this is ludicrous, it was a charge I heard frequently and it was rooted in history. After the Great Flood of 1927 tens of thousands of black New Orleansians did indeed flock to the industrial cities of the north, such as Chicago and Milwaukee, in the hope of a better life and less prejudice. In the same year The New York Times applauded the attempts by a local contractor to block the hole in the levee by forcing hundreds of black men to lie on top of one another. The band on one of the rescue ships, evacuating white residents, played Bye Bye Blackbird as it sailed into the distance. Yes, these were the bad days of racial hatred, and folk-memories linger.

In September 2005 there was no evidence of any sinister plot. Personally I saw no evidence of overt racism. But there was plenty of mistrust between black and white and good deal of incompetence. For instance, the authorities and the rumour mill had told people to flock to the Convention Center for safety and evacuation, and then abandoned them to their own resources. I arrived there on Thursday afternoon. Most of the people had been there since Tuesday. Officials from the American Red Cross, FEMA - the disaster relief agency - or any other arm of government were conspicuous by their absence. Occasionally armed men in uniform appeared, standing on the back of pick-up trucks, their guns held aloft as if they were on a hunting trip. Were they local police, officers from other municipalities, vigilantes, white looters? They didn't enlighten us. Many sported red bandanas and smoked cigars, which, to be frank, didn't enhance their image as potential care providers. I saw one elderly couple being told to "Back off " when they approached with a perfectly reasonable question: "When are we going to get out?" No answer from the men with red bandanas. Just another warning: "Back off!"

The other manifestation of officialdom came from the skies. Every half-hour a helicopter would appear, hover above the empty car park next to the Convention Center and dump a few crates of water. This triggered a scrum in which the young and the aggressive would invariably get hold of the water, leaving everyone else at their mercy. Any aid official will tell you this is one way to turn a crowd of waiting evacuees into a riot. But in New Orleans there was no riot. Instead there was resignation and utter helplessness. I will never forget the pained, vacant stares of the ageing residents of the Gus Tyler Nursing Home, lined up in their wheelchairs like front row spectators in Hell. After three days and nights of being rooted to their metal chairs in the sweltering heat without food, medicine or water, all had soiled themselves, many were fading into a feverish delirium and five had died. We were shown the bodies of two elderly women, still slouched in their wheelchairs. Why these people had to wait for several days for buses that were parked a few miles away remains baffling.

One explanation was that the bus drivers were too afraid to come to the Convention Center, which officials had convinced them was on the point of eruption. Another was that the arrival of soldiers might trigger a race riot. According to yet another, the streets were too dirty and had to be swept clean before the school buses dared to park in front of the Center. A middle-aged man came up to me and said he had organised 50 qualified drivers who were happy to drive the buses themselves, if only they could be taken to the vehicles. I had no answer for him. Nor, clearly, did the authorities. But despite the desperate state of 8,000 people, there was less evidence of violence in the New Orleans Convention Center than there is at closing time outside the Hat and Stick near Broadcasting House.

Americans expect the devastation of hurricanes. They did not expect the shambles and chaos that followed. Events in New Orleans dominated every newspaper and television channel. The networks stopped pulling their punches. The usually understated Economist thundered "The Shaming of America" on its cover, and even the flag-waving Fox TV - owned by the same Rupert Murdoch who criticised the BBC for its "anti-American" coverage - sounded a note of jaw-dropping disbelief. At the time of writing, the death toll for the whole Gulf Coast stands at 1,200. This is a lot lower than the 10,000 predicted at one stage by the mayor of New Orleans, but still one of the worst natural disasters in modern American history. Crucially it is estimated that 700 people - most of them elderly - died after the initial storm as a result of neglect or mismanagement. These were the deaths that could and should have been avoided. Why they were not will continue to be the subject of bitter debate.

A despised four-letter word

There is no shortage of targeted blame. Mayor Nagin has been widely criticised for not mobilising hundreds of school buses for a mandatory evacuation that should have been ordered much sooner. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has been blamed for not allowing Washington to federalise the National Guard, putting thousands of soldiers under the direct command of the White House or the Pentagon. Congress failed to approve the funds to secure the levees. Homeland Security, the mega agency that controls a staff of more than 170,000 bureaucrats, was widely condemned for flunking the first big test of its existence. FEMA, the disaster relief agency, whose mere mention used to herald relief, has become a despised four-letter word among evacuees from the Gulf Coast. The New Orleans police department was weakened by desertion. Scores of police officers had lost their own homes and their families had been displaced. And two policemen committed suicide in the days after the flooding.

All the above blamed the President for failing to get off his ranch quicker and do what he prides himself on: managing a crisis. One possible explanation for his lacklustre performance emerged after the waters had receded. When Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, Karl Rove, George W. Bush's most trusted lieutenant, was absent from the White House, confined to hospital suffering from kidney stones. Distracted by excruciating pain he was unable to advise his master. Whatever the reason, Katrina turned out to be a huge blow for the President. It raised questions of competence, even among those who agree with Bush on matters of values and ideology. The storm broke the levees of the President's credibility.

The only agency to emerge blameless from the storm was the Coast Guard, whose red helicopters rescued thousands of citizens from trees and rooftops. But such was the shock and soul-searching triggered by Katrina that this was a crisis without the usual mythology of heroes. Even belated attempts by the networks to celebrate the Coast Guard as "the heroes" of Katrina fell on deaf ears because America was tearing its hair out over much bigger questions raised by savage weather. If the authorities can't handle a hurricane, what will they do if a dirty bomb hits Washington? Where is the scientific and political debate about the increasing strengths of hurricanes? Is the "greatest democracy on earth" best served by a layered system of government that is at best devolved and at worst messy? Is the superpower too big to micro-manage a domestic crisis caused by a hurricane named Katrina? - bjr.org.uk

Corps admits to 'design failure'
By Bill Walsh Washington bureau - 2005
- In the closest thing yet to a mea culpa, the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged Wednesday that a "design failure" led to the breach of the 17th Street canal levee that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina.
Lt. General Carl Strock told a Senate committee that the corps neglected to consider the possibility that floodwalls atop the 17th Street Canal levee would lurch away from their footings under significant water pressure and eat away at the earthen barriers below.
"We did not account for that occurring," Strock said in an interview after the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing. "It could be called a design failure."
A botched design has long been suspected by independent forensic engineers looking into the levee failures. A panel of engineering experts confirmed it last month in a report saying that the "I-wall" design could not withstand the force of the rising water in the canal and triggered the breach.
But until Wednesday the corps, which designed and oversaw the construction of the levees, had not explicitly taken responsibility for the mistake.
"We have now concluded we had problems with the design of the structure," Strock told members of the subcommittee that finances Corps operations. "We had hoped that wasn't the case, but we recognize it is the reality."
Experts from the National Science Foundation, the external review panel for the corps, said potential problems have been known for some time. They pointed to a 1986 corps study that warned of just such separations in the floodwalls.
But Strock told the panel that the corps wasn't aware of the potential hazard before Aug. 29 when Hurricane Katrina drove a massive surge of water against New Orleans' storm-protection system. He said the corps is in the process of evaluating all the levees to see if they, too, could fail in the same way.
"There may be other elements in the system designed that way that may have to be addressed," Strock said.
A lawyer who has filed a class-action suit over the levee failures said Strock's statement may mean little for his case because the corps is generally immune from legal liability by virtue of a 1928 law that put the agency in the levee-building business.
"The words are heavy and important," Joseph Bruno said. "The problem is legal impediment called immunity. It was tort reform that began in 1928."
However, lawyer Mitchell Hoffman said it could help his case, which seeks to sidestep the corps' immunity by alleging the levee failure amounted to a massive government seizure of peoples' homes and land.
"It simplifies the case significantly because we don't have to have a battle of experts," Hoffman said. "Now the judge can say because of the enormity, it was a taking and the government needs to pay these people for their property."
Under questioning from Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, Strock also told the committee that the stunning $6 billion increase in the price of levee protection announced last week was prompted by a request from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to certify the levees to national flood insurance standards.
Strock said that FEMA asked the Corps what it would take to make the levees strong enough to withstand a 100-year flood, the standard government level for protection.
"Six billion dollars was our preliminary estimate," Strock said. "That number should come down somewhat."
The general, however, could not say when he might be able to fine-tune the estimate. Timing is critical because the Bush administration is evaluating how much money to request from Congress for additional levee repairs. Without a White House request, FEMA says it can't release flood maps that tell people whether it is safe to rebuild or not.
Landrieu has threatened to hold up all presidential appointments to executive branch agencies until the White House issues such a request. Louisiana lawmakers hope to include any new levee financing in the pending emergency supplemental spending bill for hurricane recovery and the global war on terror. The bill passed a Senate panel Tuesday and is expected to reach the floor by the end of April. - nola.com

Three Hurricane Katrina survivors found shot dead in US
WASHINGTON (AFP) Dec 31, 2005 - Three members of a US family who survived Hurricane Katrina and were facing eviction from a Texas apartment complex where they had found shelter have been found shot to death in an apparent murder-suicide, according to a newspaper report.
The Dallas Morning News reported late Friday that the bodies of a 40-year-old man, his 37-year-old wife and their 14-year-old son were discovered early Friday in an upstairs unit of the Village on the Creek Apartments by Grapevine, Texas police.
A shotgun was found near the bodies and neighbors said they had heard three gunshots at around noon on Thursday.
The victims' names were being withheld while police attempted to contact their relatives.
A friend said Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the family's rental home in Louisiana. The family had reportedly spent a week on the streets before moving into a hotel.
After Hurricane Rita struck the US Gulf Coast in Katrina's wake, the family moved again and ended up in Grapevine. However, they had recently been served with an eviction notice, officials said.
"He pretty much lost it after the hurricane," said Teri Curry, a friend of the man who died.
Curry said the man's wife had once confided in her: "I failed my kids again, Teri. My kids are starving."
The couple also had a 16-year-old daughter whom police have since located. She had been staying in North Carolina with her boyfriend.
The local magistrate who issued the eviction order against the family had given them information about the government's Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has helped other Katrina survivors find shelter and aid.
"They were definitely given the opportunity to seek other shelter," said Marc Flake, a spokesman for the local authorities. - .terradaily.com

Four bodies found since Dec. 21; Katrina death toll now 1,326
January 9, 2006 (AP) - Four bodies found in Louisiana over the past 17 days have brought the total found since Hurricane Katrina to 1,100, the number attributed to the storm to 1,077 and total storm deaths to 1,326 in five states.
The official search for bodies in Louisiana was called off Oct. 3, but fire departments and people returning to destroyed neighborhoods have continued to find the dead.
The state morgue has released 40 bodies to families since Dec. 21, bringing the total to 601, the Department of Health and Hospitals reported recently.
Workers at the morgue have identified 12 of those whose identity had been unknown, leaving 162 still unidentified.
Another 143 bodies are ready for release, and morgue workers are trying to locate families.
Katrina killed 231 people in Mississippi, 14 in Florida, and two each in Alabama and Georgia.
The state also maintains a listing of people who were reported missing. There are about 3,700 names on the list, though DHH spokesman Bob Johannessen said family members may have located some of them and not called the state. - louisianaweekly.com

Storm sweeps away health insurance
BY JUDITH GRAHAM - Jan. 09, 2006 - Chicago Tribune
It took a hurricane for Trudy Robinson to realize how much she took health insurance for granted.
A teacher for 22 years, she had covered her entire family through a policy with the New Orleans school district. When she, her husband or her children got sick, Robinson didn't worry about the bills.
In December, that sense of security ended. Along with 7,500 other school district employees, Robinson learned she was losing her medical coverage and her job. Now, she doesn't know how she'll pay for care.
"It's just such a burden," said Robinson, whose home in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and everything in it was ruined in Hurricane Katrina. "You work all your life, and you count on that protection. Except something like this comes along, and then it's gone."
Tens of thousands of people struggling to recover from Katrina are learning what it means to slip into the ranks of the uninsured, and how hard it can be to climb out. Many common events - a divorce, a death, a job change, a serious illness, company layoffs - can lead to economic dislocation and the loss of job-sponsored health insurance, the primary source of medical protection for most U.S. families.
The storms that swept through the Gulf Coast highlighted just how easily it can happen, surprising and alarming many who thought they could rely on employer-sponsored health coverage.
Grace Lomba, 60, a high school guidance counselor, discovered in November that she has early breast cancer. Her insurance policy with the New Orleans school district is being canceled at the end of January.
"My home and my car, I can replace those if it comes to that," she said. "But having no health insurance, that makes me very nervous, wondering if I'm going to get the treatment I need."
In Louisiana alone, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana estimates that 200,000 men, women and children who had health insurance through the workplace will lose those benefits as financially stressed organizations terminate staff or go out of business altogether.
Experts believe this is one of the largest groups to lose medical coverage because of a single event in the nation's history.
Even before the hurricanes, 866,000 of Louisiana's 4.4 million residents were uninsured - a function, in part, of high poverty rates and lower-than-average rates of employer-sponsored coverage. Now, the situation is expected to worsen as employers cut costs in an effort to survive.
"What these hurricanes have demonstrated is that having insurance for most adults is only as good as having a job ... and that relationship can be tenuous," said Dr. Fred Cerise, who heads Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals.
Louisiana has done what it can to help, given scarce resources. Immediately after the storm, state officials required insurance companies to keep medical policies active even if premiums hadn't been paid. But those rules expired at the end of November, and now companies such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana are preparing to cancel policies if employers don't pay their bills.
"We have exhausted what we can do to keep people's insurance in force, and we are very concerned what will happen next," said Gery Barry, the company's chief executive.
One possibility is that displaced workers will drift in and out of temporary jobs, sometimes having medical coverage and sometimes not. This phenomenon, known as "health insurance churning," is widespread, new research shows.
In an analysis of two years of data, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that more than 20 percent of Americans younger than 65, or slightly more than 50 million people, go through periods without insurance that typically average less than a year. The study was published in September by the Commonwealth Fund.
By contrast, some 9 percent of Americans, or about 20 million citizens, were considered chronically or permanently uninsured.
These periods in and out of coverage testify to instability in the job market, especially for low-income workers. Even if short in duration, gaps are risky for consumers with underlying medical conditions, who are less likely to see a doctor and receive follow-up care during those periods, the authors note. The most seriously ill consumers may have difficulty securing new coverage.
In Louisiana, no one knows how many uninsured workers will be able to find new jobs, how long it will take them to do so, and whether those positions will provide medical benefits.
This year, employment is expected to decline by 278,900 jobs from 2004 levels in New Orleans alone, according to the Louisiana Economic Outlook, prepared by economists Loren Scott and Jim Richardson.
Few newly unemployed people will opt to purchase insurance on their own, experts predict. "If you've been displaced by a hurricane, you're not going to be able to afford it," said Wilson Boveland, director of member rights for United Teachers of New Orleans, a union.
For jobs that remain, benefits may be reduced.
"It is hard to see how a business struggling to recover can even be as generous as it was in the past," Don Smithburg, head of Louisiana State University's public hospital system, recently told a meeting of public hospital executives.
Making matters worse, the city's hurricane-devastated health care system is poorly prepared to take on the burden.
Charity Hospital, a renowned public institution that served the uninsured, was damaged beyond repair and has closed its doors indefinitely, leaving the burden of caring for this population to others. Meanwhile, thousands of doctors have left the area, and eight local hospitals remain closed.
At Ochsner Clinic Foundation, one of three New Orleans-area hospitals that continued operating during and immediately after the hurricane, the volume of patients who have no way of paying for care has tripled, said Warner Thomas, its president. Other institutions report similar increases.
"The fewer paying patients there are, the harder it will be to rebuild adequate clinical capacity and serve the medical needs of citizens returning to this region," warned Barry, who has lobbied the federal government to provide financial assistance to help displaced workers pay health insurance premiums.
Waiting for federal help to materialize may be the only option state officials have at the moment. But for Elaine Maldonado, a 52-year-old single woman who has lost her job of 17 years and her health insurance, waiting for care could be fatal.
Maldonado was diagnosed with breast cancer after a mammogram in March. Choosing aggressive therapy, she had her right breast and several lymph nodes removed.
Since then, Maldonado has been taking Arimidex, an expensive hormone blocker that could help prevent the cancer from recurring. The medication costs $300 for one month's supply; with insurance, Maldonado was paying $35.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed Maldonado's home in St. Bernard Parish, just outside New Orleans, and flooded the ceramics component division of Spectrum Control Inc., where she worked. Spectrum Control laid off Maldonado and 137 other workers at the Louisiana division at the end of October, human resources manager Bob Bowles confirmed.
Now that she's uninsured and living in Isabelle, La., Maldonado has to pay for her Arimidex prescription on her own as well as for visits to doctors to monitor her condition. Her unemployment check of $200 a week is barely enough to cover rent, food, car payments and gas, much less those expenses.
Because she's a single adult, Maldonado doesn't qualify for Louisiana's Medicaid program for the poor. Because she has breast cancer, private insurance companies won't offer her coverage. And because she's living on the edge, financially, she can't afford to continue coverage under COBRA, a program that lets most workers pay the full cost of their insurance for an 18-month period.
"I'm so scared," Maldonado said on a recent morning when she had only 10 pills left and no money to pay for another month's supply. "I'm a responsible person. I've worked all my life. I never dreamed I could be in a situation like this.
"It just seems that every door that gets open gets shut again when I try to get help. How long can this go on?" - sanluisobispo.com

the aftermath -Wayne Madsen reports:
January 10, 2006 -- New Orleans: What the media is not reporting and what Congress and the Bush administration are ignoring. Yesterday, two New Orleans journalists, Jason Berry, who writes for New Orleans magazine, and Lolis Eric Elie, columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about the real nature of the situation in New Orleans and surrounding parishes.
The picture they painted of the city is sobering. Only some 100,000 people, out of a total population of 467,000, have returned to New Orleans, just a month and a half before the famous Mardi Gras celebrations. However, the national media and their corporate friends in the urban development business, will paint New Orleans during the next Mardi Gras celebration on February 28 as a city coming back from disaster. Nothing could be further from the truth.
On November 24, 2005, WMR reported, "Florida mental health professionals report that hundreds of evacuees scattered along the Florida Panhandle are ticking time bombs due to the effects of post traumatic stress syndrome from both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita." In addition, WMR reported, "These people are from all walks of life, professionals like doctors and lawyers and those who were from the lower end of the economic scale," related one source close to the scene in Florida. He added, "what they have in common is that they've lost everything, including the will to live." Mental health workers say that some of the evacuees are showing signs that may result in suicides and murder-suicides."
Without regular telephones and dealing with unresponsive insurance companies, New Orleaneans and their neighbors in adjoining parishes are living in a "cell phone hell" and experiencing an insurance mudslide, according to Berry.
According to the two New Orleans journalists, post traumatic stress syndrome is taking its toll on people from all walks of life in the storm-ravaged area of the Gulf Coast. Filmmaker Stevenson Palfi, whose credits include, "Piano Players Rarely Play Together," committed suicide on Dec. 14, after having lost most of his property and possessions in Katrina.
Dr. James Kent Treadway, a well-known pediatrician in the Uptown district, also committed suicide in his damaged house on November 16. An increase in suicides is being reported from St. Tammany Parish and incidents of murder-suicides are also increasing among evacuees in Louisiana and Texas. In fact, today, psychoanalysis is one of the few booming businesses in New Orleans.
The final death count from Katrina may never be known. Many people were washed out to open waters. There is no one to claim the bodies of the elderly and indigent.
There is a profound sense of abandonment in New Orleans. FEMA has still not started moving transitional housing trailers into the city, preferring to leave residents scattered across the country in evacuation locations. Republican Mississippi received five times as much in Federal aid per household than Louisiana.
The two journalists reported that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin muzzled themselves after at first criticizing Bush because the president threatened them with abandonment unless they stopped their criticism of the Federal response. They are apparently petrified of Bush after he threatened them with no assistance.
Berry pointed out that when Hurricane Betsy struck Louisiana in 1965, Democratic Senator Russell Long called President Lyndon Johnson and said, "My people are suffering." Johnson quickly summoned Long to board Air Force One and they flew from Washington to New Orleans where Johnson personally met with the affected people, black and white, rich and poor. On the other hand, Bush's trip to New Orleans was a publicity stunt punctuated with photo ops with carefully screened evacuees.
People in Louisiana who are trying to pay mortgages on destroyed property are going bankrupt and have little protection for the new bankruptcy law passed by the Congress and pushed by George W. Bush. FEMA assistance is handed out randomly, according to a FEMA official in New Orleans.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans is talking about closing half its churches in New Orleans, including some historical churches like St. Augustine, home to the Tomb of the Unknown Slave and the second oldest African-American Catholic church in the United States.
The Army Corps of Engineers is still not doing anything on stopping the loss of the coastal littoral. Before Katrina, Louisiana lost some 40 miles of coastline over the last three decades. Congress has only appropriated $200 million for a coastal restoration study when $14 billion is required for coastal restoration and another $25 billion is needed for Category 5 hurricane levee preparation.
In what may be a deal with the devil, Republican Rep. Richard Baker's Recovery Corporation Bill would buy out destroyed properties from their owners and resell them to exploitative developers. The situation on land re-development is all the more ominous considering that some 300,000 indebted residents are no longer in New Orleans. And in a sign of the times, Nagin and Blanco are not the most important people involved in New Orleans' future. That honorific goes to Joe Canizaro, the head of First Bank & Trust and New Orleans most important real estate developers. New Orleans is now suffering under the dictatorship of competing re-development committees.
Bush's rhetoric about the improving national economy rings hollow in New Orleans. New Orleans and the Gulf remain indelible and shameful stains on Bush's otherwise dismal record of leadership and compassion. - wayne madsen report.com

Dutch barriers built in 1953... That's 53 years ago...why only consider it now?

U.S. officials learn from Dutch flood expertise
By Reed Stevenson DELFT, Netherlands, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Officials from Louisiana, visiting the Netherlands in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, hailed Dutch know-how on Thursday and said they still had much to learn to prevent future flood disasters.
"We feel we've benefited from centuries of expertise," said Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who, with a group of engineers, academics and businessmen from the U.S. state, toured Dutch flood control and water management systems this week.
"Clearly, we have a lot of work ahead," she added.
The U.S. government has committed about $3.1 billion to strengthen the New Orleans levees but views still vary on how to rebuild flood protection systems, strengthen against future storm surges and restore and protect wetlands and coastal areas.
The Dutch stressed -- and their U.S. counterparts agreed -- that short-term measures would not protect low-lying lands from storms such as the two Category 5 hurricanes that devastated New Orleans, the Mississippi marshes and Louisiana coast last year.
"Treat water in a mature way," said Johan van der Burg, vice president of the Regional Water Authority of Delfland, an area inhabited by 1.4 million people near the southwest coast. "When nature is too strong, we prepare," he said.
At least 1,300 people in Louisiana were killed and one million displaced by Hurricane Katrina, while tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed.
MISERY OF 1953
After suffering a similar calamity in 1953, when a massive North Sea storm breached the famed Dutch dikes in more than 450 places along the southwest coast, the Dutch spent nearly $15 billion over the next five decades improving flood defences. More than 1,800 people were killed in "the Misery of 1953", and in a vast engineering operation called the Delta Project, huge dikes were built and a complex system of flood gates was designed to keep the sea at bay.
One system alone, the Maeslant storm surge barrier, cost $700 million to build and was completed only in 1997.
The Louisiana visitors said they were struck by how the Dutch were constantly aware of the threat to their land and their lives with the full knowledge that nearly two-thirds of the country was below sea level.
"I was impressed...the government spends time on constantly educating the public," Landrieu said. Landrieu said she was planning another trip in March or April, and her Republican counterpart, Sen. David Vitter, said he was planning to introduce a bill that could call for a nine-member water control committee.
The Dutch reminded their visitors repeatedly that long-term thinking was crucial to preventing flood disasters, that they themselves are working on plans to cope with rising sea levels, sinking land and increased rainfall.
Some new ideas include giving land back to the sea, creating flood plains and building floating buildings, roads and farms.
"Our country may seem relatively safe," said Boudewijn van Eenennaam, Dutch ambassador to the United States, "But the Dutch can never be safe." - alertnet.org

where will the poor live?

On hurricane-wrecked Gulf Coast, dreams of new kind of American city
1/21/2006 - PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. (AP) -
Dreams of the future here are just sketches: Friendly streets lined with a welcoming mix of homes, stores and sidewalks. Neighborhood parks for play, picnics and a shady respite from the Southern sun. A bustling waterfront.
Reality lies on the ground, for mile upon mile of this hurricane-blasted stretch of Gulf Coast, a mess of splintered homes, flattened trees and tent cities housing hundreds still homeless nearly five months after Katrina.
Many people are neck-deep in that reality, scratching for the basics of meals, shelter and a job. But a high-powered group of community leaders, elected officials and architects are busily hammering out an ambitious framework for what could come next - to rebuild the entire 80-mile stretch of Mississippi's coast in a way that could produce a new model for small towns.
They are creating a test case for a different vision of America, one that seeks to turn away from the suburbs of the past half-century and instead embrace an idealized life of small towns and compact cities. It aims to resurrect the best of the past - evening promenades, neighborhood groceries, even trolleys - with the promise of the future's technology, jobs and transportation.
The ideas come from architects who call themselves New Urbanists - a group committed to the idea that smaller, walkable communities work better. They emphasize densely built downtowns with thriving Main Streets, neighborhoods that mix commerce and homes, a range of transportation options and a style that relies on a region's history. They spurn suburbs and sprawl.
"You don't want to call it a blessing, but it is a chance," said Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape president and a Mississippi native who heads the state rebuilding commission. "You need hope and a sense of place. These ideas have provided that. They seem to be resonating with an awful lot of people out here."
There are plenty of doubts - about the costs, jobs, casino gambling and the return of the poor and minorities who have built homes here. And many architects say the New Urbanists' vision is unrealistic for some towns. But leaders here are pushing for change, and quickly, hoping to jump-start Mississippi's rebuilding while arguments have left New Orleans hamstrung.
Elected leaders, newspaper publishers and developers are enthusiastically backing the proposals. Residents are still learning about the ideas. But what will determine the real shape of rebuilding here will come together through the incremental, unflashy steps of local government and private development, from building codes and road plans to housing blueprints.
The proposals came together remarkably quickly. Katrina hit Aug. 29, and while much of the nation's attention focused on the tragedies in New Orleans, the devastation in Mississippi was sweeping. Fewer people died here, but the storm's fiercest winds and waters flattened the cities of Bay St. Louis, Waveland and Pass Christian. Devastation was tremendous farther east, too, in Biloxi, Gulfport and Ocean Springs.
Within days of the storm, rebuilding talks were shaping up. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour welcomed a rebuilding proposal from one of the most prominent of the New Urbanist architects, Miami-based Andres Duany. Separately, Barbour moved quickly to allow the coast's casinos to rebuild on land, eliminating an earlier requirement that they must be on the water.
In mid-October, scores of architects from around the world met for a six-day meeting at a ravaged casino in Biloxi. Working with local architects and community leaders, they examined the damage and weighed each of 11 communities' mix of residences, business, transportation and history.
They produced 11 individual plans tailored to each town. Overall, they aimed to create more transportation options, strengthen each community's downtown and build a network of neighborhoods. Each town will choose what pieces to put in play.
Among the bigger proposals:
- Put a beachfront boulevard in place of Highway 90, a busy waterfront road that runs the entire coast. Cars would share space with people, with a median, trees and others ways to lure pedestrians, with hopes for evening promenades.
- Move freight-train lines that run close to the coast miles farther away, north of Interstate 10, and turn the rail lines into mass transit, or bike paths.
- Better utilize the waterfront for a range of uses - for ferry service, water taxis, for recreation as well as for working shrimpers.
"It's always about community, it's always about walkability, it's always about diversity of use and people," Duany said. The idea is for people to live closer together and rely less on cars, with less sprawl and less traffic. "The lifestyle of the American middle class is the greatest environmental problem of the world."
California architect Laura Hall, who led the work in Pass Christian, said that tackling the entire coast of Mississippi will give the country the best example yet of how well New Urbanism works. "It's a huge turning point for the country to be able to see this on such a huge scale. It's taken us 20 years to get to this point."
The designers turn to old postcards of the coast of 75 or 100 years ago to help carry their message to residents. The faded images of old rail stations, dusty storefronts and beach scenes seem to capture the neighborliness and mix of residences and businesses they're trying to recreate.
The embrace of their effort in Mississippi has spurred interest among officials in several Louisiana cities, though not New Orleans.
It's also stirred up a simmering backlash among other architects, who say New Urbanists, while correct in building denser cities where people can walk, produce a "one-size-fits-all" model that confines its solutions to the past and isn't open to new ideas.
"This is a very conservative, very waspy ideology," said Reed Kroloff, dean of the Tulane University School of Architecture and head of a New Orleans rebuilding committee. "There's no doubt that a fair amount of New Urbanist principles have found their way into the embrace of the American right. ... They call themselves neo-traditionalists. Neo-traditionalists and neo-conservatives make a very happy marriage."
For the people on the Gulf Coast, however, architectural arguments are a long way off.
In Pass Christian, Philip LaGrange said he'd seen the plans but had little faith in them, given the slow pace of reconstruction so far.
"They're a viable vision, but they're not realistic unless people and money come in from outside areas. They're all expecting a major influx of outside developers," said LaGrange, who's spent every day trying to rebuild his beachfront bed-and-breakfast, The Blue Rose. He said the federal government so far hasn't shown itself willing to spend the money to bring the region back - and developers won't come until the feds do.
In Biloxi's low-lying eastern edge, floodwaters left block after block of tumbled-down homes where a thriving community of Vietnamese had settled. The plans would leave much of that area alone.
"I don't 100 percent reject the city plan, but I ask - the city should find a way to adjust the situation to help the poor people," said Father Dong Phan, head of the Vietnamese Martyrs Church.
In Ocean Springs, new Mayor Connie Moran loved the design plans. But she has been frustrated by state transportation officials' plan to more than double the size of the bridge across Biloxi Bay, from the four-lane span left in pieces by the storm to a six-lane bridge with four breakdown lanes.
Moran warns it will fuel more traffic and overwhelm plans in her town for a waterfront of shops, restaurants and water taxis.
"We have an opportunity to do it right," Moran said. "Finally we'll have joggers and people with baby strollers and people in wheelchairs who won't have to dodge traffic. ... (The bridge) turns our small town into a speedway to Biloxi."
A few blocks away, Chris Marie Logan tends bar each night and supports her two young boys. Her home is the only one of nine left inhabitable on her block. She hasn't heard much about the plans her mayor is so enthusiastic about, but is worried about big casinos and big development.
"Too slick, too many people" is her worry. She doesn't understand why there's all this talk about change anyway: "I just want it to stay the same as it was."
On the Web: - http://www.governorscommission.com/
- wpmi.com

Hey! this sounds eeriliy remeniscant that 911 probe

Government 'blocks' Katrina probe
25th Jan 2006 - The White House is crippling a Senate inquiry into the US government's response to Hurricane Katrina, senators leading the investigation have said. Democrat Joseph Lieberman, a member of the Senate panel, said warnings about the risk Katrina posed to New Orleans had been ignored. He accused the White House of being unwilling to hand over documents which might explain why no action was taken.
A White House spokesman insisted the administration was co-operating fully.
Homeland Security Committee senators said agency officials had refused to answer questions about times and dates of meetings and telephone calls with the White House. "No-one believes the government acted adequately," Senator Lieberman said. "We can't put a story together if people feel they are under a gag order from the White House."
The committee's Republican chairwoman, Sen Susan Collins, echoed his criticism of the government. While some of the president's communications were covered by executive privilege, the administration had gone too far in restricting information about who phoned whom on what day, she said.
Sen Collins has previously criticised the initial response to Katrina as "sluggish" and unco-ordinated.
'Uncomfortable prospect'
A White House spokesman said the administration was committed to working with investigators but it had a responsibility to protect the confidentiality of the president's advisers. "The ability to get advice from advisers on a confidential basis is a critical need for any US president and that is continuing to influence how we cooperate with the committees," spokesman Trent Duffy said.
The BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington says the final report, which will be published in March, is likely to make uncomfortable reading for the administration. - BBC

FEMA

Controversy Swirls Around Louisiana Reconstruction Plan
By Martin H. Bosworth - ConsumerAffairs.Com - January 29, 2006
A House Republican's sweeping plan to effect large-scale reconstruction in the areas of Louisiana devastated by Katrina has run into a formidable roadblock -- opposition from the official in charge of the Gulf Coast recovery. Congressman Richard Baker's (R-Baton Rouge) H.R. 4100, the "Baker Bill," would create a corporation to buy out damaged or flooded properties in the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana, thus enabling the owners to pay off their mortgages and avoid foreclosure.
The Louisiana Recovery Corporation would then sell the properties to developers for rebuilding, with right of first refusal going to the former homeowners." The corporation would be funded by bonds backed by the U.S. Treasury.
But Donald Powell, Gulf Coast recovery chairman, is opposing the Baker bill. Calling it a "needless layer of bureaucracy," Powell said that grants already approved by Congress would be sufficient to fund the rebuilding effort. "I think it is a much better approach (than the Baker bill), a more direct approach," Powell told the New Orleans Times-Picayuna. "It puts the process in the hands of the local people. It doesn't put government in the real estate business."
"Biggest Land Grab in History"
Baker's plan -- and, for that matter, Baker himself -- comes with no small amount of controversy. In the first days after Hurricane Katrina, Baker was alleged to have said, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Baker issued a lengthy press release claiming he was misquoted. Baker's bill has been criticized as a disguised attempt to favor the mortgage industry by bailing local lenders out with government money, rather than incurring major losses from foreclosure of the destroyed property.
Opponents of the bill point to language that claims the homeowners will receive 60 percent of the home's equity, rather than 60 percent of the land's actual fair market value. Many homeowners might be persuaded to take a quick buyout of homes that have been so badly damaged as to be irreparable, rather than face years of mortgage payments on property they can no longer use. Pointing to Baker's history as a real estate developer, one blogger called the bill "the biggest land grab in history."
Slow Recovery
On the other hand, the Baker bill has been touted as the closest thing to a real solution to Louisiana's post-Katrina woes, particularly in light of complex and slow-moving efforts by the federal government to effect reconstruction. Costs for emergency housing for the displaced have doubled or tripled-costs for trailers, for instance, have skyrocketed from $19,000 to $75,000, according to the Washington Post.
Lack of oversight governing the cleanup has enabled unscrupulous contractors to quadruple costs for debris removal. The various authorities involved in the recovery are entangled in bureaucratic snafus and an inability to do very much of anything.
Critics of the federal recovery guidance, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), called the White House's opposition to the Baker bill an example of "a continued lack of understanding for the magnitude of the devastation and the immense rebuilding task our state faces."
Supporters of the Baker bill say that Powell's reliance on block grants supports homeowners at the exclusion of renters, who do not have as much recourse in the event of losing their residences due to natural disaster.
Relying on federal flood insurance or grants may encourage New Orleans residents to simply rebuild where they live, which may lead to renewed destruction in the event of another hurricane or flood, or leaving the homeowners in possession of essentially worthless land.
Powell has encouraged property owners to seek assistance from agencies such as the Small Business Administration (SBA), but both the SBA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been criticized for not processing loan applications quickly enough, not providing correct information to applicants, and for continually changing the procedures for getting loans.
Baker has vowed to keep his bill alive, and will push for its support when it comes up for debate by the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee on Feb. 15th. "Bills have been passed before without presidential approval," Baker said. - consumeraffairs.com

FEMA

Papers: FEMA Passed Up Available Equipment
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30, 2006(AP) As Hurricane Katrina victims waited for help in flooded houses or in looted neighborhoods, hundreds of trucks, boats, planes and federal security officers sat unused because FEMA failed to give them missions, newly released documents show.
Additionally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency called off its search and rescue operations in Louisiana three days after the Aug. 29 storm because of security issues, according to an internal FEMA e-mail given to Senate investigators.
The documents, expected to be the focus of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Monday, highlight further evidence of FEMA's inadequate response to Katrina. They also detail breakdowns in carrying out the National Response Plan, which was issued a year ago specifically to coordinate response efforts during disasters.
The Homeland Security Department, which includes FEMA, did not dispute the failures Sunday. Katrina "pushed our capabilities and resources to the limit _ and then some," said spokesman Russ Knocke.
Responding to a questionnaire posed by investigators, Assistant Interior Secretary P. Lynn Scarlett said her agency offered to supply FEMA with 300 dump trucks and other vehicles, 300 boats, 11 aircraft and 400 law enforcement officers to help search and rescue efforts.
"Although the (Interior) Department possesses significant resources that could have improved initial and ongoing response, many of these resources were not effectively incorporated into the federal response for Hurricane Katrina," Scarlett wrote in the response, dated Nov. 7. Scarlett added: "Although we attempted to provide these assets through the process established by the (response plan), we were unable to efficiently integrate and deploy those resources."
At one point, Scarlett's letter noted, FEMA asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help with search and rescue in New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish and St. Tammany Parish "but never received task assignments."
The agency, part of the Interior Department, apparently went ahead anyway, according to the letter, which said that Fish and Wildlife helped rescue 4,500 people in the first week after Katrina. Other Interior resources that were offered, but unused, included flat-bottom boats for shallow-water rescues. "Clearly these assets and skills were precisely relevant in the post-Katrina environment," Scarlett wrote.
Knocke, the Homeland Security spokesman, said up to 60,000 federal employees were sent to the Gulf Coast to response to Katrina. However, he said, "experience has shown that FEMA was not equipped with 21st century capabilities, and that is what (Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff) has committed as one of our top priorities going forward."
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate committee that released the documents before the hearing, called them "the most candid assessment that we've received from any federal agency." "Here we have another federal department offering skilled personnel and the exact kinds of assets that were so desperately needed in the Gulf region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and there no response that we can discern from FEMA," Collins said in an interview Sunday. "That is incredible to me."
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the committee's senior Democrat, said the documents underscore "an outrage on top of an outrage." Lieberman and Collins both said they also were dismayed by an internal FEMA e-mail, dated Sept. 1, calling a halt to search and rescue task force efforts in Louisiana.
"All assets have ceased operation until National Guard can assist TFs (task forces) with security," said the e-mail, sent from FEMA headquarters.
Knocke said the halt was likely the result of looting, rioting and other security concerns in New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit. He said he did not know whether FEMA suspended its search and rescue missions indefinitely or just temporarily on Sept.1, and that this would be determined in the department's own review of the response.
But Lieberman said the e-mail shows that FEMA "left early," noting that response personnel from the Coast Guard, and other federal, state and local agencies continued looking for storm victims for days after.
"This is shocking and without explanation," he said.
The documents were among 800,000 pages of memos, e-mails, plans and other papers gathered by investigators for the Senate committee, which plans to issue a report of its findings in March.
Lieberman last week accused the White House of hindering the inquiry by barring some staffers from answering investigators' questions. Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett maintained Sunday that the Bush administration would not give up specific internal documents or information from top advisers that might inhibit the separation of powers in the government.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the federal government will spend "well over $100 billion" to help rebuild the still-reeling Gulf Coast. The government has so far committed about $85 billion, including $67 billion in direct spending approved by Congress.
CBS News

'What else could happen?'; airport sees more damage than during Katrina

Two twisters hit parts of New Orleans
The Associated Press Updated: 3:15 p.m. ET Feb. 2, 2006
KENNER, La. - Two tornadoes early Thursday tore through New Orleans neighborhoods that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina just five months earlier, collapsing at least one previously damaged house and battering the airport, authorities said. Roofs were ripped off and utility poles came down, but no serious injuries were reported.
"Don't ever ask the question, 'What else could happen?"' said Marcia Paul Leone, a mortgage banker who was surveying the new damage to her Katrina-flooded home. She would go no farther than the front porch of her house Thursday morning. Windows were blown out, and the building appeared to be leaning. "I've been in the mortgage business for 20 years. I know when something's unsafe," she said.
Electricity was knocked out for most of the morning at Louis Armstrong International Airport, grounding passenger flights and leaving travelers to wait in a dimly lit terminal powered by generators. The storm also ripped off part of a concourse roof, slammed one jetway into another, and flipped motorized runway luggage carts.
"Everything's still backed up and the whole day is going to be messed up," airport spokeswoman Michelle Duffourc said after power returned midday. "There's more damage to the terminal than I saw during the hurricane," she added.
A line of severe thunderstorms moved across the area around 2:30 a.m. Tim Destri, of the National Weather Service, said it appeared the damage was caused by two tornadoes, one that hit the airport and another that moved into New Orleans. The storm collapsed at least one house in New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged lakefront, police said.
"I cannot believe this. We were hit twice. It's not bad enough we got 11 feet of water," said Maria Kay Chetta, a city grants manager. While her own home was not badly damaged, one across the street lost its roof and another had heavy damage to its front.
Police spokesman Capt. Juan Quinton, who lived in that area, said that gutters were ripped off his already flood-damaged house and that toppled trees blocked the alley behind his house. A federal trailer was pulled off its moorings and plumbing hookups, he said."It's an act of God and there's nothing we can do about it, so I just don't worry about it anymore," Quinton said.
The wind also blew down a radio tower near a major thoroughfare, authorities said. msnbc.

White House 'warned of levee breach'
By Andrei Postelnicu in New York - Published: February 10 2006
The White House was alerted of a breach in the New Orleans levee system on the night Hurricane Katrina struck the city, a former Bush administration official told US senators on Friday. The testimony from Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to a Senate committee clashes with White House statements that the administration had been taken by surprise by the levee failure. Mr Brown, told the Senate's homeland security committee that he told Joseph Hagin, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, about the levee breach on the night of August 29th, as Katrina made landfall on New Orleans.
"I think I told him we were realising our worst nightmares," Mr Brown said. In response to inquiries about the president's awareness of the situation, Mr Brown said he thought "If I've told Joe Hagin or [chief of staff] Andy Card, I've told the president".
White House officials have said they did not know about the levee breach and subsequent flooding of New Orleans until the morning of Tuesday, August 30th. The Bush administration has come under sharp criticism for the delays in getting emergency supplies into New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath.
"For them [the White House] to claim that we didn't have awareness of it is just baloney," Mr Brown said.
The former official, who resigned less than two weeks after Katrina struck amid uproar about the US government response to the hurricane, also told lawmakers that he often bypassed Michael Chertoff, his boss at the Department of Homeland Security in favour of talking directly to the White House.
The revelations come as a five-month investigation into the hurricane response revealed in detail the chain of events that saw images of mosrly poor and black Americans in distress in a crippled city. A Fema official who was in New Orleans emailed his supervisors in Washington to say conditions "are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting", investigators found.
Mr Brown said that going through the chain of command at the homeland security department "would have been a waster of time". The department, which was created following the September 11th terrorist attacks, was "was an additional bureaucracy that was going to slow me down even more, and the way I got around that was dealing directly with the White House".
The remarks atracted retorts from senators describing the situation as "dysfunctional". While some admitted the "structural" deficiencies of the new department, they accused Mr Brown of a leadership failure which, combined with the structure, became a "perfect storm".
Mr Brown, whose appointment without obvious qualifications for the Fema job brought the White House under attack, sought to defend his record at the agency by mentioning previous responses to California wildfires and the crash of a space shuttle.
He told senators he was "sick and tired of emails taken out of context". ft.com

Police chief wants surveillance cameras in Houston apartments
HOUSTON Houston's police chief is suggesting putting surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets and even private homes.
Chief Harold Hurtt today said it's another way of combatting crime amid a shortage of officers.Houston is dealing with too many police retirements, too few recruits and a population increase of about 150-thousand hurricane refugees.Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf coast in late August.Rita hit southeast Texas about one month later.The Houston City Council is considering a public safety tax to pay for more officers.Scott Henson with the American Civil Liberties Union calls Hurtt's proposal to require surveillance cameras as part of some building permits -- "radical and extreme."Houston Mayor Bill White hasn't talked with Hurtt about his idea, but sees it as more of a "brainstorm" than a "decision." - kten.com/

Video Shows Blanco Saying Levees Intact
BY LARA JAKES JORDAN and MARGARET EBRAHIM, Associated Press Writers - 3 March 2006
WASHINGTON - As Hurricane Katrina loomed over the Gulf Coast, federal and state officials agonized over the threat to levees and lives. Hours after the catastrophic storm hit, Louisiana's governor believed New Orleans' crucial floodwalls were still intact.
"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29 - the day the storm hit the Gulf coast. "We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee," she said on a video of the day's disaster briefing that was obtained Thursday night by The Associated Press. "I think we have not breached the levee at this time."
In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House's formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck. Not until the day after Katrina roared ashore did the White House confirm that its surge had, in fact, breached the levees - a delay that critics charge held up repair efforts and allowed the deadly flooding to worsen.
The rampant confusion is highlighted in the two Federal Emergency Management Agency video briefings, obtained this week by the AP, revealing disaster plans and damage reports detailed by officials as the storm smashed into the coast. The tapes - and particularly the pre-storm Aug. 28 video that includes an appearance by President Bush - prompted widespread criticism by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike who said the government should have been better prepared for the storm that flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.
That video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable," Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said Thursday. "It was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. That's what made the failures in response - at the local, state and federal level - all the more outrageous."
After AP's broadcast this week showing some of the Katrina briefings, the Homeland Security Department refused Thursday to release videos from five other days immediately before and after Katrina hit. The agency insisted last year - in response to AP's requests under the Freedom of Information Act - there were no such tapes. Now it acknowledges more tapes exist.
"We do have tapes," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We have the tapes from the v-tels (video teleconferences), and we've provided the transcripts - they've been in the public domain for months."
In the Aug. 29 video, Blanco is not shown in the video but is heard as a disembodied voice speaking from an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., to 11 people sitting around a table at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. She sounds uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation "could change."
Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said Thursday that "our people on the ground were telling us that there could be overtopping and breaching, but it was hard to tell" by the noon briefing.
Another official who was heard but not seen on the video was then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, who was at the federal emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La. He implored officials to "push the envelope as far as you can," noting that he had already spoken to Bush twice that day and described the president as "very, very interested in this situation."
Brown has criticized the White House for miscommunications that led to some delays. But he said in an interview Thursday he never blamed Bush. He also said there was confusion among officials over whether levees were breached at the time of the noon video conference call. But he said he was convinced of the breach by 1 p.m.
The video shows weather forecasters predicting the storm's path and also briefly cuts to White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin asking Blanco about the status of the levees and the situation at the Superdome in New Orleans.
By that time, an estimated 15,000 evacuees had gathered at the stadium, where food and water was beginning to run out, said Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director. Smith also reported up to 10 feet of flooding in neighboring St. Bernard Parish and that there were 45 patients on life-support at one area hospital that lost its power.
Still, "the coordination and support we are getting from FEMA has just been outstanding," Smith said.
Mississippi officials were less complimentary, reporting significant damage to hospitals, flooded and collapsed emergency operations centers and people trapped on the roofs or in the attacks who were begging for help.
The Homeland Security Department played down the new video. Knocke said it "reveals nothing new because the transcript had previously been released."
The new video came to light a day after the AP obtained footage of an Aug. 28 briefing - the day before Katrina hit - that showed officials warning the storm might breach levees, put lives at risk in the Superdome and overwhelm rescuers. Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were among those on the videotaped call.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said it "confirms what we have suspected all along," charging that Bush administration officials have "systematically misled the American people."
Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California renewed their calls for an independent commission to investigate the federal response to the hurricane. The House and Senate have conducted separate investigations of the federal response, and the White House did its own investigation. - yahoo.com

Interior Secretary Gale Norton Resigns
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer , 11 march 2006 - WASHINGTON - Interior Secretary Gale Norton resigned Friday after five years of guiding the Bush administration's initiative to open government lands in the West to more oil and gas drilling, logging, grazing and commercial recreation.
Norton, the first woman to lead the Interior Department in its 157-year history, told President Bush in a letter she intends to leave at the end of March, saying she hoped to eventually return to the mountains of the West.
"Now I feel it is time for me to leave this mountain you gave me to climb, catch my breath, then set my sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector," she said in the two-page resignation letter.
She leaves at a time when a major lobbying scandal involving Indian gaming licenses that required her consent looms over her agency, but there has never been any suggestion of wrongdoing on her part. Norton is the first member of Bush's Cabinet to leave in well over a year - when there was a substantial makeover in agency chiefs immediately following the president's 2004 re-election to a second term.
A day shy of her 52nd birthday, Norton emphasized in her resignation letter to Bush and in her remarks to reporters that her reasons for leaving were entirely personal. She said she hadn't done any job-searching, adding she wanted to spend more time with her husband, John, and take time for recreational pursuits like skiing.
"This is really a question of accomplishing the goals that I set out do here and wanting to return to having a private life again," she said. In her letter to Bush, she recalled releasing into the wild an injured bald eagle that had been nursed back to health by a local wildlife group. "It was amazing to hold the eagle in my arms, then launch him skyward and see his mighty wings carry him back to freedom," she said.
Norton said she, too, sought freedom.
"I'm looking forward to visiting a national park without holding a press conference there," she said. "I'm looking forward to enjoying the wide-open spaces again."
Her communications director, Tina Kreisher, said Norton had decided she wanted to step down as interior secretary last year, just before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf coast. "When Katrina and Rita hit, she felt a responsibility to stay on," Kreisher said.
Bush called Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, a strong advocate for "the wise use and protection of our nation's natural resources." "When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, she played a leading role in my administration's efforts to restore badly needed offshore energy production," he said.
As one of the architects of Bush's energy policy, Norton eased regulations to speed approval of oil and gas drilling permits, particularly in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming's Powder River Basin. In her first three years, the pace of drilling permits issued by Interior's Bureau of Land Management rose 70 percent. She also was the administration's biggest advocate for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope to oil drilling, areas considered sensitive for caribou and other wildlife.
"We have improved the ways we are protecting wildlife in ways that energy development is responsible," she said Friday. "We spent billions of dollars in improving wildlife habitat and otherwise restoring the environment.
Many environmentalists and Democrats have been sharply critical of her stewardship of public lands.
"Gale Norton was an unpopular symbol of unpopular policies," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "Americans do not believe their public lands should be sold to the highest bidder, and they don't believe in privatizing their parks, forests, monuments. While the symbol of those unpopular policies may be leaving, we don't expect those unpopular policies to change."
But others, such as the Nature Conservancy's president, Steve McCormick, praised her for working as close partners in creating Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park, the new Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota and the Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area in Montana.
Norton led the Bush administration's push for "cooperative conservation" - shifting more of the responsibility for land management and recovery of endangered species to states and local communities. The Interior Department oversees the government's ownership of one-fifth of the nation's land.
Sen. Bill Nelson (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., said Friday he will attempt to block any successor who supports the department's current plans to open a 200-million-acre area in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to new oil and gas drilling.
Until Bush appoints a successor, Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett will take the helm of the agency.
Norton was a protege of James Watt, the controversial interior secretary during President Reagan's first term in office. Watt was forced to resign after characterizing a coal commission in terms that were viewed by some as a slur. Before joining the administration, Norton was one of the negotiators of a $206 billion national tobacco settlement in a suit by Colorado and 45 other states. She was Colorado's attorney general from 1991 to 1999. In 1996, she sought the Republican Senate nomination in Colorado but was defeated by Wayne Allard, who now holds the seat. Later she co-founded the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a group that has become embroiled in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to federal felony charges related to congressional influence peddling and defrauding Indian tribes in Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas of millions of dollars. The tribes were either seeking casino licenses or trying to prevent other tribes from opening competing casinos. In e-mail exchanges that have been made public since his plea, Abramoff mentioned having an inside track at the Interior Department, and his clients donated heavily to the advocacy group Norton helped establish. Steven Griles, Norton's former deputy, had a close relationship with Abramoff, according to several e-mail exchanges that are now the subject of investigations by a Senate committee and the Justice Department.
Norton briefly defended Griles on Friday. "I know that Steve Griles was a great asset for this department and what I saw of his conduct was aboveboard and very conscientious," she said.
Norton met Abramoff in her office at least once and attended a dinner at which he was present, but aides have described the meetings as nonsubstantive. Kreisher added Friday: "The decisions in this building did not go Abramoff's way." - news.yahoo.com

FEMA Releases Katrina, Rita Clean Up Numbers
FEMA continues its long-term hurricane recovery efforts in partnership with the State of Louisiana.
Below is a `by the numbers` progress update as of March 8, 2006, six months following Hurricane Katrina and five months after Hurricane Rita.
2-Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were two of the most intense hurricanes ever recorded during the Atlantic Hurricane Season, both making landfall in Louisiana.
Both Katrina and Rita intensified to Category 5 storms while in the Gulf Coast before making landfall as Category 3 storms.
Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29 and Rita followed almost one month later on Sept. 23.
523-To date 523 vessels, under a federally funded mission assignment by FEMA, have been removed by the U.S. Coast Guard.
2,997-There are 2,997 federal housing units occupied by hurricane evacuees in the State of Louisiana alone.
Federal housing or housing vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and others were offered to displaced hurricane victims.
9,242-The U.S. Small Business Administration has approved 9,242 businesses for disaster assistance loans. Total: $833.6 million.
49,000-FEMA`s Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, working in the immediate response and for a record number of days into the recovery, provided care to 49,000 patients.
The teams gave 65,000 immunizations and provided crisis counseling to 5,800 individuals, as well as other medical services. Crisis counseling continues today through state programs reimbursed by FEMA.
55,650-LA Swift, the free emergency bus system between Baton Rouge and New Orleans for displaced residents, has served 55,650 passengers. It has operated seven daily round trips since October 31, 2005.
81,241-More than 81,000 damaged roofs that have been temporarily covered under FEMA`s "Blue Roof" program, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The program allows families to remain in their homes as they rebuild.
692,749-More than 692,749 Louisiana residents have been served by FEMA`s Disaster Recovery Centers (DRCs) located in the state.
DRC`s are one-stop information centers where victims can learn more about state and federal disaster assistance available to them, including loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) for homeowners, renters and business owners. Currently, 18 DRCs are operating in the state, down from a peak of 89 DRCs.
1.4 million-FEMA has completed more than 1.4 million housing inspections in Louisiana.
The inspection process includes a complete overview for structural damage.
The inspector will record all disaster-related damages to the home.
A survey of damaged personal property, clothing and vehicles may also be conducted.
36 million-The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with private contractors working for some Louisiana Parishes, have removed 36 million cubic yards of debris.
$164 million-FEMA approved $164 million in unemployment assistance for 108,000 eligible hurricane victims in Louisiana who signed up during the application period.
$1.1 billion-In Louisiana, individual assistance totaling more than $1.1 billion has been distributed for Other Needs Assistance. This program provides assistance for serious, disaster-related needs to impacted individuals, such as dental, transportation replacement costs, and other serious needs.
$1.4 billion-More than $1.4 billion in federal dollars has already been allocated for Public Assistance (PA) projects, such as debris removal and emergency services in Louisiana, equaling the amount allocated for PA grants in Florida in the eight months following four hurricanes that hit the state in the 2004 hurricane season.
$3.7 billion-The SBA has approved more than $3.7 billion in disaster assistance loans to 451,147 business owners, homeowners and renters in Louisiana.
$3.5 billion-FEMA has paid out $3.5 billion in financial housing assistance to Louisiana victims, in the form of rental assistance and home repair reimbursement grants.
$4.6 billion-FEMA has provided more than $4.6 billion directly to Louisiana victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita for housing and other needs assistance through the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). This is more than the $1.2 billion used for IHP after last year`s Florida hurricanes.
$12.1 billion-To date, FEMA has paid out $12.1 billion under the National Flood Insurance Program to policyholders in Louisiana. - newschannel6.tv/

Katrina disaster aid is not being used
The Associated Press WASHINGTON - Nearly $2 billion in federal disaster aid for Katrina evacuees is sitting unclaimed more than six months after lawmakers approved the emergency funding.
Congress approved a $2 billion block grant program in September for displaced Gulf Coast families - regardless of income - to help them get back on their feet after the Aug. 29 storm.
But only 11 states have made requests totaling $25.5 million in aid, according to the Health and Human Services Department. Several states said they didn’t want the bureaucratic hassle, or weren’t certain if displaced families qualified for aid under the program.
“The funds are there, and it’s deeply troubling they’re not being used,” said Mark Greenberg, executive director of the Task Force on Poverty at the Washington-based Center for American Progress. “These funds could be used right now to help families in tremendous need.”
It is unclear how many displaced families are missing out on the funds from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Several states say they are opting to provide assistance out of their own pockets. In other cases, families with higher incomes who are eligible aren’t seeking the aid.
About 420,000 families were displaced by the Gulf Coast hurricanes. About 50,000 were low-income families who generally aren’t eligible because they were already receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families aid before Katrina hit. - kansas city

New Orleans sinking faster than thought
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Wed May 31, 2006 WASHINGTON - yahoo.com
Everyone has known New Orleans is a sinking city. Now new research suggests parts of the city are sinking even faster than many scientists imagined - more than an inch a year.
That may explain some of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and it raises more worries about the future.
The research, reported in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.
"My concern is the very low-lying areas," said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. "I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt."
The blame for this phenomenon, called subsidence, includes overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts.
For years, scientists figured the city on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.
As the ground in those areas sinks, protection from levees also falls, scientists and engineers said.
For example, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, built more than three decades ago, has sunk by more than 3 feet since its construction, Dixon said, explaining why water poured over the levee and part of it failed.
"The people in St. Bernard got wiped out because the levee was too low," said co-author Roy Dokka, director of the Louisiana Spatial Center at Louisiana State University. "It's as simple as that."
The subsidence "is making the land more vulnerable; it's also screwed up our ability to figure out where the land is," Dokka said. And it means some evacuation roads, hospitals and shelters are further below sea level than emergency planners thought.
So when government officials talk of rebuilding levees to pre-Katrina levels, it may really still be several feet below what's needed, Dokka and others say.
"Levees that are subsiding at a high rate are prone to failure," Dixon said.
The federal government, especially the Army Corps of Engineers, hasn't taken the dramatic sinking into account in rebuilding plans, said University of Berkeley engineering professor Bob Bea, part of an independent National Academy of Sciences-Berkeley team that analyzed the levee failures during Katrina.
"You have to change how you provide short- and long-term protection," said Bea, a former engineer in New Orleans. He said plans for concrete walls don't make sense because they sink and can't be easily added onto. In California, engineers are experimenting with lighter weight, reinforced foam-middle levee walls, he said.
Dixon and his co-author Dokka disagree on the major causes of New Orleans' not-so-slow fall into the Gulf of Mexico. Dixon blames overdevelopment and drainage of marshlands, saying "all the problems are man-made; before people settled there in the 1700s, this area was at sea level."
But Dokka said much of the sinking is due to natural seismic shifts that have little to do with construction.
Dokka also thinks all is not completely lost. Smarter construction can buy New Orleans some time.
"We've made the pact with the devil by moving down here," he said. "If we do things right, we probably can get another 100-200-300 years out of this area."
The Army Corps of Engineers is adding extra height to earthen levees to compensate for sinking and is setting benchmark measurements of all levees for regular monitoring of how much they sink, corps spokesman Gene Pawlik said.
"It's something post-Katrina, we're much more focused on," Pawlik said Wednesday. "It's certainly an engineering challenge."