KATRINA/RITA, page 4

I ENCOURAGE ALL OF YOU TO READ NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES AND NEWS WEBSITES REGULARLY. STAY INFORMED!!!

=================
Brown's Turf Wars Sapped FEMA's Strength
Director Who Came to Symbolize Incompetence in Katrina Predicted Agency Would Fail

By Michael Grunwald and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post, December 23, 2005

On Sept. 15, 2003, one of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's deputies lobbed a bureaucratic hand grenade across his desk. In a seven-page memo, the new department's undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response told Ridge that his organizational plan would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters.

The memo, like so many that flew around Washington during the largest government reshuffling in decades, involved turf: Ridge had decided to move some of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's preparedness functions to an office less than one-fifteenth its size. The writer warned that the shift would make a mockery of FEMA's new motto, "A Nation Prepared," and would "fundamentally sever FEMA from its core functions," "shatter agency morale," and "break longstanding, effective and tested relationships with states and first responder stakeholders."

The inevitable result, he wrote, would be "an ineffective and uncoordinated response" to a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

The author was Michael D. Brown, who was FEMA's director as well as a Department of Homeland Security undersecretary. Two years later, Brown would lose both titles after Hurricane Katrina, when his prophecies of doom came true.

Katrina exposed FEMA as a dysfunctional organization, paralyzed in a crisis four years after the supposedly galvanizing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And it turned Brown -- a former executive of the International Arabian Horse Association who had no emergency management experience before joining the Bush administration -- into a symbol of government ineptitude. But Brown's well-chronicled gaffes in Louisiana had less impact on FEMA than his little-known power struggles in Washington. Brown lost almost all of them -- partly because he was widely despised at DHS for his relentless infighting -- and FEMA paid a price in money, manpower, missions and prestige.

In his first extensive interview about FEMA's chaotic integration into DHS, Brown acknowledged that the agency deteriorated on his watch. But he blamed its decline on the mammoth reorganization that forced FEMA into the new department, and on his constant setbacks once inside.

"The slogan was 'Do No Harm,' but we were doing harm," Brown said. "People became distracted from the mission, because we spent so much time and energy fighting for resources and working on reorganization. It just disintegrated our capacity."

Initially, Brown's bosses at DHS and the department's architects in the White House shared the same goal of a beefed-up FEMA; their catchphrase was "FEMA on steroids." But that is no longer the vision or the reality. And FEMA's deterioration is not only the most visible failure of DHS: It is also emblematic of the turf battles that have plagued the rest of the department.

This account -- drawing on internal documents and e-mails as well as interviews with Brown, FEMA officials and many of the DHS leaders who clashed with him, including Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and his predecessor, Ridge -- reveals a more complex Brown than the now-familiar caricature of cronyism and incompetence. Long before his e-mails portrayed a befuddled bureaucrat who fretted about restaurant reservations and his Nordstrom wardrobe while New Orleans drowned, he was known at DHS as a fierce turf warrior whose griping about FEMA's role alienated superiors and marginalized his agency.

"The biggest danger in the department was tribalism," said Bruce M. Lawlor, Ridge's initial chief of staff, "and FEMA was the number one tribe."

In many ways, Brown is a cautionary tale of what can happen to Washington officials who make mistakes in the public eye after making enemies behind the scenes. Brown spent two years trying to use his contacts with White House officials to undercut DHS, but the White House rarely backed him, and DHS leaders responded by shifting FEMA's responsibilities and resources to more cooperative agencies.

Ridge stripped FEMA's power over billions of dollars worth of preparedness grants as well as the creation of a national disaster response plan. Most of the agency's top staff quit. And after he arrived at DHS in February, Chertoff decided to take away the rest of FEMA's preparedness duties.

"I wasn't happy where we were on preparedness," Chertoff said.

Neither was Brown. He's now a punch line for late-night comics, but in the months before Katrina he was still firing off memos about "the absence of effective leadership" and "complete lack of accountability for results" at DHS. He wrote that Ridge's decisions had promoted "unfocused empire-building in duplicative mission areas" and predicted that Chertoff's restructuring was "doomed to fail."

As usual, his sky-is-falling pleas were ignored, and Brown finally admitted defeat. He planned to submit his resignation in early September.

But on Aug. 29, the sky fell. Brown had warned that his agency would be unprepared for a catastrophe, and he was right.

'Bye-Bye, Get Out of My Office'

On June 5, 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. called then-FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh with stunning news. President Bush was about to announce a secret plan to merge 22 agencies into a Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA was on the list.

Allbaugh immediately decided to quit. His handpicked deputy, his old friend Mike Brown, would replace him once the department took shape.

"Joe signed on to be agency head, not to play second fiddle," said Bruce P. Baughman, a former senior FEMA official. "He didn't want to be reporting to anybody but the president."

After managing Bush's 2000 campaign, Allbaugh had been exiled to FEMA when he lost a power struggle with the other members of Bush's "Iron Triangle," Karl Rove and Karen Hughes. But FEMA had enjoyed a renaissance under President Bill Clinton, who had entrusted it to his Arkansas emergency management director, James Lee Witt, and elevated the post to Cabinet level. And after Sept. 11, Allbaugh recognized that his obscure agency could take a lead role in the fight against terrorism.

With Vice President Cheney's support, Allbaugh cleared out FEMA's second floor to make room for an Office for National Preparedness. He also began plotting to seize the Justice Department's three-year-old Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP), which already distributed anti-terrorism grants. Allbaugh wanted FEMA to oversee the inevitable cascade of post-Sept. 11 emergency dollars.

The White House officials who designed DHS also envisioned a more robust FEMA, leading America's efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks as well as natural disasters. Ridge, Bush's homeland security adviser before he became DHS secretary, was a FEMA fan; as a congressman, he had written the Stafford Act, which governs the agency. The self-styled "Gang of Five" -- the mid-level aides who sculpted DHS in the White House basement -- also hoped to strengthen FEMA into a "prime-time agency," said Richard A. Falkenrath, a member of the gang. It would no longer be an independent Cabinet agency -- it would not even be called FEMA -- but it would swallow the ODP and control all federal emergency grants.

The goal was for FEMA to "go away and become something bigger, more important and more central to the role of the department," said Lawlor, another member of the gang.

FEMA's staff worried that their expertise with natural disasters would get lost in a terrorism-focused department. But while Ridge said the administration was aware of the "huge angst" at FEMA, it never considered preserving its independence. "If you didn't have a FEMA-like agency at Homeland Security, you'd have to create one," he said. Overall, Ridge figured, FEMA would benefit from the overhaul, because it would gain control of the ODP.

But the ODP and its patrons on Capitol Hill -- especially Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who had used his Appropriations Committee seat to help create the office at the Justice Department -- quietly blocked the administration's effort to meld it into FEMA.

The ODP had only about 150 employees, compared with FEMA's 2,500, but it was favored by law enforcement officials, who worried that FEMA's historic focus on floods and fires rather than bombs and anthrax would produce a funding shift from police departments to fire and emergency management departments.

The ODP's power play caught FEMA by surprise. Baughman, the head of FEMA's new preparedness office, tried to launch a rear-guard action on the Hill, but members of Congress kept reminding him that Witt had turned down an offer to start the ODP back in 1997.

"They said, 'You had this opportunity to take this, and you opted not to, so bye-bye, get out of my office,' " Baughman said.

So when Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in late 2002, the ODP ended up in the DHS border directorate, which had nothing to do with preparedness but made Gregg and others happy because it was nowhere near FEMA on the organizational chart. "We intended to put ODP into FEMA -- that was the vision," said Susan Neely, Ridge's communications adviser. "But on the Hill, you deal, you make these concessions."

FEMA's ambitious expansion plans were put on hold.

"First, we were told we need to strengthen ourselves," lamented Leo Bosner, the head of FEMA's employee union. "Then, no, no, stop everything."

FEMA did get a few new responsibilities, including the FBI's National Domestic Preparedness Office, as well as the National Disaster Medical System and the national drug stockpile from the Department of Health and Human Services. But the FBI stripped most of the NDPO's staff before sending it over to the new department, and after an emotional appeal from HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, Ridge agreed to send back the drug stockpile.

Now FEMA was supposed to morph into the new department's Emergency Preparedness and Response directorate. FEMA's director would be the directorate's undersecretary and would shed his FEMA title once FEMA vanished.

But that was Mike Brown's job. And he had different plans.

'Guerrilla Warfare'

Brown was a political operative before he was a horse specialist, staffing a committee in the Oklahoma legislature and chairing the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority. And after two years working for Allbaugh as general counsel and then deputy director, Brown thought he understood Washington well enough to know that if FEMA lost its unique identity -- its "brand" -- it would lose its power. At his swearing-in in February 2003, days before the official birth of DHS, he vowed to fight to make sure that FEMA remained FEMA.

But Ridge and his aides were eager to create a unified DHS brand that would signify the integration of its assorted parts. Congress had prohibited them from tinkering with the Coast Guard or the Secret Service, but FEMA was fair game, and they saw Brown's resistance to a name change as part of a larger resistance to integration within DHS. Lawlor, Ridge's chief of staff, said he resented all the time he wasted on Brown's "guerrilla warfare."

"He fought being part of DHS from Day One," another top DHS official recalled.

Brown got his way on the name; Ridge and his brand-conscious aides had to admit that "FEMA" sounded better than "EP&R." But when Brown sent a memo urging Ridge to defy Congress and move the ODP into FEMA, Ridge refused.

Brown further alienated Ridge's team when he argued that DHS did not need an emergency operations center at its headquarters because FEMA already had one. DHS built its own command center anyway, with Coast Guard officers in charge. "Everybody wanted a toy," Brown grumbled. "Fancy screens and all that kind of stuff."

Brown was the only undersecretary who did not work at DHS headquarters, and he wanted to keep it that way. "There was so much spinning of wheels," he said. "The meetings just drove me nuts."

But Ridge's team saw only that Brown cared more about FEMA than about DHS. "We started from the notion that we're always going to be looking for ways to bring things together," Neely said. "Anybody from the leadership team who embraced that notion was part of the inner circle."

So Brown was frozen out.

Minnow Swallows the Whale

Ridge ultimately did decide to move the ODP and its preparedness grants -- but not to FEMA, as Brown had proposed. Instead, Ridge moved the ODP into his own office -- and began moving FEMA's preparedness grants into the ODP. He agreed with Brown's argument that there ought to be a "one-stop shop" for grants, just not that the shop belonged in FEMA.

That's when Brown wrote his September memo to Ridge. He emphasized that the White House originally intended to put the ODP into FEMA, even though its latest budget endorsed Ridge's new plan. He also argued that it would help Ridge thumb his nose at Congress, in order to set a precedent for future clashes .

But mostly he aired the substantive concerns of FEMA's staff members, who worried that Ridge's plan would separate emergency preparedness from response and endanger their relationships with first responders. At the state and local level, he noted, the people responsible for responding to disasters were the same people responsible for preparing for them.

"FEMA learned the hard way that disjointed efforts between preparedness and response create significant problems in effectively managing disasters," he wrote.

Brown insisted that "my sole motivation regarding these topics is to ensure that you have the benefit of all perspectives," and he pledged that regardless of Ridge's decisions, "the dedicated employees of EP&R/FEMA will work diligently to implement them." But when Ridge continued to balk, Brown appealed again to his White House contacts, especially Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph W. Hagin and personnel chief Clay Johnson III.

The White House often took the side of rival departments against Ridge, but it took Ridge's side against Brown. Eventually, Johnson told Brown to back off.

"At the end of the day, I always lost," Brown said.

Soon the ODP minnow began to swallow the FEMA whale. First, much of Allbaugh's new preparedness office moved to the ODP. It was followed by FEMA's grant program for fire departments, then a terrorism training program for local emergency managers, then a series of additional grants.

ODP then merged with an Office of State and Local Government Coordination that Ridge had created. And when the department was tasked with creating a "National Preparedness Goal" to focus attention on likely disaster scenarios, Ridge assigned the job to the bulked-up new office. Meanwhile, morale plummeted at FEMA; in one survey of large agencies, it ranked last in worker satisfaction.

Senior career staff members left in droves.

Ridge and his aides now believed that FEMA should be a response and recovery agency, not a preparedness agency. In an age of terrorism, they argued, preparedness needed a law enforcement component, to prevent and protect as well as get ready to respond.

But that's not the only reason the minnow ate the whale. Ridge's team wanted to knit DHS together, and FEMA kept standing apart. The ODP's director, C. Suzanne Mencer, was "very much a part of the inner circle," as Neely put it. Brown was not.
FEMA Pays the 'DHS Tax'

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 directed FEMA to develop a National Response Plan, the linchpin of post-Sept. 11 efforts to ensure smoother responses to disasters. It was a logical assignment; FEMA already oversaw a Federal Response Plan, and Brown and his staff figured they could easily tweak it into a larger government strategy for catastrophes.

But that was exactly what Ridge's people did not want. They wanted a bold new approach for a frightening new world. So a few days after the department was born, Ridge reassigned the plan to James M. Loy, a Coast Guard admiral who was running the Transportation Security Administration.

Ridge did not even inform Brown of his decision, and some offended FEMA officials, joked Ridge aide Robert B. Stephan, "had frothy sputum come out of their mouth." Ridge had to order Brown to force FEMA staffers to attend meetings about the plan.

"It was never particularly pleasant," Loy recalled. "Mike's inclination was to continue to do it the way it used to be done."

FEMA officials thought the first DHS draft was awful. "They had an extremely simplistic view, as though the whole country was the army and we were the generals," said Bosner, FEMA's union chief. "The gist was: We'll give orders and everybody will jump and say, Sir, yes, sir!" Sure enough, the draft sparked an uproar among local, state and rival federal agencies.

Ridge assigned Stephan to fix the plan, but Stephan said that Brown "never, never, never bought into the concept." Brown was most upset that, under the plan, the DHS secretary would appoint a "principal federal officer" to oversee disasters -- a FEMA official in a fire or flood, but probably a law enforcement official in an incident of terrorism. Until then, FEMA's director had reported directly to the president during all disasters.

"It was just another dad-gummed layer of bureaucracy," Brown said.

Stephan explained that FEMA would run the emergency response and recovery even if the principal officer were from another agency, but Brown still balked. "Mike didn't understand or maybe didn't want to accept that someone outside FEMA could have this designation," Stephan said.

Meanwhile, DHS continued to divert some of FEMA's funds -- the staff called this the "DHS tax" -- along with manpower and missions. "The result has led to confusion and the duplication of mission areas within the Department," Brown wrote in another memo. What was the point of an emergency preparedness and response directorate with no preparedness assets or responsibilities?

But the more Brown griped, the less his bosses listened. And the more preparedness assets FEMA lost, the less it made sense for FEMA to handle preparedness at all. "It was a vicious cycle," Brown said Ridge said he finally laid down the law during a meeting about preparedness in the fall of 2004. You lose, he remembered telling Brown: "You don't have the wherewithal to do it."

Brown said he still considered one more memo to Ridge but grudgingly relented after White House friends told him to "stop banging my head against the wall." He complained in one e-mail that everyone who questioned DHS groupthink was "labeled as 'being difficult' or 'not a team player.' "

Brown was right: He was not considered a team player. And in the White House as well as the department, FEMA was no longer considered an agency worth expanding.

"The FEMA I experienced really wanted to stay the way it was," Falkenrath said. "It was like an insurance company that swung into action after the weather got bad."

While Brown was complaining that FEMA was being destroyed by its merger into DHS, a smaller agency was airing similar complaints about its merger into FEMA. And Brown was not expressing much sympathy.

'We're in a Crisis'

In December 2004, Jeffrey A. Lowell, a St. Louis transplant surgeon who was Ridge's medical adviser, stopped by Brown's office. Ridge had asked Lowell to assess federal medical response capabilities -- especially the National Disaster Medical System, which was now part of FEMA -- and Lowell had given Brown an advance copy of his scathing report.

Lowell found out that Brown could be scathing, too.

"He said: 'How dare you? You can't give this to Ridge!' " Lowell recalled. "I was stunned. Everyone on the planet knew about these problems."

In a crisis, the NDMS was supposed to deploy and coordinate volunteer teams of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. It was originally housed in the Department of Health and Human Services, and in 2002 a similar report commissioned by HHS Assistant Secretary Jerome M. Hauer found that the NDMS lacked a "clear, consistent vision," that it had "systematic readiness issues," and that its central command was dangerously disconnected from its 7,000 volunteers. "We knew what was wrong, and we were beginning to fix it," Hauer said.

Then the NDMS was transferred to DHS. HHS Secretary Thompson was outraged, and he pleaded with Ridge to send it back with the drug stockpile. When Hauer suggested that the move was defensible, Thompson exploded: "Don't talk about that outside this office! You work for me!"

Ultimately, Ridge decided that the NDMS would stay. "That was a terrible mistake," Thompson said. "It belonged in the health department . . . and Mike Brown was an absolute nightmare."

The turf battles intensified after conflicting presidential directives put DHS in charge of the overall response to a disaster but left HHS in charge of the medical response. "Basically, much of '03-04 was a war between DHS and HHS," a former White House official recalled.

In September 2003, HHS tried to wrest control of the NDMS from DHS during Hurricane Isabel; Brown blocked the move. In November 2004, Hauer's successor, Stewart Simonson, told his staff not to work with DHS's Lowell; he was furious that Lowell had not invited him to a medical briefing by Israeli security officers. "I did not feel Dr. Lowell was a constructive partner, and I made that very clear," Simonson said.

Meanwhile, the NDMS floundered. Lowell's report found that it was "woefully underfunded, undermanned, and too remote from DHS leadership to gain the visibility it needs." Its paid staff had shriveled from 144 to 57 and did not even include a physician. The report also included vicious anonymous quotes from NDMS volunteers complaining about FEMA's unpaid bills, faulty equipment and intransigent leadership.

"NDMS is losing functional effectiveness under FEMA's inflexible and inappropriate management," Lowell wrote.

But Ridge was about to leave the administration, and Brown believed that the NDMS teams were just upset because FEMA was enforcing some budget discipline. So nothing came of the report. That spring, Brown told an NDMS conference that he knew some teams were upset about their move to FEMA. His advice: "Get over it."

The National Association of NDMS Response Teams sent a letter to Ridge's successor, Michael Chertoff, that was even harsher than Lowell's report. It warned that two years after their move to FEMA, they were less prepared than ever: "We feel that the identity of the NDMS is being lost via FEMA's efforts to 'swallow' NDMS functions, rather than support them . . . During transition, it has been fragmented, reduced, and relegated to a position without the authority, staff, resources . . . or systems in place at FEMA to move forward with the most fundamental of readiness and critical mobilization issues."

Today, Brown acknowledges that those complaints about FEMA sound a lot like his critical memos about DHS: "I recognize the irony." But at the time, Brown dismissed the critics in e-mails to his staff as "Kids who don't get it!"

"Clearly there is a group within NDMS that does not like us," Brown wrote. "We need to nip this in the bud pronto. Whatever it takes."

Undersecretary vs. Secretary

After Chertoff was sworn in last winter, he promptly began a "Second Stage Review," preparing to reconfigure the new department. And Brown promptly began bombarding his office with memos, relitigating fights that FEMA had lost under Ridge.

On the National Response Plan: "The time is right for FEMA to be given full responsibility for all aspects."

On the shift of the ODP: "This reorganization has failed to produce tangible results."

On DHS raids on FEMA's budget: "A total of $77.9 million has been permanently lost from the base."

Brown even took his appeal public, declaring in a speech to emergency managers that all of the department's preparedness grants should go back to FEMA. Chertoff's aides, worried that Brown was boxing in the new secretary, frantically prepared a release clarifying that DHS policy had not changed.

Chertoff, a blunt-spoken former prosecutor and judge, was not swayed by Brown's appeals. "I don't box in very easily," he said. He agreed with Brown that preparedness was a serious deficiency, but not that FEMA was the place to fix it.

Instead, Chertoff endorsed a plan that had originated at the ODP -- to replace Brown's EP&R directorate with a new preparedness directorate that would absorb whatever remained of FEMA's preparedness mission. He agreed with Brown's bureaucratic rivals that FEMA was too busy responding to daily disasters to focus on the long-term planning needed to prepare for a major catastrophe.

DHS officials dangled the possibility of heading the new directorate in front of Brown, but he was not interested. "It's a Hobson's choice," Brown e-mailed a friend in the White House. "Take something that I don't believe in and that I don't think will work, or stay at FEMA and try to keep it from failing. Geez, what a life!"

Brown sent one last-ditch memo to Chertoff's deputy, warning that under the new plan, "FEMA is doomed to failure and loss of mission." But his appeal was rejected, and after his White House contacts said they could not find him a job elsewhere in the administration, Brown decided to submit his resignation after Labor Day.

FEMA's career professionals made similar choices. Eric Tolbert, chief of the agency's response division, said he quit this year because DHS was siphoning away "huge chunks" of his budget. Chertoff points out that FEMA's budget has increased since Sept. 11, but Tolbert said the periodic incursions "dramatically impacted my ability to maintain a readiness level."

For example, a FEMA exercise simulating a Category 4 hurricane in New Orleans was suspended when funding ran out. "Those of us involved became pretty disenchanted near the end," Tolbert said.

'Can I Quit Now? Can I Go Home?'

On Sunday, Aug. 28, Brown was supposed to be finalizing his resignation letter. Instead, he was on his way to Louisiana for Katrina and chuckling into his BlackBerry. Hagin had e-mailed from Bush's ranch, teasing that his imminent departure no longer seemed so imminent: You didn't get out in time!

Brown would be gone soon enough.

His agency, as he had predicted, was not ready. Its relations with state and local agencies, as he had warned, were in shambles. Three of its five operations chiefs for natural disasters and nine of its 10 regional directors were temporary fill-ins. And as Katrina approached, Brown and his aides were still balking at a DHS directive to join an interagency crisis management group -- and ignoring DHS requests for information.

"Let them play their reindeer games as long as they are not turning around and tasking us with their stupid questions," Brown's deputy chief of staff e-mailed him.

Once Katrina came ashore, the newly completed National Response Plan spectacularly failed its first test. Chertoff neglected to activate it until the day after landfall, and Brown resisted the secretary's efforts to name him the principal federal official. And the 426-page plan proved to be mostly irrelevant once local responders were unable to participate; FEMA had not finalized the "Catastrophic Annex" that was supposed to guide that situation.

"Can I quit now?" Brown e-mailed a press aide during the storm. "Can I go home?

Katrina also triggered the biggest deployment in the National Disaster Medical System's history. Thompson called the result "a national embarrassment." In an after-action report, NDMS team leader Timothy Crowley, a doctor on the Harvard Medical School faculty, called the deployment a "TOTAL FAILURE."

Crowley's team was summoned late, then sent to Texas instead of Louisiana, then parked in Baton Rouge for a week while New Orleans suffered. When the team was finally sent to the disaster zone, it was immediately overwhelmed, but NDMS leaders told Lowell there was no help available, even though he later found out that a host of other teams "had been sitting on their butts for days waiting and asking for missions."

"The current management team and disaster response is completely dysfunctional," Crowley wrote. "I never learned what sort of political agenda or just plain incompetence or stupidity were behind these decisions." His report was harsh, but not atypical.

"I was holding back!" he said.

Katrina has inspired a round of soul-searching throughout DHS. A terrorist attack, after all, would not provide several days' warning; Chertoff has vowed to "retool FEMA, maybe even radically, to increase our ability to deal with catastrophic events."

But Brown believes that if DHS leaders had not spent so much time retooling FEMA in the first place, his name would not be a synonym for poor performance. He's proud of the losing battles he fought inside DHS, and he could not resist a final dig at his old bosses.

"To this day," he said, "I'm not sure they've got a vision for the department."

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

=================
Amid ruins, volunteers are emerging as heroes

By Anne Rochell Konigsmark and Rick Hampson

USATODAY.com, 12/22/05

NEW ORLEANS — In his 67 years, Howard Peterson had never seen a Mennonite. But 11 days before Christmas he stood in the ruins of his kitchen, watching a crew of them gut and clean his flood-ravaged house

Peterson is a retired African-American barber who lives on disability payments. His eyes are sad, his movement listless, his voice weak. His helpers were strapping white men from Lancaster County, Pa., dressed in dark pants, collared shirts, suspenders and black straw hats.

Peterson and his wife couldn't afford to pay a contractor several thousand dollars to gut the one-story house, which sat in water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina inundated the working-class Gentilly district. So Peterson, who looks too frail to do spring cleaning, began trying to clear out the house himself. Then the Mennonites came by and offered a hand.

"I can't thank them enough," he says. But he also wonders when the professionals — city, state and federal agencies — will do their part. "They should be trying to repair the city."

The Gulf Coast in general and New Orleans in particular have at times felt abandoned by the American government. But they haven't been abandoned by Americans, who have volunteered by the thousands to clear out houses, collect trash, fight mold, cover roofs, feed the hungry, tend to the sick and help in any way they can. Now, as disaster relief gives way to rebuilding, volunteers are renovating and constructing homes, restocking libraries, surveying historic structures, tracking down voters and helping communities plan for the future.

Partly because politicians continue to dither, bicker and accuse, non-governmental organizations — "NGOs" ranging from large, non-profit agencies to church youth groups — are emerging as heroes of the recovery effort.

Habitat for Humanity, whose Operation Home Delivery has been building houses across the nation for shipment to the Gulf Coast, received an 85% "positive" rating for its post-hurricane work in a national Harris Poll released in November. FEMA, in contrast, got a 72% "negative" rating.

In New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward, FEMA is so unpopular that its workers have been heckled and threatened. Some stopped wearing anything that identifies their agency.

Past crises generally have established the limits of non-government action; private charity proved insufficient to cope with the Great Depression, for example. This crisis seems to have a different lesson: Volunteers, outsiders and amateurs can help fill a void created by what Amy Liu, an urban policy expert at the Brookings Institution, calls "a lack of leadership across all levels of government."

"There's a general sense that the charitable sector has the touch needed, a better feel for the communities affected," says Paul Light, a New York University government analyst.

Small steps, massive need

Pride in what non-profits are doing to help the Gulf Coast recover is tempered by the universal acknowledgment that there will be no recovery without a massive government effort.

Charitable contributions for victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma total about $3 billion. That's less than what the Bush administration says is needed just to fix the Mississippi River levees that protect New Orleans.

"Habitat (for Humanity) will build you a house, and it will build 500 other houses," Light says. "It won't build 10,000 houses." And it won't rebuild the levees.

However, in New Orleans alone, the volunteer effort has been impressive:

•The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an advocacy group that works in low-income areas, is organizing the city's scattered residents to give them a voice in planning their neighborhoods' future.

•National Trust for Historic Preservation volunteers are canvassing thousands of flood-damaged historic houses and encouraging owners to restore, not raze.

•The Preservation Resource Center, another historic preservation group, is handing out "flood buckets" with materials for cleaning up buildings and offering classes for homeowners on how to repair flood damage.

•Oprah Winfrey's Oprah's Angel Network is donating 50 houses for people left homeless.

•Common Ground, a coalition of activist groups founded after Katrina, was among the first to go into the Upper 9th Ward, where it runs a health clinic, a legal aid office, a homeless shelter, a free kitchen, a "tool lending library" and a solar-powered shower.

Religious denominations are focusing on their traditional specialties in disaster relief. They include Southern Baptists (chain sawing for debris removal), United Methodists (tracking the needs of families), Seventh Day Adventists (warehousing supplies) and Church of the Brethren (emergency child care), according to Kevin King of the Mennonites (building trades).

Volunteers include Old Order Amish, who shun modern conveniences and still dress as they did centuries ago; hippies of the Rainbow Family, a 1960s-style, back-to-the-land group that established a soup kitchen and medical tent in a park east of the French Quarter; and planners from the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit research group that waived its usual fee to study rebuilding New Orleans.

Outside help a godsend

Local non-profits do what they can, but outsiders are taking the lead. "Everyone who lives here is maxed out dealing with their own situation," says Patty Gay of the Preservation Resource Center. The out-of-towners, she adds, "are so good for morale. It's easy to be depressed."

Even NGOs that usually work overseas, such as Oxfam, the International Rescue Committee and the Mennonite Central Committee, have sent help.

Although the role of NGOs in disaster recovery has grown over the years, Katrina is a watershed, says Brenda Phillips, professor of emergency management at Oklahoma State University: "We're seeing how important they are to our country in a way we never have."

She and other analysts cite several reasons:

•Government lost the public's confidence after the hurricane and will have a hard time regaining it. "That leaves the non-profits," says Tiziana Dearing of Harvard's Hauser Center for Non-profit Organizations.

•The disaster's scope stretches even well-functioning government agencies, inviting involvement by NGOs that normally focus on the neediest victims — the poor and elderly.

•Lacking government's power, money and size, non-profits often are more sensitive to people's needs. "We listen before we do anything," King says.

•NGOs are relatively nimble — an important asset if, as seems likely, the Gulf Coast will recover a block or a neighborhood at a time. "It's easier for light-footed individuals to move things forward than a government bureaucracy," says Greta Gladney, a community activist whose home in the Lower 9th Ward has been rehabbed by ACORN volunteers.

A call to action

"True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant — It clothes the naked. It feeds the hungry. It comforts the sorrowful. It shelters the destitute."

- Menno Simons, 1539

The Mennonites, the denomination Simons helped found, are known mostly today for their belief in adult baptism, pacifism and simple Christian living. Some of the 400,000 Mennonites in North America favor old-fashioned dress. Women who dropped by the Gentilly work site wore dresses and bonnets.

From the start, Mennonites were persecuted in Europe. The account of such trials, Martyrs' Mirror, is a thick volume. Yet their reaction has not been to hate others, but to try to help them.

Katrina was a call to the action demanded by their founding fathers, who "emphasized doing something about our faith — putting it into practice," says Werner Froese, a Canadian who supervises New Orleans projects for the Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS). "So we want to get people back into their homes as soon as we can."

Since early October, more than 600 MDS volunteers have worked on 200 projects along the Gulf Coast. They've donned masks, boots and gloves to do the dirtiest, most basic jobs — ripping out moldy drywall and picking through wreckage.

In Peterson's house, the flood line was halfway up the wall. The smell of rot and mold was nauseating. A recipe for chicken salad was still taped to a kitchen cabinet, but little else was salvageable.

"It's dirty work," says Jerry Weaver of East Earl, Pa. "But it's worth it. The homeowners appreciate it."

Much more work will be needed before Peterson can move back in.

Brenda Wise, a widowed teacher who lives around the corner from Peterson, says the Mennonites were her only hope. She felt betrayed by her insurance company, which said her flood insurance was inadequate and homeowner's insurance did not cover her belongings, and by the Orleans Parish school system, which laid her off.

Wise has been living in Houston, but says she must move back into her house. She can't afford anything else. The Mennonites are readying the house for her return — and lifting her spirits.

"When I first saw my house, all I could do was just turn around and come out," she says. "I thought nothing was salvageable. I couldn't see beyond the destruction." But the Mennonites carefully set aside dishes, pots, pans, photographs and other items that could be cleaned and saved.

Just a week earlier, the Mennonites' mission was in doubt.

King, executive coordinator of Mennonite Disaster Service, and five board members had spent the day touring the city and talking with residents. By 10:30 that night they were exhausted, but King insisted they discuss a disturbing question: Should they commit tens of thousands of volunteer hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to a community that might not survive the next big storm?

Some Mennonites favored concentrating on other parts of the Gulf Coast and writing off New Orleans. By helping people rebuild in the city, they argued, we might only be setting them up for the next disaster.

Nothing King saw or heard that day challenged such pessimism, especially the residents' despair over government inaction and their uncertainty over the condition and future of the levees that are supposed to protect the city from flooding.

But as they sat around a table in a small, second-floor conference room at an Hispanic church, he and the directors kept thinking about the desolation they'd seen in Gentilly and the 9th Ward. The situation was desperate — so desperate they decided in the end that they should stay.

"We have to do something," King says. "People here are desperate for hope, so we'll take a risk with them and walk with them."

The Mennonites expect to stay for at least two years and continue to import work teams from around the USA and Canada each week.

King says that if New Orleans is a lost cause, it is one for which there are many volunteers: "We're booked through March."

www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-21-katrina-volunteers_x.htm

=================
Department's Mission Was Undermined From Start

By Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald
Washington Post, December 22, 2005

The Department of Homeland Security was only a month old, and already it had an image problem.

It was April 2003, and Susan Neely, a close aide to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, decided the gargantuan new conglomeration of 22 federal agencies had to stand for something more than multicolored threat levels. It needed an identity -- not the "flavor of the day in terms of brand chic," as Neely put it, but something meant to last.

So she called in the branders.

Neely hired Landor Associates, the same company that invented the FedEx name and the BP sunflower, and together they began to rebrand a behemoth Landor described in a confidential briefing as a "disparate organization with a lack of focus." They developed a new DHS typeface (Joanna, with modifications) and color scheme (cool gray, red and hints of "punched-up" blue). They debated new uniforms for its armies of agents and focus-group-tested a new seal designed to convey "strength" and "gravitas." The department even got its own lapel pin, which was given to all 180,000 of its employees -- with Ridge's signature -- to celebrate its "brand launch" that June.

"It's got to have its own story," Neely explained.

Nearly three years after it was created in the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense, DHS does have a story, but so far it is one of haphazard design, bureaucratic warfare and unfulfilled promises. The department's first significant test -- its response to Hurricane Katrina in August -- exposed a troubled organization where preparedness was more slogan than mission.

Born out of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, DHS was initially expected to synthesize intelligence, secure borders, protect infrastructure and prepare for the next catastrophe. For most of those missions, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recently gave the Bush administration D's or F's. To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation. But the department has also struggled to execute even seemingly basic tasks, such as prioritizing America's most critical infrastructure.

When Coast Guard Adm. James M. Loy signed on as Ridge's top deputy in the fall of 2003, "I found turmoil," he recalled, and "lack of strategic direction." When Loy left earlier this year, he believed DHS was sorely in need of "a midcourse correction." And Michael Chertoff, Ridge's successor, said in an interview that when he arrived in February, he was disturbed by the department's "insufficient focus on outcome and mission." Chertoff was so disturbed that he has already proposed a broad restructuring of DHS.

"We're not where we need to be," he said.

President Bush hailed DHS as his administration's answer to the "urgent and overriding" mission of securing the homeland. But the department designed in secrecy and haste in the White House basement and complicated further on Capitol Hill was hobbled from the start by what the branders called a "Rube Goldberg drawing" of an organization chart.

Interviews with dozens of participants in DHS's formation and operation -- including Ridge and Chertoff, White House aides, Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and current and former DHS officials -- suggest the sheer magnitude of the bureaucratic challenge overwhelmed the department's leaders. They worked almost full time on the merger, too busy to do much more than manage their inboxes, referee internal turf wars and wage losing battles with departments that commanded more clout at the White House.

Most corporate mergers fail, and even the successful ones often take years to produce dividends. DHS can point to some results, including hardened cockpit doors on commercial airliners, background checks for truckers and radiation detectors at ports. DHS has consolidated eight payroll providers into one system, and 22 human resources offices into seven. And there has not been another terrorist attack.

But some of the department's strongest supporters are disgusted by what it has achieved with its $40 billion annual budget. Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Tex.), who proposed a new department even before Sept. 11, said he was warned by several top CEOs that the mega-merger would require quick and decisive leadership. DHS, he said, never got it.

"The implementation has been a huge disappointment," Thornberry said.

Ultimately, Ridge and his team came to see their searing experience as a classic Washington morality play of entrenched bureaucracy resisting change.

"The notion that everyone was going to join hands and sing 'Kumbaya,' I don't think anybody in our leadership expected that to happen," Ridge said. "And it didn't."

'Zero Interest' in New Department

The White House had plenty of warning about potential failings of a new department -- it had been doing the warning. "Creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve the problem," Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said in March 2002.

Before Sept. 11, a host of blue-ribbon terrorism commissions had recommended new bureaucratic alignments, culminating with the May 2001 finding by a panel chaired by former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) that the nation had a "fragmented and inadequate" homeland defense apparatus. In response, Vice President Cheney ordered a "national preparedness review," focused on the catastrophic possibility of an attack employing weapons of mass destruction. "They knew the government was not well configured to deal with this," former White House aide Frank J. Cilluffo recalled.

But Cheney opposed the concept of a new department as a big-government mistake, several aides recalled. And Steve Abbott, the retired admiral he picked to head the review, did not start work until a few days before Sept. 11.

After the attacks, Bush named Ridge, Pennsylvania's popular Republican governor, to head a new Office of Homeland Security in the White House. With the office just beginning, "there was zero interest in the White House in setting up a new department," a senior Ridge aide said. When Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) argued the case at a White House meeting that October, Bush was dismissive, saying Ridge could do the job out of the West Wing.

But Ridge found it difficult to get things done. In late December, he took a modest proposal to a Cabinet-level "principals" meeting -- a new "border-centric" agency that would bring together immigration officers, customs agents and other border-related personnel then scattered around the government. No Cabinet secretaries supported him.

"The only person at the time that thought it was a good idea was yours truly," Ridge recalled.

The lesson his staff took away was the need for secrecy: When bureaucracies were informed of potential threats to their empires, they tended to resist. "Everybody realized the agencies were not going to look at mission first, they were going to look at turf first," recalled Bruce M. Lawlor, a National Guard major general working for Ridge.

But soon the White House began to contemplate reversing its position. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers in both parties were upset by Bush's refusal to let Ridge testify as a presidential aide, and Lieberman's bill to create a new department was gaining momentum. While many Republicans were leery about a vast new bureaucracy, they did not want to cede the homeland security issue to the Democrats.

"That was driving decisions," one senior Ridge aide said.

In February 2002, Michael A. Wermuth, a homeland security expert at the Rand Corp., handed Ridge a two-page list of government entities that could be folded into a new department. It was the fourth of four options he offered, and Wermuth warned Ridge it was a horrible idea. He spoke "of train wrecks coming, a clash of cultures." It would take at least five years, probably 10, for the department to function smoothly. And without the proper resources, Wermuth said, "you're going to strangle yourself in bureaucracy for years."

Ridge seemed undeterred. "Option 4 is really where I'd like to get to," he said.

"We didn't scare him enough," Wermuth thought.

Everything Was on the Table

In the White House bunker where Cheney had waited out the Sept. 11 attacks, a select group of policy aides had been secretly commissioned to plot the administration's about-face.

They were called together in April by White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. -- five mid-level staffers known as the "Gang of Five," or as they liked to call themselves, the "G-5." Two worked for Ridge -- Lawlor and Richard A. Falkenrath, a security expert from Harvard -- and Card sent his deputy Joel D. Kaplan, associate counsel Brad Berenson and deputy budget director Mark W. Everson.

Several times a week, the G-5 met with a group of principals, including Card, Ridge, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. and Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. On poster boards, they listed all the agencies that might make sense in the department. "The overriding guidance," Lawlor recalled, "was that everything was on the table for consideration."

Why not include the Federal Aviation Administration? Or the Drug Enforcement Administration? Falkenrath and Lawlor wanted to move the FBI, which was responsible for investigating threats to the homeland. But it became clear that politics would also shape the department. Card and other principals swiftly vetoed the transfer of the FBI as a non-starter. Rice scoffed that it would make the department look like the German Interior Ministry.

But everyone agreed to move the border agencies that Ridge had tried to merge earlier. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was definitely in as well. Card raised the idea of taking the National Guard from the Pentagon, but as Falkenrath recalled, "we just couldn't figure out how to make it work."

Some of the decisions were almost random. Falkenrath thought it would be nice to give the new department a research lab that could bring cutting-edge research to homeland security problems. He called up a friend and asked which of the three Department of Energy labs would work. "He goes, 'Livermore.' And I'm like, 'All right. See you later.' Click," Falkenrath told historians from the Naval Postgraduate School. He did not realize that he had just decided to give the new department a thermonuclear weapon simulator, among other highly sensitive assets of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In June, after just six weeks of meetings, the department was ready for unveiling. The secret had been kept so well that even secretaries with major turf on the line had no idea what was coming until Card put out calls to the Cabinet the day before the president's announcement.

"They were just totally bamboozled," Falkenrath said.

When the president convened the Cabinet to reveal his plan, Ridge recalled with a wry smile, "everybody said, 'Good idea, Mr. President.' " But few of them really thought so.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to keep a handful of offices that were supposed to go to DHS, including the National Disaster Medical System and the national drug stockpile. "Make sure this doesn't happen!" he instructed Jerome M. Hauer, one of his assistant secretaries.

The plan had been put together with such speed and secrecy that after its release angry officials had to explain to the White House how their agencies really worked. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was able to beat back the total transfer of Livermore after it became clear the Gang of Five had little idea what the lab did. A similar battle unfolded over the Department of Energy's radiological detection teams, which were supposed to be folded in with FEMA. The White House had not realized that the teams consisted of employees with regular jobs who mobilized only during emergencies.

The one Cabinet official who willingly surrendered turf was Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who angered some of his aides by giving up three prized agencies. But O'Neill was skeptical as well. "It was never clear there was a vision of what homeland security ought to mean," he recalled. And many colleagues were similarly dubious. "We all expected an ineffectual behemoth," said a close aide to a Cabinet member, "and that's what we got."

GOP Lawmakers Turn Around

On Capitol Hill, Bush's allies were left tongue-tied by his abrupt shift. In late May the White House had pushed Republicans on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to oppose Lieberman's bill. Now, Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) told Lieberman: "I've been having a great time explaining my enthusiastic support for a proposition I voted against two weeks ago."

Falkenrath was barraged by Hill staffers with questions he could not answer: If the Immigration and Naturalization Service was moving to the new department, why were immigration judges staying at the Justice Department? Falkenrath did not know there were immigration judges. "Every one of these staffers had some little angle on something that we hadn't thought of," he said. "I was like, 'We better go figure out what we've missed here.' "

Inside the White House, some aides were appalled by the specter of "a group of people who really didn't know a whole lot about the boxes they were moving around," as one put it. White House cybersecurity czar Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism chief sidelined by Bush after urging more decisive action against al Qaeda before Sept. 11, blasted Ridge's office with a memo about the new department's design flaws, warning that the failure to include a policy office would leave the secretary helpless to control its independent fiefdoms.

"Creating a significant policy shop is like Bureaucracy 101," said Clarke deputy Roger Cressey. "We never heard anything back."

In fact, the G-5 had considered a policy shop. But the idea had been shot down, Ridge said, in an effort to streamline the department's upper management ranks. The White House knew Hill Republicans were skittish about a big-government scheme, and Daniels, the administration's budget hawk, told conservatives he did not want the department to spend more than its 22 agencies were already spending.

"The tendency to throw money thoughtlessly on problems was on full display" after Sept. 11, Daniels recalled. "It was easy to see that could happen again."

Ridge, who had won a Bronze Star as an infantry staff sergeant in Vietnam, knew he might be stepping into another quagmire at DHS. "Part of him was excited," said then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. "Part of him thought it was a no-win situation."

Clearly, he could not count on unlimited financial support. And working in the White House, he was already learning he could not count on absolute political support, either.

One stark example was the White House's blockade of a Ridge-supported plan to secure large chemical plants. After Sept. 11, Whitman had worked with Ridge on a modest effort to require high-risk plants -- especially the 123 factories where a toxic release could endanger at least 1 million people -- to enhance security. But industry groups warned Bush political adviser Karl Rove that giving new regulatory power to the Environmental Protection Agency would be a disaster.

"We have a similar set of concerns," Rove wrote to the president of BP Amoco Chemical Co.

In an interagency meeting shortly before DHS's birth, White House budget official Philip J. Perry, who also happens to be Cheney's son-in-law, declared the Ridge-Whitman plan dead.

"Tom and I would just throw our hands up in frustration over that issue," Whitman recalled.

And not just that issue. Whitman said that Ridge was often stymied inside the White House: "He got gazumped a couple of times."

In his new job, the gazumping would continue.

The Push and the Pushback

On Jan. 24, 2003, Ridge was sworn in as the first secretary of homeland security; Bush hailed him as a "superb leader who has my confidence." Four days later, Ridge learned from the president's State of the Union address that a new intelligence center for tracking terrorists -- which he had expected to be the hub of DHS's dot-connecting efforts -- would not be controlled by DHS.

Ridge and his aides thought the center was one of the key reasons the department had been created, to prevent the coordination failures that helped produce Sept. 11. Not only had the White House undercut Ridge, it also let him find out about his defeat on television.

"We watched it and thought: 'What the hell are we doing here?' " recalled John Rollins, who became chief of staff for the new DHS intelligence section. "The White House did not support us," said one of Ridge's top advisers. "That occurred repeatedly. It was if the White House created us and then set out to marginalize us."

The first battle over DHS came when the White House tried to exile it from Washington. Initially, Daniels proposed to let cities around the country bid to host the new department as a cost-saving measure. Then the White House tried to park DHS outside the Beltway in Chantilly.

Just before the department's official March 1 start date, the Chantilly deal fell through and DHS ended up in a decrepit Navy complex on Nebraska Avenue in Upper Northwest, several miles from the rest of federal Washington. Top DHS officials had to share desks in a "gulag-like" hangar at Building 3; the White House initially told them it was temporary quarters until a new "campus" was commissioned. But the talk of a new home for the department quickly stopped.

Rollins recalled the opening days as "absolute chaos." In his intelligence office, there was no undersecretary, no assistant secretary and just 10 aides out of the 300 the office was supposed to hire. Many of the new DHS offices had been picked apart by the departments from which they came; Rollins had moved with the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, one of three of the center's 150 staffers to make the switch.

At headquarters, Ridge had only a few dozen staffers to oversee a department that was suddenly responsible for everything from livestock inspections to floodplain mapping to the national registry for missing pets. He was also besieged by congressional inquiries, not to mention day-to-day security responsibilities; his first "orange alert" occurred 17 days into the department's existence. "Everyone," Daniels recalled, "empathized with Tom's near-impossible assignment."

Ridge radiated good cheer, and just about everyone liked him. But many senior DHS officials thought Ridge was outmatched. "He had no managerial ability," said one. "He was such a nice guy, and totally unwilling to knock heads and tick people off." Lawlor, Ridge's chief of staff, was more of a head-knocker, but he lasted only seven months. Former Navy secretary Gordon R. England, Ridge's deputy, was gone by the fall.

"It was one of the world's worst leadership teams," said a former White House official involved in the start-up.

Some of Ridge's problems were structural. The White House and Congress had left his powers unclear, and many key tasks had to be shared with other departments under contradictory laws and presidential directives. In some ways, Ridge's aides came to believe, they had even less power than when they were mere presidential staffers.

"You had a platform at the White House. Whenever you called a meeting at the White House, the other agencies came," Susan Neely said. "Now we're over at the department and the agencies didn't come; they came up with all sorts of excuses."

Ridge said he constantly faced "aggravating, annoying pushback," and he did not enjoy pushing back against the pushback. He let Tommy Thompson, the HHS secretary, have his stockpile back; he let FEMA keep its name. He could not even persuade agency heads to work out of a single DHS command post for a counterterrorism exercise. "Why the hell shouldn't you be in a single operations center?" Ridge asked.

The strongest pushback came from the Justice Department, where the mention of DHS inspired jokes about duct tape and chartreuse threat levels. Justice officials believed DHS had "too much focus on marketing and not enough on substantive delivery," in the words of one aide to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. "They were consumed with their public perception," said Mark Corallo, an Ashcroft spokesman.

Indeed, one of the new department's biggest intramural furors was a branding fight with the FBI. It began when the director of a new DHS agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- or ICE -- decided to keep the catchy acronym but change the name to Investigation and Criminal Enforcement. The FBI, it turned out, had some proprietary feelings about the word "investigation."

"Over my dead body," Mueller, the FBI director, told one aide.

Loy had sensed trouble. "When I saw that one go by, I didn't have the time. . . . I said, 'Oh . . . surely, for God's sake, we're not going to waste time on that,' " Loy remembered. "But it just festered." In fact, Mueller brought the matter to the White House. "It got to the top, sadly," Loy said.

At the FBI's insistence, the White House had already forced ICE to give up its Operation Greenquest program investigating terrorism financing -- and forced Ridge to sign a memo pledging to keep his department away from similar investigations. But Ridge thought this spat was just silly; nobody was going to mistake ICE for the FBI.

Nevertheless, the White House told Ridge to back off.

"Folks at higher levels than yours truly said, 'We side with the FBI,' " Ridge recalled. "We thought it was as clear as the nose on your face. Bob [Mueller] disagreed. Bob prevailed."

Still Undone: Infrastructure Plan

In the early days, recalled former DHS inspector general Clark Kent Ervin, Ridge's senior staff meetings were dominated by "weekly, even daily talk about structure, 'branding' the department, coming up with a mission statement and bringing a sense of esprit de corps." But, Ervin recalled, "there wasn't a lot of focus on substance and specifics -- exactly what do we do and how? What are key vulnerabilities?"

Early on, Ridge and his aides realized they had no way to focus on long-term planning because they had lost the battle for a policy shop, a decision Ridge aide Robert B. Stephan called "the kiss of death." In the summer of 2003, Ridge asked Stephan to troubleshoot the flawed first draft of the department's National Response Plan for catastrophes. Stephan did not have a staff. "I'm like this magician up on stage, spinning plates, and I'm so far from the first plate that I'm not sure it's spinning anymore," he recalled.

Eventually, Ridge named Stephan, a retired Air Force colonel, to head a modest "integration staff" that would focus on big-picture thinking. But Stephan spent much of his time troubleshooting problems such as the department's plan to protect America's "critical infrastructure." The first DHS draft arrived a year late, and was little more than a list, with no analysis of what was most vulnerable or vital.

"The most common term used to describe DHS was 'frustration,' " said Harris N. Miller, who headed industry's Partnership for Critical Infrastructure Security. "Most of the world didn't see it until Katrina. We saw it all the time."

The infrastructure plan is still not done, which prompted the Sept. 11 commission to argue in a report card earlier this month, "It is time we stopped talking about priorities, and actually set some."

For all practical purposes, the department's real policy shop was in the White House, where the Homeland Security Council oversaw almost every detail of its work. The Washington Post reviewed one memo to DHS with a lengthy checklist of items the White House wanted regular updates about, including uniforms for border guards, the curriculum for teaching border inspections, the selection of a single firearm for DHS training academies and "batch processing" for new hires.

"White House staff micromanaged the department in the worst of all ways," Lawlor said. Loy called the White House's involvement "very much a heavy process."

After a December 2003 presidential directive outlined a new program of preparedness planning for DHS, the White House took the lead in deciding what scenarios the department was supposed to prepare for. A group led by White House aide David Howe produced a list of 15 likely catastrophes, including a nuclear dirty bomb and a Category 5 hurricane. It was an obvious job for DHS, but the White House did not trust the department to execute it.

Ridge's lack of influence inside the administration became painfully clear after an off-message moment on Memorial Day 2004. Ashcroft had taken to the airwaves warning of a dire terrorist threat, while Ridge had been publicly reassuring. The president took Ashcroft's side, according to sources in DHS and the Justice Department, and ordered Ridge to back down.

"There was an attitude in [the White House] that the department couldn't do anything right, that the department was not competent, and that carried through on almost everything you tried to do," one of Ridge's senior advisers complained.

Ridge's Plan Hits a Dead End

From his first day at DHS, Ridge pushed to create what he called "mini-me's," eight regional directors who would manage the department's assets in their areas during a crisis. It was Ridge's one major effort to put his own organizational stamp on DHS, and it was meant to ensure better preparedness for a disaster, the thinking being that "you can't plan a response in Los Angeles out of Washington, D.C.," Lawlor said. With hurricanes in mind, Ridge wanted one region to have headquarters in New Orleans.

Like so many DHS initiatives, Ridge's regions plan went nowhere.

Lawlor wrote the first draft, giving the mini-me's full control over the department's various fiefdoms within their regions. "That went over like a lead balloon," Ridge recalled. The opposition was led by some of Ridge's own deputies, such as FEMA's Michael D. Brown, who appealed to the White House.

Ridge worked hard to come up with a more acceptable regional structure, and he repeatedly announced at staff meetings that it was about to be unveiled. But the White House kept declining to approve the idea, and the impasse became increasingly embarrassing for Ridge. "On numerous occasions the secretary and deputy were saying: 'There's nothing more important than getting this regional structure set. We're going to roll it out next week,' " Ervin recalled.

By the time Lawlor left DHS in the fall of 2003, he had already concluded the plan was dead. "The White House killed it," he said. It was "too difficult of a political nut to crack" for the White House, Brown believed, since it would require DHS agencies to close their existing regional offices.

But Ridge, usually conflict-averse, continued to pursue his regions war. He sent Loy to the White House for another pitch, and even persuaded budget director Joshua B. Bolten to arrange a special appeal overseen by Cheney. Ridge decided to leave the department after Bush's reelection, but he left a memo for his successor pushing his regions plan, among other changes.

Ridge and Loy knew the department had lingering problems, and they left behind an array of reorganization ideas, from an intelligence directorate to a chief medical officer to a policy shop. Ridge's successor, Chertoff -- a former prosecutor who was Bush's second choice after former New York City police commissioner Bernard B. Kerik withdrew -- launched a sweeping "second-stage review" of DHS in February, and soon adopted almost all of their proposals.

Except the regions plan.

Chertoff said he concluded that Ridge's pet project would be a "disaster," further dividing a fragmented DHS into regional silos. But Chertoff agreed with Ridge that DHS needed to be much readier for the next catastrophe.

"I wasn't happy about where we were on preparedness," he said.

The next catastrophe was on the way. And DHS wasn't ready.

Staff writer Spencer S. Hsu and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

=================
Suspicions fire racial tensions
Antoine's is an oasis of relative peace as rumors haunt city

By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune, December 22, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- Gina Blandin has a theory about what caused the flooding disaster that befell New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck last August, an idea that has little to do with engineering studies or physical evidence and everything to do with the poisonous history of race relations in this starkly segregated city.

"I think they blew up those levees and let the water come in," said Blandin, who lost her apartment in the Mid-City neighborhood to the floodwaters and is now living temporarily in Houston. "They were happy that this storm hit, to get all of us black people out of the city."

For Blandin, a bartender at Antoine's Restaurant, the landmark French Quarter institution that is struggling to reopen four months after Katrina hit, and many other African-American residents who were driven from their homes, the evidence suggests unseen powers ordered the sabotage of New Orleans' protective levees to cause low-lying black neighborhoods to flood.

The plot, according to those who believe it, was to use the deadly hurricane to transform this majority-black city into a whiter, richer place. And everything that has happened since--the delays in reopening the poorest districts, the shuttering of the city's public housing projects, the sluggish delivery of federal storm aid, the mass layoff of the city's mostly black municipal workforce--has only reinforced the fear of many exiled black residents that New Orleans will be reconstructed without them.

"There have already been great changes in the composition of who New Orleans is and what she looks like," said Cynthia Willard-Lewis, the City Council member who represents the Lower 9th Ward, upscale Gentilly and several other predominantly black districts that were flooded. "Now the question becomes, who can return?"

It is a question strongly informed by history in a city that, before Katrina, was 67 percent black, 28 percent poverty-stricken and deeply marked by the flight of whites to the suburbs.

"Even before Hurricane Katrina hit, greater New Orleans was one of the more troubled metropolitan areas in the nation," the Brookings Institution wrote in an October report. "Sharp racial segregation and high concentrations of poverty, decentralization and a slowing economy all challenged the region."

So did outright racism. David Duke, the notorious white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader, was elected to the state Legislature by white voters in Metairie, next door to New Orleans, in 1989. The city's signature Mardi Gras organizations, or krewes, were not officially desegregated until 1991.

After Katrina hit, officials of the nearly all-white parish of St. Bernard, bordering New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, ordered rail cars dragged across the roads as a blockade. In Gretna, a majority-white suburb just across the Mississippi from New Orleans, police officers stood guard to turn back New Orleanians trying to flee across the Crescent City Bridge.

And even now, residents of predominantly white communities across southern Louisiana, citing fears of crime and "outsiders," are resisting efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to locate temporary trailer parks for storm evacuees in their neighborhoods. The not-in-my-back yard phenomenon has begun surfacing in wealthier New Orleans neighborhoods as well.

What particularly worries Willard-Lewis and many of her constituents are the proceedings of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, an advisory blue-ribbon panel appointed by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin to draft a plan for the wounded city's future. The commission's recommendations are due in early January, but already a major study prepared for the panel by the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit land-use think tank, has raised alarms.

The institute's experts bluntly recommended writing off huge swaths of the city and postponing their resettlement far into the future so that less heavily damaged neighborhoods might be resuscitated first. The study argued for this approach in part because of uncertainty over whether the federal government will spend the tens of billions of dollars flood-protection experts say would be needed to shield those low-lying areas from future storms.

Right in the institute's crosshairs were some of the city's most historic and vibrant black neighborhoods.

"To have a one-time cataclysmic occurrence that brings water over 80 percent of the city and then just redline certain neighborhoods is extremely troubling," said Willard-Lewis.

But to Alden McDonald Jr., a member of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission and one of the city's prominent business leaders, the sacrifice of even his own neighborhood of Gentilly may be necessary for the larger city to survive.

"It's reality that's bringing this about," said McDonald, president of Liberty Bank & Trust, the third-largest black-owned bank in the U.S. "We're going to have a loss of population, real simple. If you have a loss of population, you will have vacant housing. It's a formula for blighted neighborhoods. That's the No. 1 issue we have before us."

The water took its time getting to Gina Blandin's apartment building, arriving nearly 24 hours after Katrina hit New Orleans near dawn on Aug. 29. And when the floods did come, rising to 4 feet all around her, they stopped short of the historic French Quarter just a few blocks away.

These facts only added to Blandin's suspicions.

"The hurricane was completely over, and you go to sleep and the next morning there's water everywhere. How did that happen?" she said. "Why else would it have happened at night? The French Quarter got no water. They knew what they were doing."

One resident of the Lower 9th Ward, the home of much of the city's rich black culture until every house was damaged or destroyed in the flooding, testified before a congressional panel earlier this month that her neighbors heard explosions coming from a nearby flood wall just before the water rushed in.

"I was on my front porch," Dyan French told the House committee probing the response to Katrina. "I have witnesses that say they bombed the walls of the levee. And the debris that's in front of my door will testify to that."

Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, first raised the possibility of sabotage in September. He asserted that in one of the levees "there was a 25-foot hole, which suggested that it may have been blown up, so that the water would destroy the black part of town."

The theory that someone intentionally sabotaged the levees to target black residents might easily be dismissed as urban paranoia. After all, many predominantly white neighborhoods in and around New Orleans also were inundated.

Moreover, forensic engineering experts studying the disaster universally have declared that the levees failed due to design and construction flaws, not dynamite. The explosive noises some 9th Ward residents reported hearing were caused by the cracking of the concrete levees and a huge barge that slammed into the flood walls during the storm, engineers assert.

"We can see lots of evidence why those people could have heard very loud sounds that could have sounded like explosions," said Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of a National Science Foundation panel that investigated the levee failures.

"As that concrete is breaking, it will emit sounds that probably to them sounded very much like muffled gunshots," Bea added. "Then they would have these very large booming sounds as that barge was slamming against the walls. Those residents probably heard what they heard, but they came to the wrong conclusion. We didn't see any signs of explosive action."

Yet the paranoia and conspiracy theories are rooted in real history. Such sabotage of levees has happened before.

In April 1927, as torrents of water from the Great Mississippi Flood bore down upon New Orleans from hundreds of miles upstream, the city's bankers and backroom power brokers maneuvered the governor to approve dynamiting a down-river levee to relieve pressure on the city's flood walls. The decision spared wealthy white districts of New Orleans but doomed neighboring St. Bernard Parish and low-lying black neighborhoods to a devastating flood.

The notion that some political leaders regard Katrina as a lever to permanently alter the city's demographics also might sound a lot like hysteria--except that several politicians have come close to saying as much.

"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," Rep. Richard Baker (R.-La.) was quoted by The Wall Street Journal as saying. "We couldn't do it, but God did."

"New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again," Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, told a Houston audience, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The continuing shutdown of the city's public housing developments--even those that did not flood--has only deepened suspicions of neighborhood activists that a mass gentrification of the city's poor districts is being planned.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans, operating under HUD receivership because of past mismanagement, contracted with a security company to weld heavy steel plates over the doors and windows of nearly every public housing apartment.

"Their thinking is, the longer poor people and black people stay away, the more unlikely they will be to come back to this city," said Jay Arena, leader of C3/Hands off Iberville Coalition, a public-housing advocacy group. "It's a plan to fulfill Jackson's prophecies. We call it class and ethnic cleansing."

HUD officials deny they are trying to drive public housing residents from their former homes. Rather, they say, they want to ensure the housing units are safe before allowing residents to return.

"While a unit may appear to be safe from the outside, inside it's not safe," said Donna White, a HUD spokeswoman. "Once those safety assessments have been done, we'll be in a better position to get more families back into their homes."

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who studies New Orleans population trends, said he hopes that happens soon.

"New Orleans has a very rooted population and a unique demographic personality," Frey said. "People will wait six or nine months to see what's happening. But after that, they may lose hope of returning. Then you won't have New Orleans. You will have somewhere else."

For all the racial tensions that have long roiled New Orleans, Antoine's Restaurant seems to have remained an island of relative tranquility in the divided city that has hosted it for 165 years. By the accounts of dozens of black and white employees alike, a climate of egalitarianism has prevailed in the back of the house, even if the patrons sitting at tables in the front were often members of the city's white, moneyed elite.

Nor would it matter to Blandin if few of her fellow workers shared her belief in a conspiracy to blow up the levees: Employees say they often banter good-naturedly about politics, race and other sensitive topics.

"We are like one big, happy family at Antoine's," said Blandin, in a comment repeated by many of her colleagues. "We just didn't have racial problems there."

About a third of the 131 employees working at Antoine's before Katrina struck were black, according to the restaurant's personnel records. That proportion will hold steady when the restaurant reopens at the end of the month with a skeleton staff of about 50, managers say--which means Antoine's, at least, will not be aggravating the African-American depopulation trend that Willard-Lewis and other leaders fear.

One measure of harmony at Antoine's is the remarkable longevity of its employees, many of whom have spent decades working at the restaurant.

They do not do it for the money. Most of the cooks, bartenders, dishwashers and busboys were earning below $7 an hour before the hurricane shuttered the restaurant, although Rick Blount, Antoine's chief executive officer, had scheduled a round of across-the-board raises for October--increases that will be boosted even higher when the restaurant reopens, Blount said.

Instead, many workers say they stay because of people like Michael Guste, Antoine's general manager, who, like his cousin Blount, is a great-great grandson of the restaurant's founder.

Guste said he suffered a terrifying experience in October, when he was driving home from the restaurant with his 12-year-old son in the passenger seat of their sport-utility vehicle. As they neared their house in Metairie, Guste recounted, two men waving guns began to tailgate them. Guste said he floored the accelerator as the two presumed carjackers gave chase, eventually eluding them by ducking into the parking lot of a shopping center.

Guste reported the incident to the police. But when a New Orleans newspaper reporter called him a few days later seeking an interview about the crime, he declined to talk about it.

The men wielding the guns had been black, Guste explained, and New Orleans still was raw with racial stereotyping in the wake of the wild rumors of crimes--most later disproven--supposedly committed across the city as the floodwaters spread.

"I didn't want the incident to get sensationalized," Guste said. "I didn't want to represent the mantra of division. One isolated incident is not a reason to consider all of our problems to be of just one class."

=================
Katrina investigation focuses on more than one person

By Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN.com, 12/21/05

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- More than one medical professional is under scrutiny as a possible person of interest as Louisiana's attorney general investigates whether hospital workers resorted to euthanasia in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina shattered New Orleans, a source familiar with the investigation has told CNN.

CNN first reported in October that staff members at Memorial Medical Center had discussions about euthanizing patients after the hurricane flooded the city on August 29, cutting off power and stranding thousands of residents.

Now, for the first time, Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti has told CNN that allegations of possible euthanasia at Memorial Medical Center are "credible and worth investigating."

But that is all he would say.

There were hundreds of deaths at hospitals and nursing homes, all of which are being investigated by Louisiana authorities.

Among those, one investigation has focused on allegations patients were intentionally killed at Memorial Hospital.

By mid-October, Foti announced that autopsies would be performed on all 45 bodies taken from the hospital after the storm. Two weeks later, Foti's office served 73 subpoenas in connection with the investigation into what happened at Memorial Medical Center which is owned by Tenet Healthcare.

Foti told CNN that lately cooperation "has not been as good as I had hoped." Foti's investigation was prompted by stories that came from the families of patients and others after Memorial was finally evacuated.

Dr. Bryant King, who was working at Memorial when conditions were at their worst, told CNN exclusively that while he did not witness any acts of euthanasia, "most people know something happened that shouldn't have happened."

King said another doctor came to him at 9 a.m. on Thursday, four days after the storm came ashore, and recounted a conversation that the doctor had had with a hospital administrator.

According to King, the doctor said that the administrator suggested patients be put out of their misery. When King objected, this physician acknowledged his concerns but said that "this other [third] doctor said she'd be willing to do it."

Fran Butler, a nurse manager, also told CNN that a doctor approached her at one point and discussed the subject of putting patients to sleep, and "made the comment to me on how she was totally against it and wouldn't do it."

Butler said she did not see anyone commit euthanasia, and she said because of her personal beliefs, she would never have participated.

Tenet Healthcare, the company that owns Memorial, told CNN that most of the 45 patients who died were critically ill. Tenet said about 11 of those had died the weekend before the hurricane and were placed in the morgue.

In a statement e-mailed to CNN when news of the investigation first surfaced, Steven Campanini, a spokesman for Tenet, said that "in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the physicians and staff at Memorial Medical Center performed heroically to save the lives of their patients under incredibly difficult circumstances.

"About 2,000 patients, families, physicians and staff were safely evacuated from the hospital by boat and helicopter during a continuous evacuation that began Wednesday morning, August 31, and was completed by Friday, September 2," Campanini said. "We understand that the Louisiana attorney general is investigating all deaths that occurred at New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes after the hurricane, and we fully support and are cooperating with him."

As CNN prepared this report, Tenet corporate spokesman Teresa Wolfe sent this statement: "Memorial Medical Center continues to cooperate with the Louisiana Attorney General's Office in its investigation. Memorial has no comment on these latest assertions reported by CNN."

www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/21/katrina.hospital/index.html

=================
December 21, 2005; NY Times

New Orleans Wonders What to Do With Open Wounds, Its Canals
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 16 - It was the canals that betrayed this city, but they never left the scene of the crime. The fingers of water that overflowed sit there like open wounds, and many residents and engineers would prefer never to see them again.

"Those canals are like knife cuts into a person," Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, said. "They're just waiting to fester."

The Bush administration agreed last week to pay for gates to cut off the three main drainage canals from Lake Pontchartrain, the source of the storm water that pushed into the canals and then into thousands of houses.

Many here say the gates will be inadequate as long as the canals remain. Either way, it is clear that repairing the canals has become a linchpin of any plan to move the city forward.

The flood protection system failed in many places and in many ways, with water overflowing miles of levees along Lake Borgne to the east and a deadly surge funneling up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigational shortcut that many in the state have long wanted to close.

But it is the three breaches on the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals that draw an almost obsessive interest here, because they failed even though the water levels in the storm remained well below the tops of the floodwalls.

That the canals are still there at all is in many ways a victory of complacency over common sense, as they remained virtually unchanged while the world around them was transformed by growth and new technology. They were originally built in the 19th century to carry rainwater and sewage from the city past marshland northward into the lake.

But by the 20th century, even as the canals were enhanced with powerful pumping stations and higher floodwalls, they remained open ditches that moved water through neighborhoods of houses and businesses.

Local engineers had long known the possibility of a storm surge from the lake. More than a decade ago, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed gates at the mouths of the canals as a way to strengthen the levee system. The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and the Orleans and Jefferson Parish levee boards killed that plan. The argument was that closed gates without adequate pumping could cause flooding in hurricanes.

After that proposal failed, the corps suggested the current system of concrete floodwalls to raise the level of the earthen levees. Now gates seem more likely to be built.

Last week, the White House announced that it would ask Congress for $1.5 billion, on top of the already requested $1.6 billion, to deal with the problems of the drainage canals.

Rainwater going the other direction would be pumped past the barriers into the lake by new pumping stations. Depending on the ultimate design, the gates might be closed permanently or be able to be closed quickly in the face of an approaching storm.

At a news conference announcing the new request, the coordinator of the federal response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Donald E. Powell, said, "The levee system will be better and stronger than it ever has been in the history of New Orleans."

Is "stronger" strong enough?

Artie Folse, who lives in the Lakeview neighborhood a few blocks from the 17th Street Canal, has watched the corps repair the 465-foot breach in the canal wall with high-quality sheet piles and improved earthwork to resist the water pressure.

But, Mr. Folse said, his eyes widening, "What about the rest of it?"

The untouched levee stretches, he said, could just be another breach waiting to occur.

"It's like welding," he said. "The weakest spot is next to the weld."

Although the administration plan, if well executed, could offer greater protection for the drainage canals - and Artie Folse's neighborhood - it is unclear the extent to which they will raise protection levels at the eastern end of the city, where so many miles of levee were destroyed by the rushing waters of Hurricane Katrina.

Water is still likely to course over the tops of the eastern levees if a storm as strong as Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans directly, instead of passing to the east as Hurricane Katrina did, engineers say.

"The thing that scares me about open water channels is your inability to control them," said Robert G. Bea, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the system and favors replacing the canals with enormous underground culverts.

"Cover the suckers," Professor Bea said. "Turn this into something we can control, manage and maintain, and let that part of the world get on with its life."

Dan Hitchings, director of Task Force Hope, the Hurricane Katrina relief effort of the Army Corps of Engineers, said the planned repairs and upgrades would give New Orleans greater protection, but would still be a far cry from the Category 5 storm protection that many residents have demanded. More likely, Mr. Hitchings said, the work would protect against the 100-mile-an-hour winds of a Category 2 hurricane and the low barometric pressure - a contributor to storm surges - of a Category 3 or weak Category 4 storm.

Additional protection can be installed after that work has been completed, he said.

The White House proposals have little to do with the damage caused when storm waters destroyed levees at the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a channel east of New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish that allows ships a shorter route between the river and the Gulf of Mexico.

Locally, many elected officials have reached a consensus that this channel, known familiarly by the acronym Mr. Go, should be closed. For years it has been little used, and it serves as a conduit for destructive saltwater into freshwater wetlands.

"I think this event has proved how dangerous and deadly a hurricane alley Mr. Go is," Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, said.

Officials at the Port of New Orleans disagree, and want the outlet preserved. For now, the corps has announced that it will not dredge Mr. Go next year, waiting for its future to be determined.

The port has struck an accord with St. Bernard Parish that calls for a floodgate and the eventual closing of the channel to "deep draft" vessels, so long as the businesses along it are moved and a new lock can be built.

Back in Lakeview, Mr. Folse said he hoped to bring his family home, but only after the corps addressed the canal problem. He favors closing the canals and said he expected the work to be carried out.

"Politically, nobody can afford to let this happen again," he said.

He was both optimistic and fatalistic. If there are no hurricanes before the safety upgrades are in place, he said, "we'll be O.K."

Then he added: "What else we going to do? Everything we have is tied up in this."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
President pledged a major post-Katrina rebuilding effort. But feds' deeds don't yet match Bush's words.

OPINION

AJC, 12/21/05

" I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives." — President Bush, Sept. 15.

In his stirring address to the nation 17 days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, President Bush promised to help rebuild that which had been destroyed. Read his words closely; they're suffused with unmistakable truths about our obligation to each other as Americans, especially in the wake of ineffable disaster.

The president was correct in his assertion that reconstructing storm-struck areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is too massive a burden to be undertaken by state and local officials alone. We did not leave New York to fend for itself after the Sept. 11 attacks, and we cannot now abandon the Gulf Coast in its time of need. Rebuilding the area is a vital national interest, and therefore will require sacrifice from each of us under the auspices of our federal government.

In the first three months since Katrina hit, however, our national leaders had been slow to respond. After the admittedly inept official reaction to the storm's aftermath, questions arose about whether the White House and Congress would fulfill the president's pledge. Some Americans, afflicted with "Katrina Fatigue" — or worse — have even questioned whether we should. But we must, and in the last few days the Bush administration and lawmakers have taken some belated, but meaningful steps toward honoring our collective commitment.

During a flurry of legislative deal making over the weekend, a House-Senate conference committee reached a compromise to spend $29 billion for the recovery effort as part of a larger package of aid Congress had already approved. That "new" spending allocates about $3 billion to restore and fortify damaged levees around New Orleans, and $8 billion in tax breaks to encourage the rebuilding of housing and businesses. A formal vote on the measure is pending.

With so much at stake, a reality check is in order to determine where we stand with regard to major aspects of the president's pledge, and how much more remains to be done.

"Our first commitment is to meet the immediate needs of those who had to flee their homes and leave all their possessions behind."

STATUS: Katrina displaced an estimated 400,000 people and destroyed more than 200,000 housing units. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying to house roughly 150,000 evacuees in hotel rooms, makeshift trailers and privately owned homes and apartments. A federal judge has ruled that evacuees can remain in hotels until Feb. 7, but it would be prudent to move them more quickly into much less expensive private residences.

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has years of experience in administering a successful housing voucher program, should take the lead. Congress has also agreed to set aside money to help 110,000 homeowners who lacked flood insurance.

"Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone, from roads and bridges to schools and water systems. Our goal is to get the work done quickly. And taxpayers expect this work to be done honestly and wisely — so we'll have a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures."

STATUS: Taxpayers already have plenty to be worried about. Despite inspectors general from at least 16 federal agencies scrutinizing spending, there's abundant evidence of profiteering, political favoritism, phony benefits claims and companies under investigation for outright fraud being awarded millions in no-bid contracts. As of October, 92 probes had been initiated into possible wrongdoing, 23 people have been arrested and 12 have been indicted, according to the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. More stringent oversight and tougher penalties are needed.

"As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region, as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

STATUS: After the federal government's tragically slow response to the hurricane and the human suffering it caused, the president sought to fend off criticisms that he was indifferent to the numbing poverty of its victims, especially blacks and other minorities in New Orleans. Bush deserves credit for raising the issue, but he hasn't done much else. The "bold action" he mentioned has, so far, not materialized.

"A number of states have taken in evacuees and shown them great compassion — admitting children to school and providing health care. So I will work with the Congress to ensure that states are reimbursed for these extra expenses."

STATUS: Georgia and other Southern states on the front lines of the storm have opened their arms and their schoolhouse doors to thousands of displaced Gulf Coast students. On Sunday, Congress agreed to appropriate $1.6 billion for education aid, which will include reimbursing local school districts that have absorbed out-of-state students.

As the school year wears on, the costs of teaching these students for their adoptive schools must be re-examined.

"I also want to know all the facts about the government response to Hurricane Katrina . . . It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces — the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

STATUS: A panel composed of House Republicans is investigating the lapses by FEMA and other agencies. But the Pentagon has been stonewalling and has refused to release requested documents. The chairman of the committee recently subpoenaed top officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This is shameful, and the president should order those in his administration who have stymied the investigation to comply immediately.

Make no mistake; the task of rebuilding New Orleans and other places hit by the hurricane will depend on the hard work of residents and the competence of those local officials elected to serve them.

There are many decisions — such as reforming corrupt levee boards and changing zoning codes to limit development in vulnerable areas — that are not up to the federal government. But the president's speech back in September underscored where the buck stops when it comes to most of the heavy lifting that will be required.

"When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as president, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution."

=================
Katrina Kids: The Power of Pencils

Newsweek
Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue
Jenny Hontz
msnbc.com, 12/21/05

Two weeks after Katrina, I drove a van full of supplies into Ocean Springs, Miss., a small town on the Gulf Coast where I graduated from high school. It was my first visit in nearly a decade, and as I passed my old house, I saw straight through my bedroom. The front wall was gone.

A tent city now covered the grounds of St. Paul's Church, the shelter where I took air mattresses and M&M's and hung out with the kids. Before my trip I'd asked Linda Chapman, an art therapist for pediatric trauma patients, what I could do that might help. She said to pack small paper and No. 2 pencils.

Given a choice of plain pencils, colored pencils and markers, kids who survive trauma often choose No. 2 pencils to keep the "affect" to a minimum. Color is just too emotional. Sitting at a table in the shelter cafeteria, the kids reached for the pencils and drew pictures of houses.

Maya, 10, and her brother J.J., 8, told me wind and rain had destroyed their home. J.J. looked shellshocked. Maya said the storm had been fun; she wasn't the slightest bit scared. J.J. drew a house and colored the roof a violent black. Maya sketched what her new home would look like, boasting it would be "bigger and better, with five bedrooms." But she kept ripping these happy endings in half, saying she'd messed up and had to start over.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10509920/site/newsweek/

=================
Katrina was weaker than first thought
Despite widespread destruction, storm was only a Category 3, study shows

The Associated Press
msnbc.com, Dec. 21, 2005

MIAMI - Researchers say Hurricane Katrina was a weaker storm than first thought when it slammed the Gulf Coast, with the strength of a Category 3 storm instead of a Category 4.

New data shows Katrina’s top winds were about 127 miles at impact, and that New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain were likely spared the storm’s strongest winds, according to the National Hurricane Center.

New Orleans’ storm levees were believed to be able to protect the city from the flooding of a Category 3 storm. But portions of the levee system were either topped or failed, leaving up to 80 percent of the city under water.

An investigation into why the system failed is under way. Jim Taylor, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the storm’s category downgrade won’t affected any proposed changes under debate.

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, said: “This news further highlights the need for a full federal commitment to build the highest level of protection through levees and coastal restoration for New Orleans, South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.”

Further study on the strength
Category 3 storms range from 111 mph to 130 mph, so Katrina was on the the strong side of that ranking. Category 4 storms run from 131 mph to 155 mph. Katrina was a top-scale Category 5 with 175-mph winds while in the Gulf of Mexico.

Forecasters revised the storm’s strength after studying data from devices that were dropped into Katrina from hurricane hunter aircraft, hurricane specialist Richard Knabb and forecasters Jamie Rhome and Daniel Brown said in the center’s final report.

The change also came from reviewing readings from a device called a stepped frequency microwave radiometer, which measures wind speed by examining how sea foam is blown. Radar images taken by hurricane hunter aircraft also were used.

Although an accurate reading of the highest winds in the New Orleans area were made difficult by the failure of measuring stations, a NASA facility in eastern New Orleans measured a sustained wind of only about 95 mph, the report said.

It was likely that most of the city experienced winds of Category 1 or 2 strength, a range from 74 mph to 110 mph, the report said, although winds on the upper floors of high-rise buildings could be up to a category higher.

Katrina killed more than 1,300 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia and Alabama. It is expected to cost insurers at least $34.4 billion in claims.

© 2005 The Associated Press.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10558235/

=================
December 21, 2005; NY Times
Editorial

The Poor Need Not Apply

On Sept. 15, speaking from New Orleans's Jackson Square, President Bush was eloquent: "As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well," he said. "We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."

Did the president really mean anything by those fine words? As Leslie Eaton and Ron Nixon reported <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/national/nationalspecial/15loans.html> in The Times last week, federal loans to rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina have been flowing to wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans but not to poor ones.

The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government's main disaster recovery program for both businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home loan applications it has received. And it has rejected a whopping 82 percent of those, a higher percentage than in previous disasters, on the grounds that applicants didn't have high enough incomes or good enough credit ratings.

That is exactly the kind of barrier to upward mobility that Mr. Bush talked about battering down. Poor people live from paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate assets. They let their water bill go unpaid one month so that they can pay their light bill. Their credit ratings tend to reflect that.

Those are basic truths that the Bush administration obviously understands. Yet it encouraged poor people to apply for low-interest loans to rebuild their homes while keeping rules that would make it clearly impossible for most of them to qualify. Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, according to the Times article, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank's. As a result, well-off neighborhoods have received 47 percent of the loan approvals, while poverty-stricken ones have gotten 7 percent.

No one expects the government to squander tax dollars on bad loans. But there are ways around that, through grants, for instance, and looser standards for the many who straddle the shoulders of good credit and bad credit. Otherwise, the administration has engaged in the worst kind of cruelty - one that encourages the poor to think help is on the way, then swats down anyone who actually requests the promised assistance.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
Radical overhaul of FEMA under consideration
Homeland security chief says disaster response has been inadequate

The Associated Press
msnbc.com, Dec. 20, 2005

WASHINGTON - The government may have to radically change FEMA, the agency that proved unprepared to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday.

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, which battered Gulf Coast states over an eight-week period, stretched the agency “beyond the breaking point,” Chertoff said in a public review of his department’s 2005 performance.

“We will retool FEMA, maybe even radically, to increase our ability to deal with catastrophic events,” he said in a 35-minute speech at George Washington University. Chertoff offered no specifics for changing the Federal Emergency Management Agency but said FEMA employees must be given authority to cut through bureaucracy to assist disaster victims quickly.

His aides said changes will come early next year.

It was unclear whether any of the changes will require legislative action, or if Chertoff will move before Congress returns to Washington in late January. A special House inquiry of the government’s response to Katrina, chaired by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., is expected to issue its findings by Feb. 15.

Additionally, the White House is completing its own review of federal preparations and response to Katrina, an extraordinarily powerful storm that hit Aug. 29. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that “certainly, some of the recommendations will be related to FEMA.”

Homeland Security and FEMA were widely blamed for the government’s sluggish response to Katrina, which left some victims without food, water and safe shelter for days. The criticism led to the resignation of FEMA Director Michael Brown, who had limited disaster response experience.

© 2005 The Associated Press.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

=================
Learning How to Hope
Amid the heartache—feelings that can lead to tears in an instant—a few rays of winter sun are slipping through.

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue

msnbc.com, 12/19/05

New Orleans in December is cool and dry, and the 20 percent that wasn't flooded seems normal enough. But the pictures don't even begin to convey the scope of what 17 days of standing water will do to the delicate ecosystem of a metropolis. More than 50 million cubic yards of debris have already been picked up, including 100,000 useless refrigerators—that's 34 normal years of garbage in just three months.

Every day brings more mounds of tangled possessions and sundry junk, the stuffing of a city. I rode with a nonprofit group called Share Our Strength past the thousands of abandoned cars and handwritten WE TEAR DOWN HOUSES signs at intersections that still have no working stoplights; past the still-mysterious levee breaks and reopened Wal-Marts; past mile after eerie mile of homes and stores that for a moment look habitable enough, until you see the thick layers of dust and mold and grimy water lines four or six or eight feet up, a sure indication that the place is a total loss.

So the gutting of New Orleans has begun, but not the renovation. Why build anything yet? The place is on hold: gumbo limbo. Residents and their insurers are all waiting to see if the federal Army Corps of Engineers (responsible for the faulty levees in the first place) will fulfill its promise and at least minimally secure the city by the time the hurricane season begins again next June. The original estimate was that two thirds of the city's 450,000 people would return and one third would stay away. Now those numbers have been flipped, though no one actually has a clue.

The housing situation is a scandal. Of the 73,000 trailers needed, only 14,700 have arrived. And the trailer parks, while peaceful now, have the frustrated feel of future Gaza Strips. I toured "Renaissance Village"—a Baton Rouge trailer park with 1,600 people (the largest so far) which FEMA fobbed off on a subpar subcontractor. It still had no place for the residents to even pick up their mail, much less any real services. FEMA remains a disaster area, trashed in every conversation. One prominent Louisianan recalled how, just after the storm, physicians from Doctors Without Borders were told they could not give treatment to moaning victims lying on the tarmac at Louis Armstrong airport because the doctors were not FEMA-certified.

But amid all the heartache—the still-raw feelings that can lead to tears in an instant—a few tiny rays of winter sun are slipping through. Newly created institutions like the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps and the Louisiana Recovery Authority are beginning to cut through the chaos to supervise better and plan rationally. About three months late, President Bush finally appointed a federal coordinator, Donald Powell, who doesn't have the clout that a big name would have brought but whose background in banking is appropriate to the tangled reconstruction challenge. Most encouraging, the hurricane blew away the New Orleans school district, a cesspool of corruption and neglect that made local schools among the worst in the country. With the entrenched bureaucrats and teachers-union hacks scattered to the winds, the state legislature took the opportunity to strip them of all their power.

This offers what Tony Recasner, the principal of the New Orleans Charter Middle School, calls a "magic moment" for major change. Almost all the schools that will begin reopening in 2006 (mostly in the fall) will be charter schools, where everyone works on one-year contracts (full accountability) and the principal can actually run the school. "This gives us an opportunity to fix each school as it comes back on line," says Recasner, who already has an impressive track record of academic achievement in his school. "We get to create something from our own imagination and ask: what is this going to be?"

The answer, ideally, would be a series of KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools. The nearly 50 KIPP schools around the country have an astonishing record of academic success with low-income students, not with shortcuts but with a disciplined "be nice, work hard" program. While KIPP has only one New Orleans school planned and not nearly enough leaders in its pipeline yet, Recasner and the other avatars of local school reform are eager to adapt the model. The challenge is to get the right leadership in. And because the system will go from 60,000 students to about 20,000 next fall, New Orleans will have the perfect size for a true national experiment with school reform.

Randy Ewing, the chairman of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, says, "Our mind-set is not to return people to normal, because normal wasn't too good. Our challenge is to take them to a better life." That will take time, but it should not be seen as impossible.

2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10511929/site/newsweek/

=================
New Orleans' historic streetcars return

Associated Press
usatoday, 12/18/05

NEW ORLEANS — The clackety-clack is officially back. New Orleans on Sunday resumed its streetcar service, which had been out of commission since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the utility poles and metal tracks used to propel the city's trademark mode of transportation.

Car number 930, adorned with holiday garland and red ribbon, was the first to roll out from the French Market post at 7 a.m.

"It has taken so much to get here," said Regional Transit Authority spokeswoman Rosalind Blanco Cook. "Evaluating the cars, trying to get the cars on different routes and getting the operators back — it took a lot of work."

Six of the 35 historic New Orleans streetcars that before Hurricane Katrina ran along St. Charles Avenue — the oldest continuously operating streetcar line in the world — operated Sunday along the Mississippi Riverfront line and part of the Canal Street line. There were two backup cars on the tracks as well.

The newer red cars that usually travel those routes were severely damaged by floodwaters and are not in service. The New Orleans City Council had to pass an ordinance allowing the RTA to move the older green cars, which date back to the 1920s, to the new routes.

The RTA is providing free bus service on the St. Charles route, whose infrastructure is not yet ready for streetcar service, Cook said. She said it's unclear when the service, which runs through the city's Garden District, past mansions and Audubon Park, will resume.

The riverfront line was added in 1988 and the Canal Street line, which was abandoned 40 years ago, was restored in 2004.

Clarence Glover, who has driven streetcars for 22 years, was instructing conductor Jerry Duplessis on Sunday's first run. Before Katrina, Duplessis drove the newer cars, which had more automatic features. He had to be briefed on the older cars' manual components, such as a foot pump that drops sand on the tracks for traction as the car comes to a stop. The newer cars drop sand automatically, Glover said.

Getting conductors back into the city was part of the battle to resume streetcar service. Many RTA workers, including Cook, are living on a cruise ship docked at the riverfront after their homes were destroyed by Katrina's winds Aug. 29 and subsequent flooding.

Glover, whose home in eastern New Orleans was flooded, left his wife and daughter with family in Houston to return to his job. He's currently living in a hotel until he finds something more permanent.

Duplessis, whose home was deluged as well, said he is living with family in Avondale.

As the streetcar rolled Sunday, several bystanders waved and took pictures. A handful hopped on board. Kurt Hampton, a self-proclaimed "streetcar buff" who lives in suburban Metairie, said he woke up early to come into the city and see the first car roll.

He was glad he remembered to bring his camera when barely five minutes into the first run, car 930 came to a halt — a car parked near Jax Brewery in the French Quarter was too close to the tracks for the streetcar to pass. So, in typical New Orleans fashion, a policeman, some RTA workers and even a couple of passengers helped bounce it away from the tracks. The vehicle was later towed.

"This is the kind of job where you have to have a sense of humor," Glover said, chuckling as the streetcar continued its route.

Passengers talked of friends and family, the chilly weather and about how good it felt to have a little piece of New Orleans back.

Alan Drake, whose lower Garden District home fared well, said he "couldn't resist being here." He said he was among the first passengers to ride the Canal Street line when it launched last year.

"I love the great positives about this city, and this is one of its great positives," he said.

Hampton, who works for Cox Media, said he's been commuting to Baton Rouge since his New Orleans office was relocated there after the storm. When his office returns in January, he said he plans to take advantage of the free streetcar service being offered until March.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

=================
Michael Chertoff: 'What The Hell Is Going On?'
In Washington, a struggle to find answers to terrible questions.

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek
Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue

msnbc.com, 12/18/05

The lowest moment, Michael Chertoff recalls, came at about 2 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 1, three days after Katrina struck. An NPR interviewer asked the secretary of Homeland Security what he was doing about the thousands of people stranded at the Convention Center. Chertoff had no good answer. Hanging up from the interview, he turned and said to an aide, "What the hell is going on with the Convention Center?" Chertoff called his beleaguered FEMA chief, Mike Brown, and was told that there were only 1,500 people there. He ordered Homeland Security's Operations Center to "get some eyeballs" on the situation. Still, the answer came back: only 1,500 people. On the third go-round, Chertoff asked the head of the Federal Protection Service to take a look personally. This time the reported number shot up, to 10,000 to 15,000. Why the discrepancy? The earlier inspectors had failed to look in rooms "deep inside the building," says Chertoff.

It may seem remarkable that the secretary of Homeland Security had to be told by a radio reporter what was going on, and more incredible that it took three tries for his own people to catch up. But Katrina was a case study in how not to handle a disaster. "We weren't where we needed to be," acknowledges Chertoff. His department was in the midst of something called "second-stage review" on disaster planning, and FEMA, he says, lacked "the skill set" to do "preparedness." Pre-Katrina, Chertoff himself appeared to have been more focused on exotic threats from a bio-warfare attack by terrorists than storm damage from hurricanes.

Monday afternoon, after Katrina hit, Chertoff believed that the storm had been "bad" but not "quite as bad" as it might have been, and that the flooding was "manageable." He was not told that a FEMA official, Marty Bahamonde, had seen the levee breach on Monday afternoon and sent frantic e-mails to his bosses at FEMA. Reached by NEWSWEEK, Bahamonde said, "I've been asking myself the same question. Why didn't the information get through?"

A congressional investigating committee has released some embarrassing e-mails that suggest FEMA Director Brown was oddly detached from the urgency of the disaster. For instance, at 11:20 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 30, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown, "Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical ... thousands in the streets with no food and water ... estimates that many will die within hours." Less than three hours later, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, was asking her colleagues to get more time for Brown to eat dinner because Baton Rouge restaurants were getting busy and "he needs much more than 20 or 30 minutes."

Brown did not reply to NEWSWEEK's request for an interview, but he earlier told "Frontline" that he had received conflicting information on the scale of the disaster. By numerous accounts, there was considerable tension between state and federal officials in Baton Rouge, which added to the confusion and miscommunication. Bureaucratic resentment clouded relations between FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. Brown apparently resented that FEMA lost its cabinet-level status when it was folded into DHS after 9/11; according to his e-mails, he regarded his role as the "Principal Federal Officer" during the crisis as a "demotion."

In Washington, Chertoff was left groping for information. During the day on Tuesday, he recalls, "I'd ask, 'When did the levees break?' and I'd hear a dozen different stories." Chertoff says his first "big twinge" that things were not going well came when "I tried to reach [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin on Tuesday and couldn't get him." On Thursday, Chertoff was unable to find out how many buses had reached the Superdome to evacuate people. He says he received a "big jolt" that day when the National Guard told FEMA that it could no longer guarantee the safety of agency personnel. The tightly controlled former prosecutor began showing his emotions. "On Wednesday, you could hear this impatience in his voice," says his spokesman, Brian Besanceney. "By Friday, he was p---ed off."

By this time, Chertoff was beginning to wonder if Brown was the man for the job—"some people just shut down" was the way Chertoff put it. He decided to effectively shove Brown aside for the more capable commander of the Coast Guard, Adm. Thad Allen. On Sunday, Chertoff went to visit the Superdome, which had finally been evacuated. He was overwhelmed by the stench and lasted 10 minutes. "It was not a place you'd want to linger," he said. For many nights thereafter, he would wake up at 4 a.m., "replaying things—could we have done them better?" He concluded that he needed "better situational awareness" and that the Feds needed to be better prepared "for panic." No "second-stage review" required to figure that out.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10511927/site/newsweek/from/RS.2/

=================
Taken by Storm
The hurricane was just the start. How Katrina shook a family, a cop, an art dealer and a pol.

By Evan Thomas
Newsweek, Dec. 26, 2005 - Jan 2, 2006 issue

msnbc.com, 12/18/05

Hurricane Katrina was less than 24 hours away. The Category 5 hurricane threatened to overwhelm the dikes surrounding the city, much of which sits below sea level. The mayor had ordered a mandatory evacuation. Who would choose to stick around?

On Lizardi Street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, plenty of people. The weather was clear and sunny that Sunday afternoon, Aug. 28, and children were playing in the yard while their parents chatted on their porches or worked on their cars, NFL preseason games blaring on the radio. Lisa Moore, 37, says that she was in church with her husband, Larry Morgan, and never heard the mayor's warning. "We didn't think it was going to be that bad," she says. Besides, they had no place to go. "New Orleans is our home, our culture," says Lisa. "It's everything." Larry and Lisa, who have been together since she was 18, have 10 children, ages 2 to 18. Before Katrina, they "had a good life with beaucoup stuff," says Lisa. There was the widescreen TV, their favorite spicy foods (red beans and rice) and federally subsidized rent (only $280 a month) for their large, yellow four-bedroom house. On most Sundays, Larry donned a white suit and top hat and waved feathered fans as a member of a "second-line club" that marches in jazz funerals (the "main line" is the grieving family; in the "second line" come the friends and revelers). Larry, who could make $2,500 a month as a roofer, could make hundreds more marching behind coffins. Even though Lisa and her family lived in the city's most impoverished neighborhood, they never felt poor in New Orleans. "That's why they called it the Big Easy," says Lisa.

Charles Davis III came to the Big Easy 30 years ago and never wanted to live anywhere else. One of the world's leading African-art dealers, Davis, 60, lives in a 160-year-old Greek Revival mansion with thick white Corinthian columns on the high ground along the banks of the Mississippi. He is a member of one of the city's exclusive Mardi Gras clubs, or "krewes" (sworn to secrecy, he couldn't say which one), and a lover of the city's tradition of art, music, food and bacchanal. He is an adventurer who has been jailed by corrupt cops in Tanzania and threatened by nomadic tribesmen in the Sahara. In New Orleans, he prefers living in a mixed-race neighborhood, though he says he sometimes feels vulnerable as a white man and keeps a gun for security.

On the Saturday before the storm, he was driving back into New Orleans from his country house, partly to protect his valuable art collection, but also, he later admitted, to satisfy "an insane curiosity. I wanted to see what would happen." He did feel a little uneasy as he drove across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway on Saturday morning, cruising alone in the southbound lanes while the traffic was bumper-to-bumper leaving the city. "One wonders about one's sanity when you're the only fool rushing toward the inevitable," he recalls.

There was something touching, if slightly daft, about the willingness of New Orleanians, rich and poor, black and white, to hang on to their city that Sunday in late August, when it was so ominously threatened by Hurricane Katrina. But the essence that bound Lisa Moore and Charles Davis to their city—New Orleans's "funk," as Davis calls it—was a gossamer veneer in the face of a monster storm. And some of the city's less desirable cultural attributes—fatalism, racial suspicions and a got-mine, feuding political culture—both put lives at risk and continues to jeopardize the city's effort to rebuild.

Hurricane Katrina would have physically ripped apart any city, much less one situated in a bowl surrounded by dikes designed to withstand only a lesser storm. But New Orleans is not just any city. It is a quirky, noble, damned expression of the best and worst in human nature. To tell the story of the storm and its aftermath, NEWSWEEK reconstructed the challenging, sometimes harrowing experiences of Moore and Davis and two of the public servants sworn to protect them: New Orleans Police Capt. Tim Bayard and New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas. Theirs is a tale of bravery and foolhardiness, resourcefulness and lassitude, spur-of-the-moment competence and deep institutional ineptitude.

New Orleans's own story may yet have a happy ending—a city rebuilt and reborn, a bit smaller (and drier), perhaps, but still vibrant. Yet the cultural flaws that weakened New Orleans before Katrina's blast also threaten to undermine the city's renewal.

When Lisa Moore put her family to bed on the night before the storm, her eldest, Ranlisha, stayed awake, sitting nervously on the porch as the wind began to pick up. At about 11 p.m., electrical wires began snapping and tree branches rattled off the house. As glass shattered around them, Lisa and Larry herded their kids into closets on the second floor. "It felt like the whole house was coming loose," Lisa remembers.

The floodwaters arrived in the morning. The levee on the Industrial Canal that protects the Lower Ninth failed. On Lizardi Street, floating cars thumped against houses. Murky water gushed into Lisa and Larry's home, like a giant toilet overflowing. "All of a sudden, the icebox started moving, the sofa started moving, the freezer, everything," Ranlisha recalls. As the water churned up the stairs, the family scrambled up a ladder into the attic. The storm tore off the roof piece by piece; as Lisa and the children screamed, they were pelted by pink chunks of insulation, which burned their skin. When the eye of the storm passed, everyone "got very quiet," says Lisa. "We wanted to survive."

By late afternoon, a blazing sun was burning through the holes in the roof. The younger children were vomiting. The day passed; then a night and another day. Larry managed to fish a can of fruit cocktail out of the muck and gouged it open with his keys. He tried to dribble juice onto the cracked lips of Irielle, the 2-year-old, who was badly dehydrated. Calls to 911 were useless; overwhelmed, the emergency operators told them just to stay on the roof. The family waved a red sweater at a passing helicopter. "We had to damn near cry and scream, and no one could come get us," Lisa recalled many weeks later, her bitterness welling up.

Some eight miles away, in uptown New Orleans, Charles Davis had felt fairly confident. His mansion was nine feet above sea level, he had 10 cases of bottled water and three freezers full of game, including trout, wild duck and venison. His canned goods were more haute cuisine than survivalist—artichoke hearts and coconut milk, instead of beans. "I rather screwed that up," Davis later reflected. But at about 4 a.m. on Monday, he figured he had weathered the worst of Katrina and called his wife, Kent, who was with their daughter in Jackson, Miss. "Hey, this ain't so bad," he told her. "Well, no, it's not so bad," she replied. "It's still 150 miles south of you. "

Davis was dumbstruck. The full fury struck after dawn and kept up for nine more hours. Davis's massive, 6,500-square-foot mansion began to shake convulsively. Only later did he discover that a huge sycamore tree had split and lodged itself in the roof. The embedded trunk and foliage were acting like a mast and sail, catching the wind and threatening to tear the roof off. "When is this s.o.b. going to run out?" Davis recalls thinking as he lay in his basement. At about 4 p.m. on Monday, Davis finally poked his head outside. The street, Louisiana Avenue, was a "flowing green river, just an absolutely verdant landscape. It was like the Amazon Basin."

The city government of New Orleans was slow to grasp the full measure of the calamity. On Tuesday morning, Oliver Thomas was asleep in his office at city hall downtown. The president of the city council thought his city had survived. "We got some water here," Thomas told Det. Wilbert Theodore, head of the protection detail for all city council members. "But it'll be going down pretty soon. Everybody better go home." In truth, Thomas had little idea what was going on in the city. Communications had completely broken down, and he was guessing.

A garrulous bear of a man with a hearty laugh, Thomas, 48, was born to New Orleans politics. His aunt Leontine Luke, a Pentecostal Baptist minister and head of the citywide PTA, ran the Lower Ninth Ward machine for at least a generation. With a hand from Aunt Leontine, Thomas had won a seat on the city council in 1994 and never left. Having grown up surrounded by addicts and alcoholics, Thomas drinks virgin daiquiris. He is a student of the town's dysfunctions in other ways, too. "New Orleans is one of the few towns that's known for sore winners," he says, "and I think it's why the community has been so left behind. Especially in the African-American community. The black political leadership here, they spend eternity fighting against each other. Twenty-year-old vendettas never go away. Let's stick together? Not in New Orleans. Not in New Orleans. It's a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys."

For years, the African-American community was divided between the Creoles, light-skinned blacks who were skilled laborers—carpenters, masons and artisans—and sometimes "passed" for white, and darker-skinned blacks relegated to more menial work or unemployment. Today Creole is "more a state of mind" than a skin color, says Thomas; still, sharp divisions persist. Mayor Ray Nagin is a light-skinned black and former corporate executive who had won election in 2002 by making common cause with the white business establishment. He is not close to Thomas or the council members who represent poor black wards like the Lower Ninth. During the storm, Nagin and his crowd holed up at the Hyatt Hotel; Thomas and other city council members stayed at city hall. Communication between them would have required an effort that neither side was willing to make. (Nagin told NEWSWEEK he tried to keep the city council "in the loop," but "under a state of emergency I gotta make decisions and get to them in the back end.") In the Machiavellian world of Louisiana politics, there was also little contact or cooperation between Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who was still mad at Nagin for backing her opponent in the 2004 election. For at least the first few days after the storm, there was no effective command structure. Too often, city cops, firefighters and rescue workers were essentially on their own.

The Big Easy has always been an ethnic gumbo, a strange stew of live-and-let-live and racial tension. Mostly black run-down housingprojects sit in uneasy proximity to the mostly white French Quarter and Garden District. Working-class whites have gradually moved out of the Ninth Ward as blacks have moved in. About 20 years ago the New Orleans police force had to be compelled by court order to integrate its mostly white force to roughly 50-50 white and black (the city is 70 percent black).

Big and burly, Police Capt. Tim Bayard, 49, was born of mostly French heritage in the Upper Ninth Ward. He gets along with everyone, calling middle-aged women he never met "baby" or "girlfriend." As head of the Vice and Narcotics units, he was proud to note that only one of his 50 cops fled without permission during Hurricane Katrina (overall, about a seventh of the 1,606-person force failed to report for duty). As he cruised New Orleans on Monday afternoon, he wasn't too sure how bad the damage was, until he heard an exchange on the police radio. A fellow policeman was trapped in the attic of his house in New Orleans East, an area just above the Lower Ninth. His voice beginning to crack, the cop reported that the water was up to his chest. "I can't get out, I can't get out," he cried. A police captain calmly told him to use his service revolver to shoot a hole in the roof. The man did so and narrowly escaped. Bayard looked at his second in command, Lt. Mike Montalbano. "God looked out for him, brother," Bayard murmured.

Bayard's mission in the hurricane was to run boats rescuing people from their houses. Sometime after 4 p.m., he arrived at the St. Claude Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal separating Lower Ninth from the rest of the city, expecting to have a flotilla at his command. He had figured that emergency officials would pre-position dozens of boats on high ground, ready to launch. But there weren't any boats.

Over the next several hours, Bayard cobbled together a grand fleet of five vessels of varying sizes and seaworthiness. One belonged to his cousin. They began pulling people out of their houses in the Ninth Ward, an area with a normal population of 20,000, one by one.

For the next 14 days, Bayard and his cops would work virtually around the clock. Bayard was proud of their staying power. When the city offered cops a free trip to Las Vegas after one week of work, every one of Bayard's 50 officers turned down the RR to stay on the job. The duty was desperate at times. There was the frightened call from a cop at a local hospital telling Bayard that the generator was 15 minutes from running out of fuel—dooming 15 to 20 patients on life support. A wild search through back alleys for spare gas cans saved the day, barely. There was a helicopter trip over the city that left Bayard badly shaken; the water, as it coursed into the Lower Ninth, was so deep that white caps formed on the waves. When Bayard's chopper put down beside the Superdome, he noticed exceedingly long lines snaking from the bathrooms. "There ain't no water," he recalls thinking. "Where's it all going to go?" The emergency planners had apparently forgotten to ask that question. There was not a portable toilet in sight.

Bayard was worried about growing violence in the city. There were reports of people shooting at helicopters and hijacking rescue boats. Edgy policemen were starting to pull their weapons on each other. At the Elysian Fields Avenue on-ramp to Interstate 10, Bayard was approached by a young man looking for trouble. "You know," said the man, "I been sitting up here all this time, but I bet you if I was out here fighting and clowning, you'd have all kinds of police to pick us up." The man pushed a little further. "That's what we ought to do," he said, "we ought to start fighting."

Bayard looked at him. "I'm going to tell you right now," he said, "if you get everybody up and hollering, the first one who is going to catch a bullet is you. You're going to make me blow your f---ing head off."

Bayard looked at the man's friends. "And if anybody else jumps up, I got 14 more rounds, so that will be 14 of you motherf-----s dead before you get me."

Someone in the crowd of older people piped up, "You better leave that police alone."

The young men drifted off.

Uptown, Charles Davis was listening to the radio reports of looting by armed gangs. Much of the chatter, Davis would later realize, was hype and urban myth. But he could see out his own window that looting was rampant. The first looter he saw was a white guy with a shopping cart who shouted to him, "You've got to get to Wal-Mart because it's wide open." There was a steady procession of looters coming and going from the Wal-Mart a dozen blocks away.

Soon a more menacing presence appeared: convoys of cars with stereos blasting and occupants who seemed bent on no good. Davis armed himself with a .25-caliber Beretta pistol, a .32 Colt automatic and a shotgun. (He declined an Army friend's suggestion that he sleep in the center hall of his house, so he could shoot "fore and aft," and line the ground with broken glass so he could hear an intruder's approach.) If he spied suspicious characters as he worked on his roof, he would yell, "Hey, you don't belong here! Get out of here!" When he ventured out, he wore a gun on his hip. He finally relaxed a little on the Friday after the storm when the police showed up—not the New Orleans PD, but some cops from Southfield, Mich., guns at the ready. "They were expecting to get fire," Davis says.

It wasn't until that Friday that the U.S. military arrived in force to help Captain Bayard's rescue operation. A Special Forces captain asked Bayard where he kept the maps. Bayard said he didn't have any maps. He had been keeping a running list in his head of neighborhoods that had been covered by his men. The captain asked Bayard which areas had been covered by other rescue units, like the state Wildlife and Fisheries people. Bayard said he had no idea—the police radio system had failed Tuesday, making communications virtually impossible. "There's no coordination," he said. Bayard could tell that the captain was appalled, but was too circumspect to do anything more than shake his head.

Late on Wednesday, Aug. 31, rescuers finally arrived for Lisa Moore and Larry Morgan. A Coast Guard helicopter lowered a basket over their torn, sunbaked rooftop, and the pilot signaled "five" with his fingers. Lisa gently transferred her four youngest into the basket and tried to climb in with them. The pilot gestured her away. Larry quickly grabbed their 13-year-old son, O'Neil, the quiet, responsible one in the family, and helped him into the basket, telling him to watch out for his brothers and sisters until the rest of the family could catch up.

As the helicopter took off, boats arrived below. The rest of the family—Lisa and her two teenage daughters, Ranlisha and Juleisha, and son Little Larry, 14—clambered into one boat, and Larry, Lisa's mother and the other children into another boat. The flotilla made its way through the sea of devastation that had once been the Lower Ninth. Ranlisha later described what she saw floating by: "dead bodies, dead babies, people falling with epileptic seizures, dogs, cars, houses, tree branches."

In the chaos, the family lost track of each other. Larry and his group wound up at the Superdome. "I was just walking around, asking everyone, everyone, 'Have you seen my kids?' " The 'Dome was the first ring of hell, as Larry later described it. "I saw four babies die of dehydration right in front of me. There were two dead older ladies. I saw a man cut another man's throat." He says he witnessed a National Guardsman get shot in the leg trying to apprehend the knife-wielding man.

Lisa and her group ended up at the Convention Center, about a mile away. She says she paced the feces-smeared floor all night. Somewhere nearby, she says, she could hear a girl crying as she was being raped. Her own children were too traumatized to eat. Mostly, she agonized about her youngest children, who seemed to have vanished into the sky. Weeks later, the thought that they had been dropped off by the helicopter in the middle of nowhere brought her to tears. "How could they have left my babies like that?" she says angrily. "Why would they do that to my children?"

The president of the New Orleans City Council felt powerless. On Tuesday, Oliver Thomas had fled the rising tide to Baton Rouge, but every day he rode down I-10 to see what he could do, which was not much. On Thursday's trip, Thomas's black SUV sped past some 75 touring buses idling in a casino parking lot 20 minutes outside the city. Thomas was traveling with a couple of state legislators from the Lower Ninth, who started yelling. "Why the hell are they there?" one demanded. "Damn," said Thomas, "they're saying the buses can't get in the city, we're driving in and out, and all these buses are just sitting there? Why aren't the buses taking the same route we're taking?"

The lawmakers exited off I-10 in front of the Convention Center. An unruly crowd was swirling around any car that appeared, in the hope of catching a ride with an unwary driver, who in all likelihood would lose his car if he stopped. The men inside Thomas's SUV were silent at first. There was no sign of police or military. "Get off this street!" Thomas commanded the driver. "Just get off this street, just get off this street!" The driver jerked the car onto a side street, where they were confronted with the sight of an attractive middle-class woman dropping her jeans and squatting to empty her bowels. "Oh, my God," said the driver. "I can't believe what I'm seeing," said Thomas.

Private relief organizations finally brought Lisa and Larry back together again. The children taken off the roof by helicopter—13-year-old O'Neil and the four little ones—were dropped off on a levee and told to walk the five blocks to a sports field at St. Claude Avenue. They were only five blocks from their mother, but they didn't know that, and somehow wound up on a bus for Houma, La., 50 miles away. So began a nine-day odyssey that remains a bit of a blur. There was foster care with a "Miss Vickie" and then a "Miss Amy"; along the way, O'Neil collected a large duffel bag filled with clothes, toys, diapers, even some CDs. An astonishingly composed eighth grader, O'Neil took care of his 2-year-old sister, who recovered from her dehydration but clung to her brother, and their siblings.

Meanwhile, Lisa and her brood and Larry had been transported to Texas—Lisa to Austin, Larry to the Astrodome in Houston. On Tuesday, Sept. 6, they were reunited in Austin. Lisa had put the names of her children into a database kept by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, one of the many charitable organizations that helped in Katrina's wake. In Baton Rouge, a social worker who had been calling around trying to find the children's parents heard of the National Center's database, and within five minutes she had a match. The National Center works with a group of retired law-enforcement officials called Team Adam (named after the murdered son of "America's Most Wanted's" John Walsh), which in the weeks after the storm called on a network of 6,000 volunteer pilots called Angel Flight America to reunite children and parents. On a night in mid-September, Lisa and Larry's five missing kids, accompanied by a NEWSWEEK reporter, were flown from Baton Rouge in two small planes to Austin. There were hugs and whoops of joy as members of the family collapsed into each other's arms, but Lisa seemed dazed. She had been unable to eat, sleep or cry. She was furious that her children had been left alone after the initial rescue. "How could they have done that, seeing those children were all by themselves?" she told the reporter. "That's the thing that really p---es me off."

A four-bedroom apartment was found for the family on the outskirts of Austin. "It was like a prison," says Larry. The landlord didn't want their children playing in the yard, even though he had no problem with Hispanic kids playing there, according to Lisa and Larry. "The people there were just plain nasty," says Lisa. A new apartment was found and paid for by the city of Austin. But Larry was frustrated and bored, and Lisa was anxious and depressed. Their kids seemed to settle in at school, but the older girls were shocked by the number of unwed mothers in the student body. "The Hispanics," says Larry, as if no other explanation is needed. Larry missed marching in the second line and says he couldn't get a roofing job without speaking Spanish.

The kids were still shaken. O'Neil was even quieter than usual. Asked if he wanted to go back to New Orleans, he shook his head no. Prodded by his sister, he admitted what he dreams. "I keep hearing that wind," he said. One of Lisa's teenage daughters is afraid to leave the house. Lisa worries the whole family needs therapy, but she doesn't know where to find it.

On Nov. 8 the couple accepted an invitation, extended by Mayor Nagin on television, to "come on home." Larry, Lisa and her cousin Virginia made the eight-hour drive from Austin to see for themselves how the cleanup was going. The Lower Ninth was the only district that still looked like a war zone. Houses were shattered, trees uprooted. Everything looked gray or brown, caked with dried-out canal sludge. Sealed off by National Guard troops, the Lower Ninth could be visited only by buses leaving from checkpoints for somewhat ghoulishly named "look-and-leave tours."

Larry, Lisa and Virginia were stunned by the topsy-turvy moonscape of their former neighborhood. There were houses on top of trucks; refrigerators on top of cars; roofs in the middle of the street; upside-down cars impaled by tree branches and broken telephone poles. "Ain't no one coming back here," said Virginia. In the back seat, Lisa sat silent and wide-eyed.

Their house had slid off its foundations. Its windows were shattered. In what used to be the living room, the big-screen TV was lying face down in the muck. The furniture was covered with black mold. Flies were buzzing. Upstairs, however, in a closet, Larry found Ranlisha's new clothes, designer purse and shoe collection neatly stowed in plastic tubs high on a shelf. She had bought them with paychecks earned at Wal-Mart to run for homecoming queen.

Telephone poles were plastered with signs advertising a class-action lawsuit. Larry walked over and jotted down the toll-free number. No telling who was being sued, or for what, or by whom, but Larry wanted a piece of it. Virginia grabbed a piece of notebook paper and wrote down the number. "Someone's gonna pay," she muttered. "This city is cursed," said Lisa. "God was angry." Later that day Lisa and Virginia stocked up on red beans and headed back to Austin.

Back in Austin, Lisa seemed briefly happy to be out of New Orleans. "There's nothing to go back to," she says. On the other hand, she couldn't imagine life without Mardi Gras and Larry's second-line parades. They had heard talk that the city would be rebuilt without its low-lying but historic areas like the Lower Ninth. Renewing the city without its black folk made no sense to Larry and Lisa. "The heart of the city is jazz," says Lisa. "No one can do that better than African-Americans." An uncle talked about the time during Hurricane Betsy in 1965 when "they" blew up the levees to flood the Lower Ninth and save the business district. Someone let a barge go through the levee this time, he says. (A National Science Foundation study later found that the levee collapse was caused by soil failure, not by the drifting barge.)

New Orleans has a long and unhelpful history of urban mythology. City council president Thomas says, "I'm not a conspiracy theorist." He knew that those stories of a white plot to dynamite the levees during Hurricane Betsy were imagined. But delay after delay in restoring water, power and sewer services to the Lower Ninth had him wondering about the aftermath of Katrina.

At the first meeting of Mayor Nagin's redevelopment commission, Thomas decided to put rebuilding the Lower Ninth to a vote. He voiced a motion that stated that the commission supported the redevelopment of every neighborhood in New Orleans. The resolution passed. But in December, he was still hearing national politicians and local business people question whether it was worth rebuilding the Lower Ninth. Rather than erecting massive levees to guard against a Category 5 hurricane, these voices argued, better to let at least a part of the Lower Ninth again become the cypress swamp it once was. The city, they insisted, would still have a large black population, though not as large. (Mayor Nagin has acknowledged that some residents of the Lower Ninth may not be able to rebuild for "economic reasons"—because of the high cost of erecting above-sea-level foundations required by new FEMA rules—but he has been reluctant to flatly write off low-level areas, most of which were occupied by blacks.)

President George W. Bush himself came to New Orleans to dine with Nagin's commission in early October. Bush charmed Thomas. "I was ready not to like him," Thomas said the morning after the dinner, "because of what the Democrats said about him. But he likes people. He's not a mean dude. He's not a racist." Thomas recalls that Bush told him, "I really love this city. When I was younger, I couldn't remember how much fun I had because I was drunk all the time. But since I've been sober, I still like it."

At the dinner, a lavish but informal affair at a French Quarter hotel, Barbara Major, co-chair of the mayor's commission, did not mince words. A small black woman, she lectured the president: "My folk need to know that the federal government is going to support rebuilding a place that they can come back to. If you're going to rebuild it without black people, it's not going to be New Orleans."

"I agree," Bush said. But he warned that in order to get Congress to appropriate the money, New Orleans and the state of Louisiana had to be united on what they really needed. "There's too much infighting with the mayor and the governor and the council and the congressional delegation," the president said, according to Thomas. "You need to have one agenda and everybody buys into it and has an idea how much it's going to cost and phase that thing in. If that happens, I'll support it."

Bush concluded, "I will come back." On a Sunday in mid-December, Thomas sat in Celebration Church with the First Lady, Laura Bush, and enlisted her help on extending temporary housing for evacuees. "I got a sense that Laura and her husband really do care about us," says Thomas. In mid-December the White House announced that the Feds would double the amount already promised to fix the city's levees, to $3.1 billion.

Congressional leaders have been waiting for Louisiana and New Orleans to come together on a single—and affordable—plan to rebuild the city. Louisiana's long and well-deserved reputation for corruption has made lawmakers wary that federal funds would be wasted. Ironically, both Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin are self-styled reformers—not old-style machine pols. Their problem may be too much emphasis on openness and consensus. Nonetheless, behind-the-scenes negotiations aimed at producing a workable master plan have been making some progress, and the new year could bring renewed hope for breaking through the political logjam.

In some ways, life in the Big Easy was returning to normal. On an afternoon in mid-November, Capt. Tim Bayard was running a sting operation to catch prostitutes. In the absence of tourists, the contractors and construction workers filling the hotels were keeping the hookers busy. One of Bayard's vice-squad officers had posed as a john to hook up with an escort service, and Bayard and several of his men burst into the hotel room where the sting was going down. A nude woman, very pale with long brown hair, was sitting on the bed. She looked up coldly at the cops. "It's against the law to give a back rub?" she asked. "It takes all of you to arrest somebody? Don't y'all have something better to do?"

Not as far as Bayard was concerned. As two cops walked the alleged hooker to the door, Bayard turned to a sergeant and said, "That's good, Skinny. This is what we need to be doing."

Charles Davis was already looking forward to Mardi Gras. "You can only take so much away from a New Orleanian," he says. "One thing you can't take away is Mardi Gras. It's part of our social fabric." Davis lovingly previewed the ritual of revelry: on the Friday before Fat Tuesday he and his krewe—some 500 strong—will gather for lunch and ribald jokes. Then they will spill out into the French Quarter with their newly christened "king" for a parade. At 6 p.m., in masks and satin costumes, they will process down St. Charles Avenue atop two dozen floats. Lieutenants on horseback will lead the way, followed by the king, waving his jewel-studded scepter, and his court. Farther back, his followers will toss Mardi Gras beads and favors—stuffed animals for the kids, panties for the ladies—to the crowd. "It's a wonderful response," says Davis. "It's like you're a rock star for three hours." The parties will stretch to Ash Wednesday morning and the season of Lent.

Lisa and Larry may, or may not, be back for Mardi Gras. Larry has been living in New Orleans making as much as $100 an hour as a roofer, working seven days a week. Lisa dreams that he will make enough for a down payment for a house, maybe in Hammond, north of New Orleans, where her grandmother lived. It would be good for the kids to live in the country, she thinks. Lisa's moods swing from hope to dejection and anger. She misses her husband. "I need for us to be a family again," she says. "I've got to get it together. I think I'm going to lose my mind." She still has trouble sleeping. In her dreams, she is in the water, with a child on her back, unable to reach the shore.

With reporting from Karen Breslau, Arian Campo-Flores, T. Trent Gegax and Andrew Murr

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10512261/site/newsweek/

=================
Guthrie Seeks to Aid the City He Sang About
Train Called 'City of New Orleans' Was the Inspiration for the Song

By DEAN REYNOLDS
abcnews.com, Dec. 17, 2005

On a cold December night, the old train left Chicago and headed south down tracks that once hummed with the music of America.

The fabled "City of New Orleans" is run by Amtrak now, with all that that implies in terms of creature comforts, service and food. But for a few days this month, the passenger cars were at least swaying to a different beat.

Arlo Guthrie and friends were aboard on this trip, riding "a carpet made of steel" on a "southbound odyssey" -- phrases taken from the Steve Goodman song "The City of New Orleans," which Guthrie immortalized three decades ago.

This time, Guthrie and his band of friends were on a rescue mission for musicians from the Big Easy who've been driven from their homes, had their instruments ruined, lost their jobs -- or all of the above. Guthrie raised money for them at concerts along the way past Kankakee, Ill., Memphis, Tenn., Greenwood, Miss., and other evocative stops.

"All the jazz, all the blues, all the rock and roll, all the folk stuff that we do here in this country, all the country music owes a debt of gratitude to these boys in New Orleans," Guthrie told ABC News.

He spoke as he rode aboard a specially outfitted "Illinois Central" car attached to the back end of the Amtrak train. The special car recalled lines from the song he made famous. …

    "Riding on the City of New Orleans,
    Illinois Central Monday morning rail
    Fifteen cars and 15 restless riders,
    Three conductors and 25 sacks of mail."

Less Music
You can still hear music in New Orleans' famous French Quarter, but there is less of it because so many musicians dispersed after Katrina and Rita.

Brazella Briscoe is a member of the Zion Harmonizers, a group that has been performing up-tempo gospel songs for the better part of seven decades and was a regular at New Orleans' House of Blues.

Since Katrina, though, the group's music has been silenced. Briscoe showed ABC News some brand new equipment that was worthless now, having been underwater for weeks.

"We lost about $10,000-worth of equipment," he said, ruefully, as he surveyed the damaged goods still piled high in a panel truck parked outside his moldy home in the devastated Ninth Ward

"We're not complaining," said Briscoe, "things happen. And we just thank God we were able to endure it."

Briscoe is the kind of guy Guthrie is trying to help.

    "And all the towns and people seem
    To fade into a bad dream
    And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
    The conductor sings his song again,
    The passengers will please refrain
    "This train's got the disappearing railroad blues."

'We Owe It to Them'
Guthrie wants to make sure there is no parallel between the song and the city.

"That song meant a lot to a lot of people," he said. "It was about a way of life that was sort of disappearing."

"The thing I fear the most is that we will lose a city that loves its own decadence," he continued. "It has not become safe for families and everybody else, and I don't think they want it to be that way.

"There's got to be some place left where people are living on the edge and enjoying that. And that's what we'll lose here if we don't get it back."

Guthrie had a big concert Friday night, after arriving in New Orleans, and another is planned for Saturday. All proceeds go to bringing the music back to the Big Easy.

"I think we owe it to them, because the music that we're playing -- the kinds of traditions that we come from -- have their roots in New Orleans," Gutrhie said. "You got Delta blues and you got Chicago blues and you got bluegrass -- all kinds of stuff that was all mixed because New Orleans was sort of the original melting pot."

The trip was special for Guthrie for another reason: It was his first trip on this famous train.

"My commitment to this won't end when the curtain comes down on the last show," he said. "This is something we're going to want to keep working on."

Brazella Briscoe and the Zion Harmonizers are grateful for the effort.

    "Good night, America, how are you?
    Don't you know me I'm your native son,
    I'm the train they call the City of New Orleans,
    I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done."

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

=================
December 18, 2005; NY Times

Louisiana's Deadly Storm Took Strong as Well as the Helpless

By SHAILA DEWAN and JANET ROBERTS

NEW ORLEANS - More than 100 of them drowned. Sixteen died trapped in attics. More than 40 died of heart failure or respiratory problems, including running out of oxygen. At least 65 died because help - shelter, water or a simple dose of insulin - came too late.

A study by The New York Times of more than 260 Louisianans who died during Hurricane Katrina or its aftermath found that almost all survived the height of the storm but died in the chaos and flooding that followed.

Of those who failed to heed evacuation orders, many were offered a ride or could have driven themselves out of danger - a finding that contrasts with earlier reports that victims were trapped by a lack of transportation. Most victims were 65 or older, but of those below that age, more than a quarter were ill or disabled.

The results are not necessarily representative of the 1,100 people who died in the storm-ravaged part of the state. The 268 deaths examined by The Times were not chosen through a scientific or random sample, but rather were selected on the basis of which family members could be reached, and which names had been released by state officials.

Nonetheless, the study represents the most comprehensive picture to date of the Louisiana victims of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee failures. The Times conducted more than 200 interviews with relatives, neighbors and friends of the victims, and culled information from local coroners and medical examiners, census data, obituaries, and news articles.

The interviews add narrative and nuance to what has been a largely anonymous or purely statistical casualty list. Relatives were able to explain that what might have been listed as a simple drowning was really a tragic end to a rescue, or that medical care just a few minutes earlier might have meant the difference between life and death.

In New Orleans almost three-quarters of the black victims examined by The Times and almost half the white victims lived in neighborhoods where the average income was below $43,000, the city's overall average. In New Orleans, the median income for whites is almost twice what it is for blacks. Many, if not most, were Louisiana natives, and virtually all were members of the working class - nurses, janitors, barbers, merchant marines.

Among them was Althea Lala, 76, who suffered a heart attack while trying to saw through her roof. Prosper Louis Flint, blind, diabetic and dehydrated, was one of at least 19 people who died in the hot sun on Interstate 10, according to the state health department, waiting for help to come. Donise Marie Davis, 28, fell to her death from the rope of a rescue helicopter. Todd Lopez, 42, pushed his girlfriend's family into an attic before the water overtook him. Paul Haynes, 78, told his wife, "Marge, don't worry about me. I know how to survive."

State officials have released the names of only 512 victims - fewer than half the estimated deaths in the state - and have provided just a skeletal demographic breakdown, showing that most were 65 or older, about half were black and about half were female. Despite repeated requests, neither state officials nor the coroner of Orleans Parish, where the bulk of the deaths occurred, have released causes of death, and Louisiana death certificates are not a matter of public record.

More than 60 families told The Times that they still did not know how or in some cases even where their loved ones perished. As a result, a full portrait remains impossible.

The Times's examination encompassed about 175 of the approximately 360 New Orleans residents so far identified, along with about 60 people who died in the surrounding parishes and about 50 evacuees. One in the group was the victim of a criminal homicide.

"It's ironic that you can survive a storm," but still die, said Velda Smith, who lost her sister-in-law and three teenage nieces to the floodwaters. On the day they drowned, she said, "everything was fine. The sun was shining." Then the Industrial Canal's levee broke, prompting a panicked call by one of her nieces to their father. The girls, Kendra and Kendricka Smooth and Doneika Lewis, were spending the night at their aunt Ersell Smooth's house on Flood Street in the devastated Ninth Ward.

"The girls were hysterical," Ms. Smith said. "The water was rising so fast. Then the phone went dead. They did not know how to swim." By the time their father got to his own front door, the water was already rising in his house. He, his wife and four other children made it to a neighbor's house and were airlifted to safety.

Because of bodies that washed away or have not yet been found, a full accounting of the dead may not be available for months or even years. But more than 1,400 victims from along the Gulf Coast have been counted, including some who evacuated and whose deaths may later be determined to be unrelated to the storm.

Bodies were found floating alongside refrigerators, wedged under furniture, lashed to telephone poles or covered by makeshift shrouds. School buses arrived at shelters with some of their passengers already dead. The deaths tell of individual stubbornness, helplessness and selflessness, shortsighted government policy, and the hardships of poverty, aging and disability.

Some victims became emblematic of the horror in New Orleans and the inefficiency of the government response. There was Vera Smith, whose improvised grave proclaimed, "Here lies Vera. God help us." Ethel Freeman, slumped in her wheelchair under a plaid blanket outside the convention center. Xavier Bowie, a lung cancer patient whose girlfriend cried over his body in the street. Alcede Jackson, who lay on his front porch, in full view, until Sept. 12, and still has not been released by the central morgue. And withered, frail Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, whose rescue more than two weeks after the hurricane provided a rare glimmer of good news. Two days later, he died.

For each of those, hundreds died in obscurity. In the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where a deadly wall of water surged down streets and swept houses off their foundations, Karnettia Jacko, 26, slipped from her husband's grasp and sank into the murky water, relatives said. Her mother, 51-year-old Brenda Andrews, grabbed for her daughter and fell in as well. As the rest of the family watched from the roof, their bodies bobbed to the surface.

In Lakeview, Yvette Pereira, 54, died in her attic hours after the Coast Guard called her cellphone to say they were in the neighborhood but could not locate the house. An hour later, her 11-year-old daughter, Alexandra, who had been by Ms. Pereira's side for two days, was rescued.

Vanessa Pereira, Alexandra's grown sister and, now, her caretaker, had been evacuated but used her cellphone to stay in contact with her mother during the ordeal and made dozens of calls to find help. "I was just telling them stuff like, 'She's having a heart attack. She's with an 11-year-old child, you can't let this happen,' " Vanessa Pereira said. "The rescue people that were talking to me were crying."

Ms. Pereira said she lost more than her mother and her home - she lost her "false sense of protection," the notion that the government would be there to help in a crisis.

While the state's list of victims shows that a vast majority died alone, 31 families in the Times study lost more than one member. Anna Bonono, 85 and sick with cancer, died with her 80-year-old brother and caretaker, Luke Bonono. Their house was destroyed. "The house had been the family home for years," Rosalie Bonono, a niece, said. "It's like this family has been erased because of one hurricane."

Water - rising as fast as a foot every 10 minutes - overtook many who thought the worst had passed. In St. Bernard Parish, just east of the city, Joan Emerson, 57, was on the phone with her son at midmorning on Monday when he heard her screaming, then the phone went dead, a family friend said. Her body was found 18 days later.

In Arabi, the St. Bernard town adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward, the water came so fast that Kenneth Young did not have time to save his wife of 56 years, Gloria, who was partly paralyzed and bedridden, relatives said. He stayed with her until the last possible moment, watching her drown before he narrowly escaped to the attic, where the couple's daughter waited.

Of the 126 people who were not in a nursing home or hospital, yet did not evacuate, only 25 families said transportation was an issue - although there could be many more such victims, because the Times study was less likely to include the homeless or those with no driver's license or other official documents. Others said the victims refused to leave because they had survived earlier hurricanes, were worried about their property or pets, or were simply obstinate. At least one victim tried to leave town, got stuck in traffic, and returned home.

Clarence Fleming, 64, had two amputated legs, but still told each of his family members he was riding with someone else and stayed in his home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. Hannah Polmer said her 64-year-old mother, Rachel Polmer, simply felt safest in her own home. "Elderly syndrome," the daughter called it. Not including hospital patients or nursing home residents, two-thirds of those who did not leave were over 60. Thirty were ill or disabled.

Many said that mandatory evacuation orders came too late, or that leaving, even with transportation, was not a simple matter for older residents. LeShawn Hains could not find a special-needs shelter for her mother, Gilda, who was on oxygen and had heart and lung trouble. Eddie Cherrie Jr. stayed behind with his mother, Onelia, who relied on a walker and blood pressure medication. "It's true nothing stopped us from leaving," he said. "But also, it's not that easy to leave with a 91-year-old woman."

They survived the storm but were later taken by helicopter to the airport, where officials separated a badly dehydrated Ms. Cherrie from her son, leaving her to die alone, he said. Mr. Cherrie said if the levees had not broken, she would have survived. "That's malfeasance," he said.

For many, routine maladies turned fatal. Melvin Alexie Jr., 47, developed a mastoid infection in his ear after the storm. His father took him to Charity Hospital, which he said was too overwhelmed to help. A trip to a Federal Emergency Management Agency center proved fruitless as well, and Mr. Alexie died on Sept. 13 in Gretna, a New Orleans suburb. Edward Starks, 58, ran out of insulin at the convention center, his aunt, Dorothy Guy, said.

For others, help simply came too late, according to relatives. Earl Balthazar, 72, slipped out of his life jacket and drowned just as help arrived. Eunice Breaux, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, was trapped with 15 other people on the third floor of a home. Five days after the storm, a boat finally came and dropped them off on a levee, where Ms. Breaux, 76, died. Her death certificate says she drowned, a finding her family disputes.

Many family members said that although their older relatives were nearing the end of their lives, they had the right to peaceful, dignified deaths.

Louis Orduna Sr., a decorated World War II veteran, was 90 but in great shape, said his nephew, Jack Bunn. "His son begged him to get out," Mr. Bunn said. "He refused to leave. He felt he'd be safe there - he had no idea."

The water was up to his roof within nine minutes of the levee break.

"Every tooth in his head, every hair on his head was still there," Mr. Bunn said. "To go like that, drowning like a rat, it's terrible. It's not the way an individual like that was supposed to go."

Shaila Dewan reported from New Orleans for this article, and Janet Roberts from New York. Reporting for this article was contributed by Lara Coger, Micah Cohen, Brenda Goodman, Lily Koppel and Lee Roberts. Research was provided by Donna Anderson, Jack Begg, Nick Bhasin, Happy Blitt, Alain Delaquérière, Sandra Jamison, Toby Lyles, Jack Styczynski, Carolyn Wilder and Margot Williams.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
Congress eyes $29B more in hurricane relief
GOP lawmakers rework budget to provide aid to thousands of uninsured

The Associated Press
msnbc.com, Dec. 17, 2005

WASHINGTON - Congressional Republicans agreed Saturday on $29 billion in additional aid for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the other powerful storms that lashed the United States earlier this year, far more than the Bush administration proposed earlier this fall.

“We have a good agreement,” said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who has patrolled the Capitol for days in an effort to coax as much money as possible from lawmakers eager to adjourn for the year.

Officials stressed the additional funds would not add to federal deficits, a priority for conservative lawmakers. They said the hurricane relief as well as an additional $3.8 billion to help prepare for an outbreak of avian flu would be offset, in part by a 1 percent cut across a wide swath of federal programs.
.....................
Billions in hurricane aid at stake
The agreement on hurricane aid was a triumph for Sen. Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Faced with pressure from lawmakers, the White House proposed an additional $17 billion in aid earlier this fall. Cochran countered with $18 billion on top of that, and circulated a list of possible offsets to prevent the deficit from rising.

Officials said some of the funds would be available for one of Barbour’s top priorities — permitting federal aid to homeowners whose residences suffered water damage and are outside the federal government’s 100-year floodplain. Few of them were covered by flood insurance.

Other funds would be available for levee protection in New Orleans, and $1.6 billion will reimburse schools in Texas and elsewhere that quickly absorbed children who were forced to leave storm-damaged areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama after Katrina struck. Some of the money will be available to religious schools, officials said.

Most of the $29 billion has already been approved by Congress for other programs, and will be diverted into different accounts. The across-the-board cuts are estimated to offset another $8.5 billion.
.....................
© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10509565/

=================
December 17, 2005; NY Times

The Soul of New Orleans

To the Editor:

I gratefully read your Dec. 11 editorial "Death of an American City"; I sadly read some responses in favor of "relocating" New Orleans (letters, Dec. 13).

This suggestion indicates a deep misunderstanding of the strategic importance of New Orleans. The French, the Spanish and Thomas Jefferson recognized this.

Perhaps Americans need a history lesson on the Louisiana Purchase: It was New Orleans that Jefferson felt warranted this unprecedented treaty; the rest of the land was just thrown in as part of the bargain.

Most important, New Orleans is not a collection of buildings. New Orleans is the fierce currents of the Mississippi River and the lazy meandering water of Bayou St. John, the centuries-old live oaks that spread their branches to form a canopy over St. Charles Avenue and the swampy lagoons of City Park.

Culturally and historically, the city is tied to the land and to the water that surrounds it. You could no more relocate New Orleans than Boston or Philadelphia. It would cease to be New Orleans and become just another suburban city.

Victoria Cooke
New Orleans, Dec. 13, 2005
The writer is curator of European painting, New Orleans Museum of Art.
========
December 13, 2005
We Just Can't Let New Orleans Die (8 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Death of an American City" (editorial, Dec. 11):

There is no way that New Orleans will wither and disappear. It is a unique and wonderful city!

It is inconceivable to me that that the war in Iraq, a faraway place, is more important than the rebuilding of New Orleans, "a major American city." President Bush needs to get his priorities straight and send the federal money in the right direction.

I agree that only the office of the president is "strong enough to goad Congress in the right direction." This needs to happen now! We cannot and should not lose New Orleans.

Erica Labouisse
New Orleans, Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

I'm a New Orleans resident, now in college in Texas. We can't allow the politicians to ignore our city. They seem intent on letting us die slowly, of neglect.

The federal government's neglect, specifically of necessary coastal restoration, is why this happened in the first place. Thank you for being our voice.

Bradley Drouant
College Station, Tex., Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

Yes, if the rest of the country has decided that New Orleans is not of sufficient value to the United States to commit to its protection and rebuilding, it should let us know.

Not because we'll need time to plan for the abandonment of our city, but because we'll need time to prepare for our separation from the United States.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast provide America with oil, gas, food and the perfect port for transshipping goods for import and export. We will continue to provide your country with these resources once we establish ourselves as an independent republic. The only difference will be the price you'll pay.

Instead of confiscating most of the royalties earned on oil produced here, you'll pay the prevailing price and we'll decide how to spend the revenues. We'll have no problem building Category 5-proof levees and restoring our wetlands with our vastly expanded national treasury.

We'll gladly share our bounty of food and imported goods with you - at market prices, of course - and graciously allow your shipping to use our port, with reasonable duties.

And when, as is sure to happen, we are struck by a storm or some other disaster, we'll marshal our people and resources, roll up our sleeves and take care of our own. After all, we've had some practice with that.

Louie Ludwig
New Orleans, Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

New Orleans need not die. It can be saved for much less than $32 billion, and no levees need be built. Relocate New Orleans in the nearest area that has never been struck by a hurricane.

The federal government should use eminent domain to take the present location and environs and establish a national park, forbidding any construction other than the minimum necessary for the park's maintenance.

The government would pay condemnation awards to all owners of property it takes, and it would install enough of a basic infrastructure in the new location to encourage investment in the new area.

Human nature will create a vibrant city with all the advantages of modern infrastructure. We can avoid the hubris of a hopeless stand against nature - something along the lines of the king who commanded the waves to cease.

Jack Bittner
New York, Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

You identify two essential options for New Orleans: restore the city by overhauling its levees or allow it to fall neglectfully into abandonment.

While the American public should indeed come clean about its intentions for New Orleans, there are more alternatives than those you propose. We should also consider the feasibility of re-establishing New Orleans in a more secure location, one less vulnerable to the essentially inevitable threats of a warming climate and rising sea levels.

Relocation would, of course, be a complicated process, and it would be difficult to avoid building an anodyne rendition of the storied city that now sits, in large part, as a rotting ruin.

New Orleans owed much of its charm to a unique brand of bawdy spontaneity that is inimical with choreographed planning. Many people with deep emotional bonds to the Crescent City would dismiss relocation as tantamount to capitulation.

Despite these challenges, re-establishment could provide both residents and visitors with a vision for a "new" New Orleans founded on fortitude, resilience and endurance.

Maurie J. Cohen
Princeton, N.J., Dec. 11, 2005
The writer is an assistant professor of environmental policy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
•

To the Editor:

You argue that if our nation is unwilling to help New Orleans reconstruct, we must be forthright about our decision. True enough. But we must also understand the deeper implications.

If we say no to rebuilding New Orleans, are we not establishing the precedent that we will also say no to other cities - including, possibly one day, our own - that endure calamities in the future?

Richard Sclove
Amherst, Mass., Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

My son is a New Orleans musician. Hurricane Katrina took his instruments, books, paintings, furniture, clothes, employment - the things that make up normal everyday life.

But he still had hope.

When the president said New Orleans would rise again, my son believed. When the president promised that the Army Corps of Engineers would "make the flood protection system stronger than it has ever been," he believed. So my son went back to New Orleans to rebuild his life. He is one of many.

Now it seems promises have been forgotten. Some in Washington want New Orleans to go away - its art, music and culture discarded. I beg our leaders to do what is right. If we can rebuild Baghdad, we can rebuild a city in our own country where American citizens are struggling to survive.

The president said, "The passionate soul of a great city will return." I ask, "When, Mr. President?"

Anne Stover
Pensacola, Fla., Dec. 11, 2005
•

To the Editor:

As much as it hurt to read your editorial about New Orleans this morning, thank you for publishing it.

Yesterday morning, I was going to demolish our home in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. Yesterday afternoon, I was going to rebuild. This morning, I just don't know.

Carol Little
Prairieville, La., Dec. 11, 2005

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
Segment on New Orleans and pollution

Living on Earth, WUGA-Athens
12/17/05

www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=05-P13-00050&segmentID=2

Your computer must be able to play audio, e.g. via RealPlayer

=================
Dec. 16, 2005; Miami Herald

Survey: Storms worry travelers
Fearing hurricanes, more vacationers will steer clear of Florida next year, according to a new survey. Tourism still should grow by 3.2 percent.

BY DOUGLAS HANKS III

Hurricane worries will cut into the growth of Florida's travel market next year as storm-spooked tourists steer clear of the Sunshine State during the summer and early fall, according to a new state forecast.

An expected 2 percent fewer vacationers will visit Florida in the June-through-November hurricane season, according to the Visit Florida tourism bureau. Yet even with storm-related declines, Florida still should attract 3.2 percent more visitors in 2006 than it did this year, higher than the 2 percent nationwide growth rate.

Vacationers have undergone a ''hardening of attitudes toward hurricanes in Florida,'' head researcher Barry Pitegoff told Visit Florida's board during a meeting in Fort Lauderdale.

The statewide concerns come at the end of a record-breaking year in tourism for both Florida and South Florida. Florida is on track to attract more than 80 million visitors in 2005, just passing last year's high-water mark of 79.7 million visitors.

But the last two hurricane seasons have also broken records: Four hurricanes hit Florida both years, leaving increasingly rattled travelers in their wake.

''They see the huge satellite image on their television screen,'' said Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami geography professor who helped Visit Florida with the surveys. ``They think the whole state is being wrecked.''

Forty-three percent of hotels, attractions and other tourism-related businesses surveyed by Visit Florida saw business decline during the 2005 hurricane season. Advanced bookings dropped during that stretch, too, though most of the businesses surveyed are optimistic 2006 will go well, according to the survey.

GROWTH OVERALL

A strong economy, Florida's wintertime appeal and the state's status as one of the country's top tourist attractions have bolstered confidence for the travel industry. Florida's predicted 3.2 percent growth rate is higher than the 2 percent increase forecast for travel nationwide next year.

But the surveys show hurricanes present Florida's tourism industry its biggest worry. Through June, Visit Florida predicts tourism will grow 6 percent next year.

Of the roughly 1,800 consumers surveyed in November, 61 percent agreed with the notion that Florida's recent hurricane troubles were unusual and that the state was a ''fine place to visit'' during the summer. In October 2004, as that year's bruising hurricane season came to an end, 74 percent of would-be tourists agreed with the same statement.

The decline matches other surveys showing travelers are more worried about hurricanes ruining a Florida vacation than they were a year ago.

''It just keeps going down,'' Pitegoff said.

LET'S ASK NEXT SPRING

He noted Florida fares far better in surveys taken during the spring, suggesting travelers have short memories and that they warmed to Visit Florida's special marketing campaign launched after the 2004 season.

The tax-funded agency hasn't planned a similar blitz for 2006, but leaders will meet again in January to consider one, said Dale Brill, Visit Florida's marketing chief.

High gas prices and rising heating bills also rank high on the list of travel worries, but analysts doubted those factors would make a noticeable dent in Florida's vacation industry.

But if significant numbers of travelers avoid the Sunshine State during the next hurricane season, it could cut into travel numbers for years to come, University of Miami economics professor David Kelly told board members.

''A lot of studies show that onc

=================
Dec. 16, 2005; Miami Herald

Did Wilma spread canker?
In a new blow to citrus growers, a USDA study says that Hurricane Wilma spread citrus canker far and wide, and as a result millions more trees may need to be destroyed.

BY PHIL LONG

VERO BEACH - The winds from Hurricane Wilma may have spread citrus canker so widely that it could result in the destruction of as many as 170,000 more acres of fruit trees in commercial groves, state citrus officials said Thursday.

The estimate is based on a preliminary study given to state and citrus industry leaders this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

''I was stunned,'' said Craig Meyer, deputy agriculture commissioner and the state's top citrus canker-eradication official. He heard the news at a meeting of growers, state and federal eradication specialists earlier this week.

If the report's predictions come true, millions more trees will have to be destroyed through the eradication program because they are either infected or stand within 1,900 feet of an infected tree. The eradication plan is based on the premise that the only way to get rid of the disease is to cut and burn infected trees and those nearby.

Meyer said the USDA preliminary study, which he said included more than one scenario, suggests that the spread at worst may force the state to take out anywhere from 70,000 to 170,000 additional acres of citrus fruit south and east of Lake Okeechobee. That would raise to about 265,000 the number of acres that must be bulldozed in the controversial program. There are about 750,000 commercial acres of citrus in the state now.

Dan Richey, Vero Beach grower and co-chair of the federal-state citrus canker task force, said he has no reason to doubt the preliminary report, but added it is too early to judge the effect of the latest news.

Any disease spread by the Oct. 24 hurricane will not start showing up on trees until early next year.

Citrus growers will meet next week to map strategy, perhaps urging changes in the eradication program and the 1,900-foot rule.

The industry faces other threats, including urban encroachment on groves and the potentially devastating disease known as citrus greening.

''The way we are practicing in this industry now has got to change,'' Richey said. ``We have got to react to the set of cards that Mother Nature has delivered to us.''

Nevertheless, the USDA results ''should not come as a big surprise to anybody. It is not rocket science,'' he said.

Since Wilma hit, growers and government experts have been worried that the storm's 85- to 100-mph winds picked up canker bacteria and flung it far and wide.

Knowing the amount and location of exposed trees still standing when Wilma hit, Richey said, ``it didn't take a real genius to figure out we were in probably in trouble.''

The report has not changed the state's eradication program.

''There is a rumor out there that we have ordered our crews to stop cutting. Well, that is incorrect,'' said Liz Compton, spokeswoman for Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson.

=================
Where's Bush? Not in New Orleans.

OPINION

By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post, December 16, 2005

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin has been guilty of hyperbole in the past, with his exaggerated reports of mayhem and death in the days after Hurricane Katrina made its tragic landfall. But his plea to Congress this week that his city "is being allowed to die as we speak" may have been an understatement. Three months after President Bush stood in Jackson Square and vowed that "this great city will rise again," New Orleans instead appears to be circling the drain.

The president promised that "we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives." It was a great sound bite and a great photo op, but where the hell is he now?

At the moment, in what's left of New Orleans, citizens are waging a spirited debate over how big a Mardi Gras they should try to stage next spring. There's also a sideshow legal battle over trademarking the name Katrina for a cocktail, presumably one that leaves you with an awful hangover. I see the virtue of laughing in the face of adversity, but what I'm hearing sounds like serious denial. How does the city plan its big annual party when most of the would-be revelers are scattered to the four winds and can't come home because there's nowhere for them to live or work or send their children to school?

The Gray Line sightseeing company has an idea for luring tourists back: a new bus tour, to be launched in January, called "Hurricane Katrina -- America's Worst Catastrophe!" According to Gray Line's Web site, visitors will learn about the city's precarious geography, see ruined neighborhoods, hear an eyewitness account of the flood and even "drive past an actual levee that 'breached.' "

The old New Orleans is effectively gone. If the new New Orleans is to be more than a few port facilities and a sad little "sin and decadence" theme park for liquored-up conventioneers, you need the people to come back. The Congressional Black Caucus has introduced a comprehensive bill designed to attend to the needs of evacuees from the entire Gulf Coast and give them the resources they need to go home, but the Bush administration and the congressional leadership have preferred a scattershot, largely ineffective approach.

"I really get the feeling sometimes that our government would like for these people to remain scattered around the nation and not come back and rebuild," said Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), chairman of the caucus. "Trying to do it in a piecemeal way is just going to prolong the agony for the people."

It may or may not be wise to rebuild New Orleans on a grand scale -- we may be talking about a much smaller city. But if it's going to be rebuilt on any scale, there has to be some assurance that the next big hurricane won't flood the city again. That means you need upgraded levees, flood walls, pumps -- a whole system of hydraulic protection. The additional $1.5 billion that the White House pledged to spend on the levees yesterday is a start, but just a start. To go any further, you have to know what areas to protect.

Does it make sense to rebuild the devastated Lower Ninth Ward? Even if it is rebuilt, are the people who lived there before the flood really going to come back?

All the issues involved in reconstruction are so interlocked that nothing much is moving, and the longer the city sits empty and ruined, the less likely its renaissance becomes. Who but the president can break the logjam?

It's the responsibility of local officials to design the new New Orleans, but only the federal government is big enough to guarantee the money and provide the determination to make any plan a reality. What institution but the federal government can restore the wetlands south and east of the city into a buffer that will absorb much of the impact of the next hurricane? What institution but the federal government can break through all the jurisdictional barriers and push this halting process forward?

Bush ended his Sept. 15 speech in Jackson Square by pledging that "the streetcars will once again rumble down St. Charles and the passionate soul of a great city will return." Half of that prediction may soon come true -- they're talking about resuming token service on one of the streetcar lines. But the soul of New Orleans is its people, and that soul is being lost forever. Where is the president now?

=================

Courage Amid Katrina's Chaos

Medical Team at New Orleans' Charity Hospital Shares Story of Saving Lives Against Nearly Impossible Odds

abcnews.com, 12/16/05

Just two weeks ago, Hunter Reeves married Kristy Arceneaux in a wedding ceremony that was remarkable, not just because of the wonderful occasion, but because it took place at all. Just a few months ago Reeves was clinging to life in an intensive care unit when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, leaving him and other patients perilously close to death.

Reeves was at New Orleans' Charity Hospital. His lungs were filling with fluid. His kidneys were failing. And his life was in the hands of a remarkable medical team led by Dr. Ben DeBoisBlanc.

DeBoisBlanc, better known as Dr. Ben, ran the intensive care unit at Charity Hospital and Dr. Peter Deblieux ran the emergency room and helped teach emergency medicine.

An Unprecedented Test to Historic Hospital

While nature put Reeves and patients like him in unlucky circumstances, he was extraordinarily fortunate -- he was at Charity Hospital.

The hospital doesn't just represent top-notch medical care, it means something more to the community. "That hospital stands for a lot of things, and it mostly stands for taking care of all patients regardless of their ability to pay," said DeBoisBlanc.

"Seventy percent of the doctors that practice within the state of Louisiana came through the halls of Charity Hospital. Seventy percent. We're committed to the care of our patients. It's the mission of the hospital," Deblieux added.

That mission was about to be tested as never before. Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the city and the doctors and hospital staff were literally camping out in the hospital halls in sleeping bags, preparing for the worst.

Both Deblieux and DeBoisBlanc had been through hurricanes before, but each said they felt this storm was going to be different.

"Typically when we do activations, it's two days of flurry and a lot of activity and then ... everybody goes home. In this case we had the sense that it was going to be a bit more substantial," Deblieux said.

DeBoisBlanc said he considered taking a photo of his late father with him to work that day. "I was leaving and I saw a picture of my father and his boat hanging on the wall. And I went to grab it and I had this premonition that maybe I shouldn't, that I should leave it there for some reason. I think I had a sense that maybe his spirit would kind of look over things because I clearly had a sense that this was going to be different," he said.

Damage to the hospital seemed minimal at first, but the floodwaters continued to rise and backup generators were failing.

"It wasn't until Tuesday morning when our other backup generator went out and the sun came up and we could see that the whole city was flooding from every direction that we realized we were in big trouble," DeBoisBlanc said.

Water flooded the basement and the stairwells and was threatening the first floor. In about two hours, the hospital staff hurriedly carried 50 seriously ill patients, their ventilators and medical equipment up a flight of stairs. Without air conditioning, the temperature inside the hospital approached 100 degrees.

"The heat and humidity was outrageous. ... At about 72 hours after we had had two days of no power, no electricity to run elevators, no showering conditions, no toilets that worked, people kind of began to lose it," Deblieux said.

Without power in the intensive care unit, monitors and ventilators failed, and nurses and doctors kept patients alive by hand.

"We were trusted with the lives of these people that we weren't sure were going to pull through ... we didn't have the resources to protect their interests. And so we were very worried that several of them would die," said DeBoisBlanc.

Reeves was one of those patients. He could not breathe on his own and needed constant help.

Respiratory therapist Celeste Wydell was Reeves' godsend. She had suffered the devastating loss last year of her only son, 18-year-old Christopher, who died of sudden cardiac death during a football practice.

Wydell ran to Reeves' bed and gave him her full attention. She would keep him breathing, and she turned away doctors who offered to give her a break.

Wydell essentially adopted Reeves and decided that she was going to protect him.

Surrounded by Chaos and False Hope of Rescue

Outside the hospital, security was becoming a concern. People were seeking refuge, and there was no more room.

DeBoisBlanc wasn't surprised. "We have served the underserved for generations, they were born here, they got all their health care here, they died here. They thought that in times of crisis, Charity Hospital was the place you go," he said.

But with reports of gunfire outside, and anger mounting, everyone was treated with suspicion. Hospital guards were turning people away at gunpoint, and directing them to the Superdome to get care.

Just as the staff's fears and frustrations reached an extreme, there was a break. They learned they were going to be evacuated.

The doctors worked quickly to get their patients ready for evacuation, but to their shock, help didn't come. "It didn't come Tuesday morning. It didn't come Tuesday afternoon. It didn't come Wednesday, and we started hearing reports that we had already been evacuated," DeBoisBlanc said.

"It continues to amaze me that a major medical center, a level one trauma center could just disappear off the radar screen for five days. It's unbelievable," he added.

For the hospital staff, this was a breaking point. There were tears and anger -- but there was also unbelievable stamina and unwavering courage.

"I would go to the nurses and I would go to the residents and go to the patients and say, 'I promise you. You're going to leave this hospital before I do,'" said Deblieux.

"All of a sudden it sort of crystallized our thinking that, you know, we've been forgotten. And it became obvious to a lot of people almost simultaneously that if we we're going to get out of here we're going to have to get ourselves out," DeBoisBlanc said.

That might be an understandably crippling thought for most people, but for DeBoisBlanc and Deblieux it just made them focus. "It was a triumphant moment," said DeBoisBlanc. "The worst thing you can do in a disaster, in a crisis, is wait. I think once we had a mission, once we had a focus, it gave us a sense of purpose."

They couldn't reach FEMA or the governor's office or the National Guard, but they did reach the media. Television crews had no problem getting to Charity and soon featured their story on the national news.

Private helicopter companies volunteered to start an airlift. Within hours, the most critical patients were carried down six floors to trucks for transport to a nearby parking garage where helicopters could safely land. One of the most critical patients was Reeves.

"Every time we moved Hunter, his blood oxygen level would drop . And we realized that it was going to be tough getting him out. ... As we were transporting him out of here, in the back of that National Guard truck, heading over to the parking garage, he collapsed his left lung," said DeBoisBlanc.

Using flashlights, DeBoisBlanc made a stab wound on the side of Reeves' chest and inserted a tube to reinflate his lung.

"We had the wherewithal to bring surgical supplies with us. But we forgot the sedation, the analgesics and the anesthetics," he recalled.

So, Reeves experienced this excruciating, but lifesaving, procedure fully conscious.

"It took four people to hold him down while we did that -- saved his life," DeBoisBlanc said.

Within hours, Reeves was on a helicopter and out of the city. The evacuation of the hospital had begun and would continue for the next 48 hours. Back at the hospital, Deblieux took charge of the evacuation as his team pleaded for help from trucks as they passed near the hospital.

But it was too dangerous to continue the evacuation, as the trucks and health care staff came under fire in the streets. As the city descended into chaos, the hospital too was in crisis. The staff was exhausted, their hope was fading, and the hallways and stairwells had become an open sewer. They had to get out, but they lacked transportation and the water was still too high.

DeBoisBlanc and his staff had brought some 50 critical care patients to the roof of a nearby parking garage. The move took hours and they now struggled to keep the patients alive by hand-squeezing air into their patients' lungs for hours.

"I saw so many individual acts of compassion in a time when it was out of context, didn't seem to make sense. I would have thought that those expressions of humanism from one person to another, that compassion would have been reserved for a kinder, gentler time. But it was everywhere," DeBoisBlanc said.

Yet even as the helicopters arrived on the roof, there were problems. The garage below was full of people. Patients from other hospitals and other residents who'd been driven out of their homes by floodwaters were struggling to get aboard. DeBoisBlanc had to literally fight for space.

Help for the patients back at Charity Hospital didn't come until the fifth day of the disaster. Air boats from the Wildlife and Fisheries Departments of three states began to arrive, with armed guards on their bows. Some patients were loaded on 18-wheelers that backed up to the emergency room ramp. The rest -- the majority -- went out on boats.

Deblieux had kept his promise. He was among the last to leave the hospital, but it was a bittersweet moment. "It was a very sad moment. You know, that's the oldest continually operating hospital in the country. And to close those doors, was a hard thing," he said.

DeBoisBlanc is also concerned about the hospital's fate. "I'm going to be fine. Charity, I'm not so sure about. Charity has had sudden cardiac death and I don't know if it can be revived," he said.

Picking Up the Pieces

In the weeks after the storm, both Deblieux and DeBoisBlanc have been picking up the pieces of their personal and professional lives. Deblieux's home still stands but has no gas or water to this day. His family lives part of each day in a hotel room nearby. DeBoisBlanc had a remarkable surprise when he saw a satellite photo showing his beloved boat -- and home -- the one he had left the photo of his father to protect.

"Sure enough, there was Creola, floating like a cork. ... Out of 300 boats, there were six that were floating, and Creola was one of them. So, that was a special moment," he said.

Until DeBoisBlanc can move back aboard, he has been living with friends. With most of his belongings in the back of his truck, he continues to practice medicine at clinics throughout the region. Just two weeks ago, he took "20/20" back to Charity Hospital for his first visit since the storm.

The building is closed now, with no plans to reopen. The flood damage from Katrina is severe. It is an eerie place now. Emergency rooms and intensive care units remain exactly as they were left more than three months ago.

DeBoisBlanc said he, like his city, is forever changed. "I'll never be the same again. This has changed my life, forever. [In] a wonderful way. It's opened my eyes. It's made me more human," he said.

But DeBoisBlanc and his team did something that seems almost superhuman. They worked tirelessly for five days and nights in the dark without the use of basic critical care equipment -- pushed to the limits to keep their patients alive. Of the nearly 50 critically ill patients in their care, they lost only two.

And their devotion to their patients paid off for Reeves, whose wedding day was made all the more special because DeBoisBlanc -- the man who saved his life -- was there to celebrate it with him.

=================

December 16, 2005; NY Times

Editorial

Deeper Fixes at the Red Cross

Another disaster and yet another president of the American Red Cross has resigned. It's starting to feel as if every time a major catastrophe strikes, the Red Cross is roundly criticized and the top dog steps down. Then the organization continues as it did before, with business as usual and no significant reforms.

In the end, we as a country are the losers. We rely upon the Red Cross. It occupies a privileged position among charities, with its place in the National Response Plan as a partner with the government and with its extremely large share of private giving. So far it has received $1.8 billion of the $2.96 billion donated for hurricane relief and recovery this year. If a sudden catastrophe strikes where you live, wiping out your home and your possessions, you will need the Red Cross. The question is increasingly about how much you can count on it.

Marsha Evans, a former rear admiral in the Navy, was brought in to restore the charity's reputation after the Sept. 11 attacks. Now she is leaving in the wake of criticism over the organization's response to Hurricane Katrina. It is the second time in four years that the charity has lost its chief, and the resignation comes at a time when a re-evaluation of the organization's approach to large-scale disasters is sorely needed.

A Red Cross spokesman told The Times earlier this week that Ms. Evans's departure had been driven by coordination and communication issues with the board. The board is dominated by the local chapters, whose interests are not always the same as those of the national organization. It is also large and unwieldy. The Red Cross board has a whopping 50 members, 30 of them elected by local and regional offices. The average size of nonprofit boards is 17 members, according to one survey.

The Red Cross had trouble dealing with Katrina, an event that was admittedly overwhelming but that had been predicted and studied for some time. Yet in a statement on the Red Cross Web site, the board chairman, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, writes that "we anticipate no major changes in strategic direction," and that the organization is "embarked upon the right course."

That suggests that Ms. McElveen-Hunter, if not the entire American Red Cross, is dangerously out of touch at a time when community leaders, nonprofit experts, hurricane victims and even members of Congress have questioned its effectiveness.

It's beginning to look as if the Red Cross is more interested in deflecting criticism than in improving its response to emergencies. It may be time for the government to step in with more than advice.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

=================
New Orleans Soil Poses Hazard
Study Finds Elevated Lead Levels in Neighborhoods

By David Brown
Washington Post , December 15, 2005

Some New Orleans neighborhoods are covered in a layer of sediment containing lead above the concentration the federal government considers hazardous to human health, a new study has found.

The dirt poses the greatest hazard to small children who might play in it, said Steven M. Presley, a toxicologist at Texas Tech University, who led the soil survey team. The hazard could be reduced by keeping the dirt from becoming dry and airborne, by covering it with uncontaminated soil or, if necessary, by hauling it away.

"These levels are not astronomical. It's not like this is an insurmountable hazard. But we are saying that we did find levels that exceeded these thresholds for human health," Presley said yesterday after the study, which will appear in Environmental Science & Technology, was posted on the American Chemical Society's Web site.

The team sampled 14 sites, 12 of them inside the city limits. In two, lead was above the 400-parts-per-million concentration of the Environmental Protection Agency's "high-priority bright line screening" level, a hazardous designation set by the EPA. One was on Esplanade Avenue downtown (406 ppm) and the other was on the bank of the Industrial Canal (642 ppm).

Slightly elevated levels of arsenic and numerous organic chemicals, including some pesticides, were also found at the Industrial Canal. Presley said that was not surprising because "it was the neck of the funnel for the water being pulled from New Orleans."

The researchers also found slightly elevated concentrations of iron at one site near the Lakefront neighborhood and elevated pesticide residues near City Park, which Presley speculated might have come from a nearby golf course.

Presley thinks the chief implication of the study is that more extensive sediment testing needs to be done, as contamination is likely to vary across the city.

The source of most of the lead was exhaust from a century's worth of leaded gasoline burned by automobiles. In many places, it was under the soil surface and covered with vegetation. Hurricane Katrina and the flood suspended it in the water and then redeposited it, sometimes a long way from where it originated.

The sediment is inside many buildings that will be torn down or renovated, making it a potential hazard to construction workers. They should wear masks in dusty areas and wash their clothing and hands, Presley said.

Eryn Witcher, an EPA spokeswoman, said the new findings are "consistent with the sampling we have done. We have seen elevated levels of lead and arsenic, and we have urged the public to avoid contact with the sediments."

The researchers also sampled water and found high levels of some pathogenic bacteria, including various species of Aeromonas that caused many skin infections in victims of last December's tsunami in Southeast Asia. The sampling was done in mid-September; these organisms would have died as the water evaporated.

They also sampled snakes and an alligator to determine baseline levels of various pollutants the animals acquired before the flood. More will be sampled later to see if the flood increased their levels of toxic substances.

=================
Hurricane Response Is Defended

Louisiana's governor answers her critics in Capitol Hill testimony. She worries Congress is looking for reasons to deny more aid.

By Mary Curtius
LA Times, December 15, 2005

WASHINGTON — Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco gave no ground to Capitol Hill critics Wednesday, saying she and other state officials did all they could to save lives after Hurricane Katrina and that she feared Congress' focus on missteps was an excuse to deny more money for reconstruction.

Blanco offered her first public accounting to Congress on her handling of the crisis as House and Senate negotiators wrangled over a new aid package for the states hit by the massive storm.

"Looking back is a necessary exercise, and we will improve our response," Blanco told a House committee. "But none of this negates the obligation of this Congress to help American citizens from the Gulf Coast who literally and figuratively are feeling they have been left out in the cold."

Shortly after Blanco testified, the committee issued a subpoena to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld seeking Pentagon records relating to the help it provided to hurricane-stricken areas. It was the first time the GOP-controlled committee has moved to compel the Bush administration to hand over documents.

The sharp words Blanco exchanged with lawmakers and the difficult negotiations over additional funding underscored the increasingly partisan and charged atmosphere surrounding efforts to rebuild in the hurricane's aftermath.

House and Senate committees are wrapping up inquiries into the much-criticized response by federal, state and local officials to the disaster and preparing to issue their findings in February. The assignment of blame could help shape the debate in next year's congressional campaigns over which party is most capable of governing effectively.

Democrats have said the administration's failure to mount a quick, effective relief effort resulted from its shortchanging of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other offices and programs in order to pour resources into the fight against terrorism, the war in Iraq and tax cuts skewed toward wealthy Americans.

Republicans have said it was the incompetence of local and state officials that hampered efforts by the White House and FEMA to help.

Days after the hurricane hit, Republican lawmakers charged that Blanco and New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, both Democrats, failed to convey their needs quickly or clearly and inadequately carried out their own emergency plan.

Blanco may be the politician with the most at stake. Her popularity has sagged since the hurricane, and if she were to have a chance at winning reelection in 2007, "state voters must see some substantial progress in hurricane recovery and rebuilding," said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University.

Blanco's testimony offered her "a significant opportunity … to begin to repair some of the damage to her reputation that resulted from much of the news coverage of the hurricane response," he said.

The finger-pointing has hampered the congressional investigations into what went wrong and what should be done to fix the problems.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) refused to appoint Democrats to serve on the House committee investigating the hurricane response. Pelosi and other Democrats demanded an independent, bipartisan investigation, which Republicans rejected.

Despite Pelosi's stance, a handful of Democrats from Gulf Coast states have sat in on the House panel's hearings.

One of them, Rep. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana, opened Wednesday's session with a demand that the committee subpoena the White House and Defense Department to hand over documents dealing with their response to the hurricane.

Republicans initially rejected the move as political grandstanding, saying they wanted to give the administration more time to voluntarily produce the documents.

But Wednesday night, committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) issued a subpoena demanding that the Defense Department turn over documents on its hurricane response by Dec. 30.

Also, committee members were scheduled to meet privately today with Kenneth Rapuano, the White House's deputy assistant to the president for domestic security, to discuss the federal relief efforts. Davis said that, if necessary, he was prepared to issue a subpoena to the White House for e-mails and documents it has refused to produce.

Melancon said the committee's credibility was at stake. Without the documents, he said, the committee's effort would be dismissed as a whitewash meant to protect the administration.

Blanco was joined by Nagin in appearing before the House committee, and both pleaded with lawmakers not to lose sight of the large-scale help needed by the Gulf Coast. They asked for billions more in aid to strengthen the New Orleans levee system, revive businesses, build permanent and temporary housing for storm survivors, and reimburse school districts across the nation that have taken in Louisiana students.

New Orleans is "a city that is being allowed to die as we speak," Nagin said.

Pressed by Republicans to say whether he regretted issuing a mandatory evacuation order only 19 hours before the hurricane struck, Nagin said that he wished he had spoken earlier to Max Mayfield, director of the National Weather Service's Hurricane Center.

Mayfield told Nagin the night before the hurricane struck that it would hit New Orleans directly and that it would do so with devastating force and urged him to evacuate the city.

"Then we went about trying to figure out a mandatory evacuation that had never been done before in the city's history," Nagin said. "I'm not sure how we could have done things any differently. Maybe I would have talked to Max a little earlier and gotten his professional opinion that this was definitely going to hit New Orleans."

Blanco repeatedly defended the efforts of state and local officials to evacuate, saying they managed to get 1.2 million residents of the region out of harm's way. Of the 100,000 left behind, Blanco said, about 1,100 perished — a fraction of the number FEMA had predicted would die if New Orleans' levees ruptured. The evacuation, she said, "is the one thing we handled masterfully."

Blanco also defended her Sept. 2 request to President Bush that he speed up the return of Louisiana National Guard units scheduled to rotate back to Louisiana from Iraq soon after the hurricane hit.

"I wanted them to come home a few days earlier," Blanco said. Pressed by Rep. Stephen E. Buyer (R-Ind.), who indicated he thought the request was outrageous, Blanco snapped: "If this isn't a stronger cause than what's going on in Baghdad, then we're in for some sad days."

Lawmakers told Blanco that her request for more funding was a hard sell with voters.

Responding to requests from Bush in the days and weeks after Katrina, Congress approved $62 billion for FEMA to meet the immediate housing, food and other needs of those who suffered losses because of the hurricane.

Since then, conservative Republicans in the House have insisted the relief funding — and any additional aid to the Gulf Coast — be offset by cuts in other parts of the federal budget.

A dispute also has developed over how much of the money funneled to FEMA — much of which remains unspent — should be redirected to long-term rebuilding projects.

Bush has asked that $17.1 billion of the $62 billion be used for reconstruction.

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee, requested that $34 billion be shifted to reconstruction.

=================
A Bit of Broadway by the Bay
MSNBC.com, 12/15/05

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- The Big Apple has come to Bay St. Louis in the form of 20 professional actors and singers intent on spreading holiday cheer throughout a community stripped clean of nearly all forms of entertainment. Think the cast of "Rent" meets Christmas caroling and you'll get an inkling of the sort of diversions the group is offering.

The New Yorkers are here courtesy of the World Art Project, a three-month-old nonprofit group headed by veteran actors Liza Politi and Sarah Hamilton. None of the participants is getting paid for their time and the organization itself is operating on "a wing and a prayer and contributions from very generous hearts," says Hamilton.

Dubbed the "Bayou Tour," the trip will include performances in areas all along the Gulf Coast that suffered crushing blows from Hurricane Katrina.

Politi considers the tour a kind of karmic payback: Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, a Mardi Gras group from New Orleans came to Ground Zero, offering up everything from fresh cooked jambalaya to "music and laughter," she says. Politi, who put her acting career on hold for the first nine months after the attack to do volunteer work at Ground Zero, says she never forgot the efforts of those New Orleanians.

"For a few days, a bit of the Big Easy made living in a very hard place a little more comfortable," she says. "We want to give that feeling back this holiday season."

On this night, the group was performing for about 100 volunteers staying at the compound built by the Morrell Foundation. Sometimes raucous, sometimes serene, the performance shifted through a dozen different Christmas standards. When members of the performing troupe bolted from the ranks to grab members of the audience to join the choir, applause broke out to coax the shy amateurs onstage.

While the group will put on a host of public appearances, there are other more intimate shows dotting its itinerary. One of those is a special performance just for morgue workers here. This, too, is a throwback to the days after 9/11, when Politi and many other performers on this trip went to fire houses in New York's outer boroughs -- the ones that tended to get lost among the adoration heaped on the Manhattan fire crews -- to let them know their efforts and their losses weren't forgotten.

And there is a slightly subversive agenda at work here as well, Polti and Hamilton agree.

"I'm hoping that what the singers and performers are giving here will be dwarfed by what they are getting and that they'll be able to take that back and share it," Politi says.

=================
December 15, 2005; NY Times

White House Requests $1.5 Billion More to Build Orleans Levees
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Bush will request $1.5 billion more to help rebuild the levee
system in New Orleans, the top federal official for reconstruction announced
Thursday.

''The levee system will be better and safer than it's ever been before,''
Donald Powell said at the White House.

At a news briefing, officials dodged the question of whether the levees
would be built to a Category 5, using broader language instead to promise
that the city's citizens would be safe and the levees would be ''stronger
and better.''

''The federal government is committed to building the best levee system
known in the world,'' said Powell. ''It's a complicated issue.''

The announcement came after Bush met in the Oval Office with Powell, New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Lt.
Gen. Carl Strock, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers.

''We understand that the people of New Orleans need to be assured that
they're going to be safe when they get back home, that their city has an
infrastructure that is capable of sustaining a possible storm next season or
in the seasons afterward,'' Chertoff said.

Katrina, a Category 4 storm, surged through the city's levees at numerous
points when it struck on Aug. 29, killing more than 1,300 people in Gulf
Coast states. Gov. Kathleen Blanco and other Louisiana officials, as well as
businesses and homeowners, have argued that the levees must be improved to
protect against Category 5 storms if the New Orleans metropolitan area hopes
to persuade people to return.

Nagin thanked Americans for the money to rebuild New Orleans and told former
residents of the city to come home.

''It's time for you to come back to the Big Easy,'' he said. ''This action
today says come home to New Orleans.''

Nagin said the levee system will be stronger than ever.

''These levees will be as high as 17 feet in some areas. We've never had
that,'' he said. ''We will have the holy trinity of recovery -- levees,
housing and incentives.''

Officials said the levee system would be rebuilt to its previous level of
protection before the hurricane season next year, and that the process of
strengthening them further would take two years.

Nagin acknowledged that the most heavily devastated areas of the city --
Lakeview and the Lower Ninth Ward -- were not ready for returning residents,
but he promised they would be eventually. He suggested that officials may
need to find housing elsewhere in the city in the meantime.

''At the end of the day, our entire city will be rebuilt,'' he said.

Powell said that design and construction flaws will be corrected within the
levee system. The $1.5 billion that the president is requesting would pay to
armor the levee system with concrete and stone, close three interior canals
and provide state-of-the art pumping systems so that the water would flow
out of the canals into Lake Pontchartrain.

Breaches at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals allowed flood
water to inundate large areas of the city from close to Lake Pontchartrain
to the edge of downtown. These areas -- which included several universities
as well as thousands of homes and businesses -- likely would have been
spared widespread flooding if the levees had held up against pressure from
water that rose above normal levels but did not flow over the top of the
flood walls.

Chertoff said the federal government has already provided $5.2 billion in
direct assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, but
the government also needs to provide hope to the victims.

On Capitol Hill, meantime, Senate tax-writers embraced the casinos, golf
courses and liquor stores as part of a roughly $7 billion program of tax
incentives to rebuild Gulf Coast businesses damaged or destroyed by
hurricanes.

The Senate could act as soon as Thursday on a package of tax breaks and
other assistance that fulfills Bush's call for a special business zone in
the Gulf Coast. Lawmakers hurried to finish the bill before taking a holiday
break. The House earlier had denied including the casino and other
businesses in the tax relief.

The House last week passed its own package of aid. Its key benefits matched
the Senate and included increased write-offs for small business investments
and an additional write-offs for other businesses purchasing equipment and
new property.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

=================

Stronger levees in Louisiana promised

By Jim Drinkard and Oren Dorell

USA TODAY, 12/15/05

WASHINGTON — The federal government will strengthen New Orleans levees to withstand any future storm like the one that devastated the city more than three months ago, the top official for Gulf Coast reconstruction said Wednesday.

"They will be rebuilt stronger and better than they were before Katrina," Donald Powell told USA TODAY. He said cost estimates and other details will be announced within days by federal officials.

The promise to significantly improve the levees goes beyond previous federal commitments to protect the city. In prior statements, the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency in charge of levees and flood control, has said it had authority only to restore the levees to their pre-Katrina strength.

Stronger levees "would be very welcome news," said Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat. "As always, the devil is in the details."

"That would be wonderful ... but I've kinda heard that before. I want to actually see it this time," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said.

Powell said the improvements will be designed to protect all neighborhoods that currently are within levees. "The footprint will be the same as now exists," he said. In some places, it will include "armoring" over earthen surfaces to withstand erosion, he said. The federal government will bear the cost, he said. State officials have said it will cost $32 billion to bolster the levees.

A federal guarantee that the city will be protected from future storms is an essential step toward restoring the sense of safety needed to encourage residents and businesses to return and rebuild, Powell said. "In New Orleans and Louisiana, safety is the utmost on everybody's mind."

Powell, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a major fundraiser for President Bush, was appointed a month ago.

A crucial question, Landrieu said, is whether plans include protection against the city's worst fear: a Category 5 hurricane that comes up the Mississippi River with a storm surge that overtops levees. Katrina, Category 4 at landfall, struck to the east of the city, sending winds and a storm surge through Lake Pontchartrain, to the north. Powell declined to specify what the standard for the improved levees will be.

The promise to upgrade levees comes as the Bush administration is under pressure to show it is serious about Gulf Coast reconstruction. A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Dec. 9-11 found that 54% of Americans said the federal government has not done enough to help damaged areas recover.

www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-14-levees-rebuilt_x.htm

=================
No White House Bailout for New Orleans Utility
Rescuing a private firm would be inappropriate, an official says. Users are likely to foot the bill.

By Scott Gold
LA Times, December 14, 2005

NEW ORLEANS — The White House has declined to bail out New Orleans' bankrupt utility company, prompting dismay among local officials who see the decision as an indication that the Bush administration is not committed to rebuilding the city after Hurricane Katrina.

There was still a chance, officials here said, that assistance could come through congressional action or federal grants. But because Entergy Corp. is a regulated monopoly, they said, the decision makes it likely that the utility will be forced to pass on to the public the $350-million bill for its recovery.

Residents could see their bills soar by 140% at a time when few can afford it, said Clint Vince, who advises the City Council on energy matters. He acknowledged that utilities frequently passed natural-disaster losses on to their customers, but said the scope of the calamity in New Orleans made that impossible.

"You can't place this on their backs," he said. "We have met with the White House and articulated that. And not only have we not gotten support, we have gotten opposition. It's inconceivable."

Allan B. Hubbard, chairman of the White House Gulf Coast Recovery and Rebuilding Council and President Bush's chief economic advisor, informed Entergy of the decision in a recent letter.

"We believe that transferring federal tax dollars to the bondholders and shareholders of a private firm is inappropriate," the letter said. "Prudent investors consider the risks inherent in any investment they make, including the risks of a natural disaster…. It would be wrong for the taxpayer to bail out those investors."

White House officials declined to discuss the issue publicly Tuesday. But a White House economic official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hubbard's letter encompassed the president's position.

"The company has a responsibility, and that is to supply juice to the people," the official said. "They need to get about that business. Dragging their feet — and trying to get the American taxpayers to pay for that business — is wasting time."

Louisiana officials point out that the Bush administration delivered a $250-million bailout of New York's power company, Con Edison, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — largely so that consumers would not have to cover the cost of rebuilding the company's infrastructure.

At the time, Con Edison said that the damage was equal to one-quarter of its annual profit. Entergy says the damage to its infrastructure — caused primarily by flooding when New Orleans' levee system failed — is far more extensive.

The cost of restoring power alone represents 68% of Entergy's net assets, the company has estimated.

In addition, Con Edison still had the vast majority of its customers after the terrorist attack. More than 70% of Entergy's customer base is missing, reducing its revenue stream to a trickle; many customers will never return.

"Your viewpoint is inconsistent and appears to make a distinction between the needs of the prosperous occupants of lower Manhattan after the tragedy of 9/11 … and the needs of the displaced and disproportionately poor residents of New Orleans," Entergy Executive Vice President Curt Hebert Jr. wrote to Hubbard.

The White House official rejected the comparison.

"9/11 was not a foreseeable disaster," the official said. "Hurricanes have been striking the Southeast part of the United States since the land rose from the sea."

The issue underscores a fundamental dispute in the effort to rebuild.

In a September speech broadcast from the French Quarter, Bush pledged to rebuild Gulf Coast communities so that they would be "better and stronger" than before hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the region. Bush also said that "federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone."

It has since become clear that the White House plans to rely largely on the free market to determine New Orleans' future. But even many conservatives who espouse free enterprise say the damage in New Orleans is so sweeping that government programs are the only way to rebuild. And the utility, they say, would be a good place to start.

"There is an issue of equity here," said Chris Paolino, spokesman for Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), who in most instances is a strong White House ally. "We helped out in New York. We'd like to see a little bit of support as we rebuild New Orleans."

Hebert also is an outspoken free-enterprise advocate. In 2001, as Bush's chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, he became a central figure in the California energy crisis — and caused an uproar when he said the state's effort to buy transmission lines would amount to "nationalization."

Today, as Entergy's executive vice president, his correspondence with the White House has amounted to a stern lecture on the free market's limitations when it comes to saving a staggered city.

"I am gravely disappointed in the administration's decision to apply narrow, free-market considerations," Hebert wrote. "The consumers in the city will suffer significantly as a result, and I believe that everyone there has suffered enough."

The issue has divided energy analysts.

Michelle Michot Foss, chief energy economist at the University of Texas Center for Energy Economics, said the White House position had been consistent and that Entergy needed to demonstrate corporate responsibility before expecting a handout.

"People want to see what is actually going to happen," she said. And the burden of proving that a bailout would be the wisest use of taxpayer money is on Entergy, Foss said. "What is the quid pro quo in terms of making real improvements in Louisiana? That's the dilemma here."

But Daniele M. Seitz, a Maxcor Financial Inc. analyst in New York, called the White House position shortsighted. She said restoring electric and gas service in New Orleans was the linchpin to reconstruction.

"Every other industry is attached to that industry," she said. "Unless this works, everything else is just not going anywhere. It's a pity."

The White House's rejection of the bailout request could result in a strange twist. The administration, by adhering to conservative principles, could force the city government to take over Entergy New Orleans. Indeed, Hebert's letter to the White House warned that "without immediate federal assistance, it is unlikely that Entergy New Orleans can continue as a viable commercial entity."

"That would be a bitter irony," Vince said. "That's the last resort. But it could happen."

=================
'Katrina' Dolphins to Go to Bahamas

By VALERIE BAUMAN
Associated Press
Boston Globe, 12/14/05

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Several dolphins that were swept out to sea by Hurricane Katrina will soon be reunited at a resort in the Bahamas.

Atlantis, a resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, will take on 17 dolphins from the Marine Life Oceanarium - eight of which were rescued from open water in September.

"The dolphins, I think, are a symbol of everything that's happened on the Gulf Coast and to find a new home for them - that's something that we hope will happen for everybody on the coast," said Howard Karawan, president and managing director of Kerzner International Destination Resorts, which owns Atlantis.

The animals lived at Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport until the facility was severely damaged by Katrina on Aug. 29.

The dolphins have been spread out around the country. Five are living at the Gulfarium in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., eight are at the Seabee base on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, two are in a national aquarium in Baltimore and two are at a Six Flags theme park in New Jersey, said David Lion, the president of Marine Life.

While the dolphins are being well cared for now, cold weather and the effects of separation could take a toll soon, said Frank Murru, chief marine officer for Kerzner.

"They're very social animals," Murru said. "These particular animals have been living together off and on for quite a few years, so they're quite used to each other. Getting them back into a unified place, I think, will be very good for them."

Mike Rothe is the manager of the Navy's marine mammal program in San Diego. He helped set up temporary pools for the dolphins that remained on the Gulf Coast after the hurricane.

Rothe, a civilian, said the Navy generally does not keep animals in the temporary pools for more than three weeks. While they are not in immediate danger, the dolphins living in Mississippi have been confined to the pools for several months.

"The animals really ought to be getting into a larger environment that is set up to better facilitate their husbandry and good health," Rothe said.

There is an immediate need to move the dolphins to a permanent location, Karawan said.

"They're safe where they are now, but at the facilities that they are in now (in Mississippi), the dolphins are starting to show some stress," Karawan said. "They can't survive there healthfully much longer. They live in pods, so to bring them back and unite them - we're very excited and we plan on having a big celebration when they get here."

The dolphins will live in seven interconnected resident pools at Atlantis, with more than 6 million gallons of sea water. The dolphins will each have 250,000 gallons of water - more than 10 times the amount required by U.S. regulations.

Marine Life and Atlantis officials are uncertain how soon the animals can be transported to their new home, citing government regulations and other formalities.

Atlantis has signed a letter of intent in the meantime, guaranteeing the company will take care of the animals because Marine Life authorities were unsure when the Mississippi facilities would be repaired.

Atlantis is also planning to establish a program entitled "Katrina Kids," which will sponsor trips for Mississippi Gulf Coast school children to visit the resort and the dolphins.

A research program will also be established with regional universities to enable ongoing collaboration with the Atlantis veterinary medical and research teams.

The resort will also take on 24 sea lions and 22 exotic birds from Marine Life.

=================

Plan could shrink New Orleans footprint
Key commission member recommends returning some areas to wetland

MSNBC, Dec. 14, 2005

A key member of the commission charged with overseeing the rebuilding of New Orleans partially endorsed a proposal to shrink the city's footprint, but pulled back from a recommendation to temporarily ban development in some of the neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, according to the city's Times-Picayune newspaper.

Joe Canizaro, co-chairman of the city's Bring Back New Orleans planning subcommittee, said he and other commission members agree with a recommendation from the Urban Land Institute that some areas of the city should be returned to wetland, according to the newspaper. The ULI proposal would require environmental tests and hurricane-protection studies before allowing development in some neighborhoods, including the Lower 9th Ward.

Canizaro's plan would allow residents to rebuild in any part of the city for the next three years. "If a neighborhood is not developing adequately to support the services it needs to support it, we'll try to shrink it then," Canizaro told the paper. "I don't envision the elimination of neighborhoods, I see the shrinkage of neighborhoods," Canizaro said. The city would have the power to condemn property in areas that have failed to develop sufficiently to support the neighborhoods.

Canizaro also proposed the creation of a program that would give residents the pre-Katrina value of their homes if they choose to rebuild and later have second thoughts about the location.

A final recommendation to Mayor Ray Nagin isn't expected until the end of the year, but some commission members have made it clear that they also support the concept of a smaller city, according to the report.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10465263/

=================
Panel subpoenas Rumsfeld for Katrina documents
House committee issues subpoena for documents

Associated Press
CNN.com, 12/14/05

A House committee investigating the government's response to Hurricane Katrina issued a subpoena Wednesday to force Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to turn over documents but stopped short of sending a similar legal demand to the White House.

The subpoena commands Rumsfeld to produce internal records and communications about the Pentagon's response to the August 29 storm, including efforts to send supplies to victims, stabilize public safety and mobilize active duty forces in the Gulf Coast. It requires the Pentagon to deliver the documents, spanning from August 23 to September 15, from Rumsfeld and eight other top military officials by December 30.

Separately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would comply with a judge's ruling that FEMA keep paying for hotel rooms for hurricane evacuees until February 7. The agency also agreed to extend the program for eligible storm victims who have not been helped by that deadline.

The subpoenas were one focus of a House hearing that was marked by angry barbs between Gov. Kathleen Blanco, D-Louisiana, and Republicans who challenged her about why a mandatory evacuation for New Orleans was not ordered until the morning before Katrina hit. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for coastal parishes south and east of New Orleans before then.

"We had mandatory evacuations," Blanco said. "We got 1.2 million people out. We ended up saving another 100,000 people and we lost 1,100. That's the whole story. We got people out."

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Florida, said Blanco's explanation was "a story that's not acceptable because 1,100 people is one half of the men and women we have lost in Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"You lost that many on one day," Miller said.

Shot back Blanco: "Then it's not acceptable for us to lose ... soldiers, either."

Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, asked Blanco why New Orleans' emergency management and evacuation plans were not followed.

"It's detailed," Rogers said of the plan. "All it needed was for the mayor and/or the governor to say 'Let's go."'

"We did that, sir. Don't pretend that we didn't do that," Blanco responded tersely.

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers said they were frustrated by the administration's failures to provide the House investigation with internal memos, e-mails and other documents before and after the storm hit.

The chairman of the special House committee rejected, for now, legal action against the White House, but left open the possibility of a future subpoena. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Virginia, asked lawmakers to wait until after a private briefing Thursday at the White House before deciding whether to go ahead with a subpoena.

"We cannot do our job if we don't get these documents, and we won't get these documents if we don't subpoena them," said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-Louisiana.

The committee, which plans to issue its findings on February 15, has requested hundreds of thousands of documents more than two months ago from the administration and Gulf Coast state and local officials.

Louisiana has handed over more than 100,000 documents to the committee. Though the White House said it has provided 450,000 documents, lawmakers said it has claimed executive privilege to refuse e-mails sent to and from White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said lawmakers would be briefed by a high-level administration official and that he did not immediately anticipate a subpoena against the White House.

"I'm not expecting anything of that nature at this point," McClellan said. "What we have done is work to make sure that they get the information they need to do their job. We've worked in good faith."

The hearing came as FEMA pledged to continue paying for hotel rooms for evacuees still unable to find apartments, trailers or other stable housing by February 7, a month beyond the agency's cutoff date.

A federal judge in New Orleans this week set the February deadline in a ruling to give victims more time in hotels as FEMA processes aid applications.

FEMA's acting director, R. David Paulison, did not cite an end-date for the hotel payments, but said "it won't be indefinite." He said FEMA will pay hotel bills for up to two weeks after evacuees receive temporary housing assistance because "sometimes it's tough to find an apartment."

An estimated 40,000 families still are living in hotels, compared with a peak of 85,000 two months weeks ago.

"We are going to be flexible, we will make changes to our plan as we move along," Paulison said. "And we are going to continuously work to make sure nobody falls through the cracks. And if they do fall through the cracks, we are going to find them, locate them and get them back into our system."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/14/katrina.washington.ap/index.html
=================

La. Governor: Feds Should Fund New Levees

Congressional Katrina Hearings Include Blanco, Nagin

By DAVID KERLEY

usatoday.com, Dec. 14, 2005

The federal government is responsible for rebuilding the levees that surround New Orleans, the governor of Louisiana told a special U.S. House committee investigating the government's response to Hurricane Katrina.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, told lawmakers that the federal government funds levees, bridges and dams across the country. "This is our No. 1 priority," she said. "As I've said before, if the levees had not failed, we wouldn't be having this hearing."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is scheduled to testify later today.

While the mayor and governor testify, Gulf Coast lawmakers were working to free up more money for recovery and reconstruction.

So far, Congress has approved more than $62 billion for hurricane rebuilding. But less than half that money, $24 billion, has been spent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both the White House and members of Congress want to reallocate much of the $38 billion that hasn't been spent.

President Bush wants to take $17 billion dollars from FEMA and give it to other agencies. The point man for hurricane relief on Capitol Hill wants to double that amount. Sen. Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican whose state also was hammered by Katrina, hopes to reallocate $35 billion for use as community improvement grants, for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and social programs.

"We need to spend the $62.3 billion Congress already appropriated on an emergency basis, approved by both houses and requested by the administration. Let's spend it -- let's not just let it sit there," Cochran said.

If Cochran is successful, this would leave FEMA with just $3 billion for its continuing efforts on the Gulf region. Yet, as a spokeswoman for FEMA noted to ABC News: "Three billion dollars is still a lot of money."

FEMA points out that rules and restrictions prevent it from spending money on some of the programs lawmakers are interested in funding.

Congress also is close to passing $7 billion in tax breaks and incentives for businesses on the Gulf Coast.

=================

Katrina victims: 'Living in barns'

Parish president blasts FEMA over temporary homes

CNN.com, 12/13/05

More than three months after thousands of people lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina, local and federal officials are trading blame over the slow delivery of trailer housing.

"We got a serious situation in St. Bernard Parish," its president, Henry "Junior" Rodriguez, told CNN on Tuesday.

"We got people living in tents and automobiles. We got people living in barns. We got people living in their houses -- in tents," he said on "American Morning."

"This is the beginning of winter. This is unacceptable."

Tuesday morning, it was 41 degrees in New Orleans.

A site with 50 to 55 trailers is operational, Rodriguez said, and another may be able to handle 45 trailers within a couple days. But the 100 or so trailers fall far short of the 12,000 trailers needed for the number of people estimated to return home, he added.

Adding to Rodriguez's frustration is the fact that 1,400 trailers are sitting unused in St. Bernard Parish. The parish ordered them from a private contractor days after the hurricane hit on August 29, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not agreed to pay for them.

There are also more than 5,000 FEMA mobile homes in Arkansas sitting unused, CNN has learned.

FEMA responded Tuesday, telling CNN it is ready to deliver 125,000 trailers to the area but that parish officials "still have to identify places to put them."

The agency said that St. Bernard Parish "has identified 1,000 sites for trailers ... 500 of them have already been installed, and the rest are in the works."

"It is understandable that the process can be frustrating, given that basic services, including electricity, were just recently restored," FEMA's statement read.

"While most of the housing stock in St. Bernard's was decimated by Katrina, several options exist to ensure that people have a safe, warm place to stay."

The dispute over the trailers is the latest in a long line of bitter battles between local, state and federal officials over who bears responsibility for a breakdown in services that left people stranded, homeless and sometimes dying in the wake of the storm.

St. Bernard Homeland Security Chief Larry Ingargiola said he calls FEMA representatives three to four times a day and cannot persuade the agency to move faster in paying for the trailers. "If they don't pay for the trailers, I can't put the trailers out," he said.

Rodriguez said he and other parish officials identified 6,500 trailers, each at a price $1,500 less than what FEMA is paying for trailers of the same type. Another list he provided had 4,500 trailers that are $3,000 cheaper than what FEMA pays, Rodriguez said. And FEMA hasn't talked with the contractor in charge of the cheaper trailers, Rodriguez added.

Meanwhile Jim Maguire, the private contractor whose unused trailers haven't been paid for, told CNN that they can't stay in St. Bernard forever.

Returnees pitch tents

A couple from St. Bernard, Wayne and Charlene Conrad, have decided not to wait any longer and bought a tent to pitch in what is left of their living room. A couple of longtime friends have pitched a tent there, too.

"You call, and you call, and you call, and you call -- and it's busy," said Charlene Conrad. "And finally when somebody does answer, it's a recording. You gotta push this button. I don't know what to do. All we ask is to get a trailer."

A FEMA spokeswoman in Washington said the agency is not to blame. "So far, FEMA has provided rental assistance for more than 500,000 families and housed more than 40,000 in travel trailers," Nicol Andrews said.

On Monday a federal judge in New Orleans extended until February 7 a FEMA deadline on Katrina evacuees to leave hotels. Judge Stanwood Duval's temporary restraining order prevented FEMA from ending on January 7 the program that pays for evacuees' hotel rooms.

His ruling skewered the agency's actions concerning the program, describing them "notoriously erratic and bumbling."

CNN's Susan Roesgen contributed to this report.

www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/13/katrina.trailers/index.html

=================
New Orleans company to offer Katrina disaster tour

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana -- Visitors to New Orleans who once toured the graceful mansions of its Garden District or learned the history of its Mississippi River plantations have a new attraction: The Hurricane Katrina disaster tour.

Reuters
CNN.com, 12/13/05

Gray Line New Orleans will begin on January 4 a "Hurricane Katrina Tour -- America's Worst Catastrophe!" to show the ruin that befell the city when the storm hit on August 29, breaching a faulty system of river levees and flooding 80 percent of its neighborhoods.

Gray Line New Orleans normally organizes trips through the city's historic districts as well as its swamps and spooky cemeteries, but its business has been severely curtailed by the hurricane. The company said the Katrina tour was born of frustration over the government's slow response to rebuilding.

About 10 percent of the $35 ticket price for the three-hour tour will be donated to Katrina relief groups.

"People around the country don't understand it until they see it firsthand," Gregory Hoffman, general manager of Gray Lines New Orleans, told Reuters. "We're going to walk them through what we as locals experienced leading up to and following the hurricane."

Critics say a commercial tour only sensationalizes the city's suffering, with tens of thousands of residents still dispersed across the United States. Other victims can still be seen on city streets trying to salvage belongings from their wrecked homes.

"There should be tours, but they should be linked with people who are displaced and coming up with a plan of action," said Corlita Mahr, a hurricane victim who works with the grassroots People's Hurricane Relief Fund.

The Gray Line tour includes a history of the Mississippi River and the levees intended to protect city inhabitants, as well as its industries, from oil and gas production to seafood harvesting.

The tour will follow a route through the ravaged Lakeview neighborhood and pass by the Superdome stadium, where storm victims waited for days to be rescued with little food, water or medical attention.

Hoffman, who along with many of his employees lost his home to the flood, noted that visitors are already poking into destroyed neighborhoods on their own accord, not unlike tourists who lined up to see the ruins of New York's World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001, attacks four years ago.

Passengers will not be let off Gray Line buses to take photos of neighborhoods, he said.

"We may pass out maps that show the depths of the devastation, but after you ride around for fifteen minutes in those areas you don't really need any more," said Hoffman.

Copyright 2005 Reuters. All rights reserved.

www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/12/13/hurricanes.tour.reut/index.html

=================
Red Cross President Marsha Evans Resigns
Coordination and Communication With Board at Issue, Sources Say

By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Pos, December 13, 2005

The American Red Cross, which has faced criticism in recent weeks for its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, said today that its chief executive, Marsha Evans, will resign at the end of the month.

Evans was hired in 2002 after the stormy departure of its former CEO, Bernadine Healy, who was forced out in 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Jack McGuire, executive vice president of the Red Cross' biomedical services, has been named interim president and chief executive, the charity said today.

"The organization will maintain its current strategy, direction and programs and will continue to ensure the continuity and stability of ongoing Red Cross operations," the Red Cross said in a statement on its Web site.

While the Red Cross characterized Evans' departure as voluntary, sources in the organization say she departed after the 50-member board of directors grew unhappy with her attempts to reform the giant charity.

But Chuck Connor, senior vice president for marketing and communication, said a "more precise" description of the problems is that the "board had concerns about her coordination and communication with the board." He declined to be more specific, but defended her performance. "This place is in a lot better shape than it was 2 1/2 years ago."

In a letter to Red Cross employees released today by the organization, Evans said she had been thinking of leaving after her three-year anniversary with the charity but stayed on to oversee its Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Now, she said, "I look forward to spending more time with my family."

The 124-year-old organization is headquartered in Washington D.C., but has 800 chapters around the country. It is responsible for one-half of the nation's blood supply,collecting and selling blood to the nation's medical facilities.

The Red Cross also is designated by the federal government as the front-line responder in national emergencies for providing "mass care" -- shelter, food and first aid -- for disaster victims.

But members of Congress, civil rights groups and Katrina evacuees have criticized its performance in the aftermath of the storm that severely damaged the Gulf Coast last summer.

They complained of long lines and lengthy phone delays when evacuees tried to get financial assistance from the organization. They also said the charity was insensitive in its treatment of the mostly minority evacuees.

In interviews and in meetings with congressional representatives and other groups, Evans defended the organization's performance, while acknowledging its shortcomings. She said the organization was overrun by the scope of the disaster, which covered an area the size of Great Britain.

She also vowed to increase the diversity of its volunteer network and to improve its relations with minorities.

Red Cross officials, who asked not to be identified, said Evan's departure was not related to the charity's handling of its hurricane relief efforts.

The Red Cross, which has raised more than $1.8 billion for its Katrina relief, says it needs just over $2 billion to pay its expenses.

Evans, the former executive director of the Girl Scouts of the USA, is the fourth Red Cross CEO in less than a decade. Elizabeth Dole served as chief executive, then Healy, who was forced out after clashing with the board after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Red Cross executive Harold Decker stepped in as interim chief executive until the board hired Evans in June 2002.

Evans drew praise for her low-key style after Healy's hard-driving leadership style. But soon, sources say, she also came into conflict with the board, which is dominated by its chapters that resist any direction from headquarters.

---------------

December 13, 2005; NY Times

Red Cross Chief Steps Down; Interim Successor Is Named

By STEPHANIE STROM

The American Red Cross announced today that Marsha J. Evans, its president and chief executive, has resigned, effective at the end of this month.

John F. McGuire, the Red Cross's executive vice president for biomedical services, was named as its interim head. Mr. McGuire oversees the organization's blood operation, its biggest source of income, which has repeatedly been fined by the Food and Drug Administration for problems in the way it handles blood collection and storage.

In a press release, Ms. Evans said she had been considering leaving the organization after her third anniversary as its head on Aug. 5 but stayed to lead its response to Hurricane Katrina.

That response has been widely and bitterly criticized, although Ms. Evans and the Red Cross have defended it.

"Now, with our successful hurricane response continuing in steady hands, I believe this time is right to step down as your president and C.E.O. at the end of this month," Ms. Evans said in a statement today.

Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chairwoman of the Red Cross board, praised Ms. Evans in a statement. "She leaves the Red Cross in a much stronger position than it was when she began her tenure," Ms. McElveen-Hunter said.

Ms. Evans, a former rear admiral in the Navy, was brought in to head the organization as it was trying to regain its footing after the attacks on Sept. 11, when it was criticized for misleading donors about the use of their money and for writing checks to people who were only tangentially affected by the disaster.

Whatever gains it made under her leadership, however, were lost after Katrina hit. Survivors of the hurricane complained that the Red Cross was not present in the worst-hit areas immediately after the storm, that its telephone hotlines were inaccessible, that disabled victims were turned away from shelters and a variety of other problems.

Yet donors gave it the lion's share of their generosity, funneling more than $1.5 billion to it in the aftermath of the hurricane. That fund-raising success has sparked anger among smaller nonprofits that had to deal with the crisis without the Red Cross's assistance and that have little hope of raising money to cover their expenses.

The Red Cross's response has been that this disaster was so vast in scope and impact that it could never have adequately prepared to respond, but that explanation has failed to satisfy its critics.

The House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight is scheduled to hold a hearing this afternoon on the charitable response to Katrina, and much of the testimony is expected to address failures in the Red Cross's response.

Staff members said, however, that her relationship with the board was the primary reason for Ms. Evans's resignation, just as it was the main reason for the resignation of her predecessor.

Insiders and friends of Ms. Evans who know her from her days as head of the Girl Scouts of America, the job she held before joining the Red Cross, say she had long struggled to hold her own against a demanding board that has long challenged and tried to micromanage the leaders it has selected.

The battles between the board and Ms. Evans's predecessor, Dr. Bernadine Healy, have been well documented, and longtime staff members say Elizabeth Dole similarly had to fight to maintain her independence.

Mr. McGuire, who joined the organization in 2004 after working in the private sector, has headed a part of the organization that has been dogged for years by complaints from the Food and Drug Administration over its handling of blood products. In June, for example, the F.D.A. imposed a $3.4 million fine on the Red Cross, which reported that it had identified 135 instances in which it had retrieved unsuitable blood that it had distributed.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

=================
Science and Storms: Predicting the Unpredictable

Kathryn Freel
Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, Drake University

Journal of Young Investigators. 2005. Volume 13.

Late last summer, thousands of people joined forces as records were being broken, not at the summer Olympics in Greece, but rather in Florida. Starting in August Floridians banned together as the peninsula became the only state to suffer four major hurricanes in one season since Texas in 1886.

Just a few months later, national focus shifted to the Indian Ocean when a 9.3-magnitude earthquake caused one of the largest tsunamis in recent history, striking several countries, killing hundreds of thousands people, and leaving millions homeless.

After such disasters, it is common to ask of science why such storms occur, how does one track and predict such a storm, and where is the technology that is needed to save lives?

In reality, different areas of research have been looking at such natural phenomena as earthquakes and hurricanes for decades. Such research crosses disciplines and even countries. Researchers become creative, looking to other technology in different fields, like astronomy and physics. Countries piggy-back onto programs, systems, and satellites other nations have to create a new system with different purposes. In short, researchers study not only their area of science, but any other area, technology, or program available to better understand such complex natural phenomena.

Trying to See “Eye-to-Eye” with Hurricanes

Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne devastated Florida and other southern states in 2004. Two other major hurricanes that remained at sea rounded out the hurricane season with six major hurricanes and fifteen tropical storms.

Hurricane season started late last fall – the first storm did not form until early August. While most seasons see storms forming as early as June, the late start brought more destruction than anticipated. Furthermore, the late start just saw a late end. When the tropical storm Otto finally diminished on December 2nd, the Atlantic seaboard at length could breathe and begin the long process of rebuilding.

As the National Hurricane Center followed the paths of these storms, it found that the mapping techniques used last year needed improvements. To help efficiently evacuate areas, they projected storms five days ahead, as opposed to the three-day projections in previous years. However, the technology was not developed enough to anticipate if a storm would skip areas. After Hurricane Charley hit the west coast of Florida, it skipped up the east coast and reemerged, striking Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Hurricane Ivan acted even more unpredictably when, after hitting Alabama and heading north, a piece of the system returned to the Gulf of Mexico and caused more damage.

In response to this problem, NASA developed technology to look into the center of the system, helping meteorologists forecast changes in a hurricane's intensity and direction. Using the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, the pictures from the satellite give valuable information about how the storm is put together, providing clues as to whether a sudden change in the direction of winds near the top of the storm may impact the storm's strength or cause it to jump paths.

“With hurricane forecasts, events change quickly, and meteorologists need data as fast as possible,” says Jeffrey Halverson, Meteorologist and TRMM Education and Outreach Scientist. “This new process gives them data within three hours from the time the satellite has flown over a tropical cyclone. We hope this new data product will help the community to better assess the structure and intensity of tropical cyclones."

Professional and amateur storm trackers alike can look into the eye of a storm by going to the TRMM website.

This technology may prove very valuable for the 2005 hurricane season, which is already expected to bring great damage to the Atlantic coast. Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are predicting at least seven Atlantic hurricanes this year, with as many as five matching Ivan's destructive force. The season has already started with Hurricanes Dennis and Emily hitting the Caribbean.

If this hurricane season does prove as destructive as the NOAA predicts, the National Hurricane Center is planning on implementing the five-day storm projections again, despite criticism that it creates unnecessary panic. The NHC is certain that the need for an extended outlook combined with new equipment is necessary, even if it causes some to prepare for a storm that may end up not in their path.

“Last year’s hurricane season provided a reminder that planning and preparation for a hurricane do make a difference," says Max Mayfield, director of the NOAA NHC. "Residents in hurricane vulnerable areas who had a plan, and took individual responsibility for acting on those plans, faired far better than those who did not," he explains.

Predicting How the Earth Will Move

As nations celebrated the 2004 holiday season and coming New Year, festivals were put on hold as the world turned its eyes onto the Indian Ocean, where countries were rocked with one of the deadliest natural disasters this century. In his room at the Hilton Arcadia resort at Karon Beach, Phuket, Mike Williams was shaken awoke with the 9.3 magnitude earthquake that occurred off the coast of Sumatra. The tsunami wave followed. "The beach umbrellas and sunbeds were like dolls' furniture as they were swept inland,” says Williams. “The surge continued, and dozens of cars were swept along the road like floating toys. It was absolute chaos - very scary,” describes Williams.

As the waters retreated, exposing more destroyed homes and land, the death toll continued to rise, settling above 225,000 people. Millions more were left homeless. Relief programs arose everywhere, and people tried to help in every way possible.

Developing technology to predict earthquake magnitude and location from the tiny movements that tectonic plates make everyday has long been the subject of research projects. Scientists tend to look at this problem in two ways: tracing a single earthquake’s movements from its epicenter on or looking at several earthquakes over long periods of time.

Miaki Ishii and Peter Shearer, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, in collaboration with Heidi Houston and John Vidale at UCLA’s Earth and Space Sciences department, developed a new method for imaging how the earth ruptured during the quake. Called “back projection,” the method is not unlike those used to find sources of oil and gas and by astronomers to image distant galaxies. In this method, the scientists use the first-arriving seismic waves generated by an earthquake to produce detailed images within 30 minutes of an event. They then trace seismic waves back to their original rupture source.

In the case of the Sumatra-Andaman event, they used the Japanese Hi-Net array, consisting of about 700 high-quality seismometers, as antennae to track the seismic sources. Ishii and his partners obtained a series of rupture points progressing from south to north in the Sumatra-Andaman region. In this method, the scientists use the first-arriving seismic waves generated by an earthquake to produce detailed images within 30 minutes of an event. They then trace seismic waves back to their original rupture source.

“It’s similar to some ideas that have been used in the past," says Shearer. He explains, "But as far as we know it’s the first time that it has been applied to directly image the rupture of a large earthquake."

Meanwhile, Álvaro Corral, a physicist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, connected the reoccurrence time of earthquakes to physics systems. The time interval between successive earthquakes is similar to the physical structure of systems when they change phase in the "critical points,” as when water vaporizes from liquid to gas. Researchers may be able to develop projections for location and magnitude of future earthquakes by studying past earthquakes.

“If we note the different earthquakes that have taken place in a given zone over a large period of time,” says Corral. He also explains that, “We see that they are grouped together, but the most surprising thing is that if we look at a longer period of time, the groups of earthquakes are themselves also grouped in larger clusters. The same happens for any period of time, for earthquakes of any magnitude, wherever they take place in the world. This has a fundamental implication on the type of phenomenon that earthquakes are; rather than being chaotic, as one might think, we can consider them to be critical.”

The ability to predict and carefully track tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis becomes more important with increasingly worse storms and destruction. The new technology being developed could help warn residents in danger. Any technology used to save lives reminds everyone how science helps to improve society. Cooperation between countries like Japan and the US to study tropical storms show how simple it can be to develop new processes by joining forces.

What about the parallels found between astronomy, physical science, and earthquakes? Well, that’s just plain scientific ingenuity.

Copyright © 2005 by Kathryn Freel and JYI. All rights reserved

=================
December 13, 2005; NY Times

When the Sea Destroys a Road, The Question Arises: Is It Worth Saving?

By CORNELIA DEAN

Santa Rosa Island, in the Gulf Islands National Seashore off the Florida Panhandle, does not look like much of a battleground, even though the 170-year-old Fort Pickens guards its western end. But this tiny stretch of sand has become a new focus in a long-running and intense debate about how people can coexist with nature on the coast.

The island is a flat sandy barrier whose dunes have been virtually destroyed in recent storms. Its lone road, County Road 399, had to be moved after Hurricane Opal in 1995, and it was damaged by subsequent storms.

It was washed out by Hurricane Ivan last year and rebuilt, only to wash out again in Tropical Storm Arlene in June. Rebuilt again, it washed out again in Hurricane Dennis the next month. After that damage was repaired, Hurricane Katrina struck.

It was then that some park officials began to wonder whether it was time to do something more than rebuild. Maybe, they said, it was time to bolster the road with metal or rocks or other armor. That would maintain access to island beaches, the fort and a nearby campground, attractions that until Katrina had made the seashore a major attraction of the National Park Service.

"There's been a road there for over 50 years, and my personal feeling is we have an obligation to do our best to provide that," said Jerry Eubanks, superintendent of the seashore.

But not everyone agrees. The park service policy calls for letting nature take its course on the seashore. One reason is the damage that results when eroding beaches like Santa Rosa Island are armored with rock or metal walls. Eventually, encroaching water will reach the armor, leaving the beach itself under water, a drama that has often played out on United States coasts, most of which are eroding.

Many coastal scientists say people have to learn to live with nature rather than trying to hold off the ocean with walls and other structures. One advocate of this view, Robert J. Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University, said he was particularly disappointed to learn that the park officials were contemplating armoring Santa Rosa Island.

"It's heartbreaking," Mr. Young said. "How can you expect the developed shoreline to take this issue seriously if the parks agency, on a pristine shoreline, are using brute-force management? It's really discouraging."

So the people considering the fate of County Road 399 find themselves in the middle of an intense environmental debate that has been raging with growing intensity since the late 1960's, when an explosion of development began transforming the nation's ocean coasts. Today, the argument is further fueled by changes in the weather. In a decades-long cycle, experts say, a period of relative hurricane calm has given way to a period of more and stronger storms. Global warming will only make things worse.

Mr. Eubanks, the seashore superintendent, said the roadway on Santa Rosa Island typically failed when strong storms sent water rushing across it in sheets. The water scours out the base of the road, and pretty soon it is reduced to slabs of asphalt half buried in sand.

Park officials are considering a number of repairs, he said, including the possibility of lowering the road so storm waters would wash over it. After that, it would be reinforced.

In a report on the situation, Volkert & Associates, an engineering concern in Mobile, Ala., said there were a number of ways the repairs be done, but it recommended building a kind of seawall made of sheets of corrugated metal called sheet piling that would be driven deep into the sand along the seaward edge of the road. If this construction proceeded, it would also be possible to run a sewer line to Fort Pickens to replace the septic system there.

Mr. Eubanks, who trained as an engineer though he has not recently worked in the field, said he believed that this kind of design would be "very little impediment" to the island and would enable workers to clear the road of sand after storms.

But David B. Shaver, chief of the geologic resources division of the park service, said that when he learned of these plans he feared "that things were moving a little too fast." The seashore was developing a general management plan, he said, but the storms this year, and the emergency repair funds that followed, arrived before the process was complete and "before we had a handle on long-term impacts."

"We have to balance cultural resources with natural resources," he said, adding that while there was a lot of pressure from commercial interests to maintain access to the park, maybe there should be a "shift in that relative balance, visitor use versus preservation."

"That's an active debate," he went on. He said that no action would be taken on any plans until after Jan. 1, and that until then, construction of anything permanent "is on hold pending analysis."

Rebecca Beavers, a coastal geologist for the park service, said officials were considering ways to maintain road access between Pensacola Beach and Navarre Beach, island towns separated by a stretch of park. But right now, she added, "we are working on interim options that would not require hard stabilization."

That is good, in the view of people opposed to any armor, because it gives them time to make the case that armoring the road will ultimately be bad for the beach.

"To maintain this road with a seawall is madness," said Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., director of the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines and a fervent opponent of development on vulnerable barrier islands.

"They say, 'Well, it's only there for storms,' " said Dr. Pilkey, an author of "Living on the Edge of the Gulf" (Duke University Press, 2001), which characterizes most of the western end of Santa Rosa Island as an area of "extreme" erosion risk. "That's not the way it's going to work. It will be a seawall before long - in the water. In itself, it will enhance the erosion of the beach."

He and others point to the strategy that the park service adopted when the Atlantic Ocean threatened the famous lighthouse in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. After years of intense debate, the lighthouse was moved 1,600 feet inland in 1999, a step applauded by people who advocate keeping human infrastructure out of nature's path.

Dr. Pilkey said the debate over County Road 399 reminded him of arguments over the lighthouse. He said he saw "the same lack of sympathy for, the same lack of understanding, the same just plain ignorance of shoreline processes."

He added, "It's a very short-term view: 'We are going to save that road.' "

Dr. Pilkey said he wished the park service would consider other ways of maintaining access to seashore attractions like ferries from the mainland. And he said he hoped that once people understood the underlying geological processes shaping the island in an era of rising seas, they would recognize the problems of the armor approach.

"People say, 'What are you going to do, let the road fall in?' " he continued. "The correct answer, of course, is yes."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
December 12, 2005; NY Times

Court Extends Plan for Housing Katrina Evacuees

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW ORLEANS -- A federal judge ruled Monday that a program that is putting tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees up in hotels must be extended until Feb. 7 -- a month beyond the cutoff date set by FEMA.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval said victims must be given more time in hotels because FEMA cannot guarantee that all applications for other aid, such as rent assistance or trailers, will be processed by the agency's Jan. 7 deadline.

The temporary restraining order was part of a class-action lawsuit filed in November by advocates for hurricane victims.

Attorneys pressing the lawsuit had argued that sticking to a January deadline would mean homelessness for thousands of evacuees.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency continues to pick up the tab for about 41,000 hotel rooms in 47 states and the District of Columbia at an estimated cost so far of about $350 million. In addition, the agency has provided rental assistance to more than 500,000 families who lost their homes to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said.

The agency ''will review the judge's decision and continue to reach out to help those evacuated get the help they need as they get back on their feet,'' she said.

The agency had set a Dec. 1 deadline for ending the hotel program but extended it to Dec. 15 after widespread criticism. In addition, 10 states -- Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas -- were allowed to apply for extensions that effectively stretched the deadline to Jan. 7 for most evacuees.

Duval ruled that those who have not yet received FEMA aid to rent an apartment or move into a trailer can stay in their government-paid hotel rooms until two weeks after their application is approved or denied. But he said everyone will have to be out by Feb. 7 at the latest, unless FEMA decides to extend the deadline again.

Duval noted that even those who have FEMA rent money in hand are finding it difficult to find housing in some areas.

''FEMA cannot assure the court that it will process all or most of the applications of the persons living in hotels and-or motels by Jan. 7, 2006,'' Duval wrote. ''The court is convinced that many persons in the putative class will be irreparably harmed by FEMA's admitted inability to process the pending applications.''

A spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department, which defended FEMA in the lawsuit, said no decision had been made on whether to appeal.

Lawyers for evacuees said victims often got conflicting information about when they would have to leave. At a hearing Friday, one hotel occupant, Lenora Brantley, said she received a letter dated Dec. 2 telling her she could stay in her hotel room until Jan. 7. Later she got a Dec. 5-dated letter telling her she would have to leave by Dec. 15.

''It is unimaginable what anxiety and misery these erratic and bizarre vacillations by FEMA have caused these victims, all of whom, for at least one point in time, had the very real fear of being without shelter for Christmas,'' Duval said.

Duval's ruling dealt only with Hurricane Katrina victims who applied for FEMA aid, not victims of Hurricane Rita. But attorney Howard Godnick, one of the lawyers who brought the lawsuit, said the decision sets a precedent that Rita victims could use to fight eviction from a hotel, if necessary.

The plaintiffs did not get everything they sought. Duval refused to order that FEMA act immediately on more than 84,000 aid applications still listed as ''pending.'' He said federal law is unclear on when FEMA must act on such applications.

In Baton Rouge, Gov. Kathleen Blanco released an order Monday that postpones the New Orleans mayoral election indefinitely.

Secretary of State Al Ater, the state's top elections official, had recommended the postponement, saying the city is incapable of holding primaries in February because of widespread damage to polling sites and voting machines.

The order, which was signed Friday, did not set a new date for the elections, saying only that they should be held ''as soon as practicable.'' The postponement affects races for mayor, sheriff and city council seats.

Associated Press reporter Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this story.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

=================
Louisiana governor postpones N.O. vote

Associated Press
USAToday.com, 12/12/05

BATON ROUGE — Gov. Kathleen Blanco postponed the New Orleans mayoral election indefinitely on Monday, setting up a legal battle with voters who filed a lawsuit seeking to ensure the election is held as scheduled.
Blanco's executive order cites the recommendation of Secretary of State Al Ater, the state's top elections official, who has said the city is incapable of holding elections in February because Hurricane Katrina caused so much damage to polling sites and voting machines.

The postponement would affect the mayor's race as well as scheduled elections for sheriff and city council seats.

A group of New Orleans voters last week filed suit against the governor, seeking to force her to hold the election as scheduled. A hearing in that case has not been set.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

=================

Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina Resettle Along a Racial Divide

Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes.

By Tomas Alex Tizon and Doug Smith

LA Times, December 12, 2005

Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes, postal records show.

A Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane also highlights the metropolitan area's sharp distinctions of class and race. Poor blacks from the city were more likely to land farther away in places much different from home. In many cases, those evacuees stayed wherever government-chartered buses or planes stopped.

Evacuees from the suburbs, mostly middle-class whites, tended to find housing closer by in areas similar to their neighborhoods, which minimized the disruption to their lives and left them in a better position to return as soon as circumstances allow.

Despite the initial alarm over a massive migration that would irreversibly scatter the city's population across the 50 states, only a small percentage has landed more than a day's drive — about 300 miles — from New Orleans. Fifty-nine percent found new housing without leaving the storm-damaged area.

These patterns emerged from a Times analysis of about 325,000 address changes from Aug. 29 — the day Katrina hit — through mid-October, representing about a quarter of the 1.5 million households in the hurricane-damaged region no longer receiving postal delivery. For privacy reasons, the U.S. Postal Service excluded destinations where fewer than 25 families relocated — a total of about 30,000 households.

The findings provide only a snapshot of migration patterns. Migration will be in flux for a long time, possibly years, as thousands continue to lead unsettled and unstable lives in hotel rooms, trailers and other temporary housing.

"We should look at this situation as a kind of motion picture, and this gives us a glimpse of one scene," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan.

"I would bet that six weeks from now, two months from now, two years from now these numbers will be dramatically different," said Frey, author of "America by the Numbers: A Field Guide to the U.S. Population."

Address changes that have poured in since mid-October, however, followed the same migration pattern, the postal service said.

Caveats aside, Frey and other researchers said there was evidence — primarily anecdotal — corroborating The Times' finding that poor blacks ended up farther away in wealthier, more rural areas that are predominantly white. The move to more-prosperous cities could amount to a second chance for many evacuees and could change New Orleans forever.

Tulane University sociology professor James Elliott said New Orleans, more than any other large American city, is a place of concentrated poverty, where schools and social agencies perform poorly and where a large number of residents seem stuck in a cycle of poverty that goes back generations.

"Will moving to a new place help some people? The answer is 'probably,' " Elliott said, adding that much would depend on how accommodating their new hometowns turn out to be.

The greater distance from home and their lack of financial and social resources will make it more difficult for poor people to return, whereas middle-class residents who want to go back home are more likely to be able to afford it. What this could portend for the rebuilding of New Orleans is a city with radically different demographics.

"It points to a New Orleans that could become much more white and middle-class," said Laura Ann Sanchez, a researcher at the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. Sanchez lived and taught in New Orleans for six years, leaving in 2000.

"The truly astonishing melting pot of race and culture that made New Orleans such a gem could be gone forever," Sanchez said.

About 65% of the address changes were turned in by evacuees from the New Orleans area. Of that group, most came from densely populated Orleans Parish, one of the poorest areas in the nation, whose population was about two-thirds black. Many of these evacuees settled in areas where the populations on average were two-thirds white.

Nearly 15% of the Orleans Parish evacuees scattered to such distant cities as Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

By contrast, the displaced population of New Orleans' suburban counties, which were about two-thirds white, evacuated to areas similar in racial demographics. The suburban group largely settled nearby, with 10% staying within the same ZIP Code and more than 90% relocating within the region.

In hurricane-damaged areas beyond New Orleans and its suburbs, the tendency to stay close was even stronger, with nearly half of address changes occurring within the same ZIP Code.

Overall, about 80% of the evacuees remained in the Southern states closest to the hurricane-damaged region, with the top destinations being suburban New Orleans, followed by Houston; Baton Rouge, La.; Dallas; and Atlanta.

The postal service information, tracking movements among regions that share the first three digits of a ZIP Code, roughly corroborates Federal Emergency Management Agency statistics on people who have applied for aid.

The postal service does not normally release address changes but has agreed to provide quarterly summaries. The next release will be in January.

After initial stays in emergency shelters, many blacks went where they had family, which partly explains the migration to Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. Earlier migrations of Louisiana blacks to these cities created networks of extended families, particularly in Houston, about a five-hour drive from New Orleans. Louisianans have long migrated to Houston for jobs and better schools.

At its peak, Houston housed as many as 200,000 evacuees. City officials say as many as 50,000 have left, creating speculation that residents are trickling back home — or close to home.

Audrey Singer, a migration expert in Washington and author of an academic paper titled "The World in a Zip Code," said many New Orleans evacuees want to get as close to home as possible to monitor the recovery process. Studies show that about half the residents in the most devastated areas of the city are homeowners.

"Being close by is a good thing for them because they can get back quickly and check on their properties," Singer said.

Many evacuees have made frequent trips to retrieve whatever belongings they could salvage. New Orleans officials have said more and more residents are making their way back to the city for the first time, if only for a brief visit.

Frey, the Michigan demographer, said he was skeptical about media surveys in which nearly 40% of evacuees said they would not return home. Those surveys, he said, were conducted in emergency shelters during the first weeks after Katrina, a time when most people were still in shock.

More than three months after Katrina barreled through the region, thousands of evacuees are still dazed and disoriented, making it difficult to predict how many will return home, Frey said.

The uncertainty is exacerbated by the seeming lack of progress in rebuilding New Orleans. Many evacuees are standing by in frustration as government leaders debate what course of action to take, according to Amy Liu, a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.

"My sense is that many families are anxious to go back," Liu said, but as more time passes without a concrete recovery plan for New Orleans, the more likely it is that evacuees will settle elsewhere.

Some experts paint a picture of a huge, restless, growing population of evacuees hovering just outside New Orleans, waiting for a green light to allow them back into their old lives.

Such a longing for home is understandable, especially among low-income blacks, Frey said. Nearly nine out of 10 blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana. Compare that with Houston, where 75% of black residents are Texas-born, and Atlanta, where 57% are native to Georgia.

Many black New Orleans residents, especially those in their 40s, 50s and 60s, "had not traveled widely outside of their neighborhoods, much less to a different city or state," Frey said. "This population felt more settled in one place than any population anywhere in the United States."

Times data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.

*
INFOBOX

Where the displaced landed

Most of the households displaced by Hurricane Katrina have stayed close to home, according to a Times analysis of address changes filed with the postal service. Of 325,057 households that moved, 59% of them relocated within the area of hurricane damage.

Northwest – Less than 1%

Plains states -- Less than 1%

Midwest – 3%

Northeast – 2%

Southwest – 3%

Gulf states – 28%

Hurricane-damaged area – 59%

Southeast – 4%

*

BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

The relocation of New Orleans residents

Evacuees from the poor and largely black city of New Orleans relocated to areas across the country that were far different from their neighborhoods, whereas those displaced from the New Orleans suburbs tended to move to places that were nearer and more similar to their own.

Suburban New Orleans

75,181 households

Nearly two-thirds of the suburban households remained in the area damaged by Hurricane Katrina

Where they went

Northwest – Less than 1%

Plains states -- Less than 1%

Midwest – 2%

Northeast – 1%

Southwest – 2%

Gulf states – 28%

Hurricane-damaged area – 63%

Southeast – 4%

--

Urban New Orleans (131,586 households)

Fewer than half of urban households relocated within the damage area and a higher percentage moved great distances

Where they went

Northwest – Less than 1%

Plains states -- Less than 1%

Midwest – 3%

Northeast –31%

Southwest – 3%

Gulf states – 39%

Hurricane-damaged area – 47%

Southeast – 4%

--

Racial breakdown of suburban New Orleans was:

Black: 24.2%

White: 65.5%

Latino: 6.1%

Other: 4.3%

Suburban evacuees moved to areas that were:

Black: 16.8%

White: 62.2%

Latino: 15%

Other: 6%

Moved from area with: 14.3% poor

To area with: 12.9% poor

--

Racial breakdown of New Orleans was:

Black: 62.4%

White: 30.9%

Latino: 3.1%

Other: 3.5%

City evacuees moved to areas that were:

Black: 15.3%

White: 63.9%

Latino: 14.2%

Other: 6.6%

Moved from area with: 26.5% poor

To area with: 12.6% poor

Note: Does not include ZIPs to which fewer than 25 households relocated

Sources: Postal Service, ESRI. Data analysis by Sandra Poindexter and Doug Smith

=================

Insurance thicket imperils comeback

Shuttered since Katrina hit, a French Quarter institution's losses mount during haggling on its claims. Such woes are ubiquitous in Louisiana.

By Howard Witt

Chicago Tribune, December 12, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- There were 11,256 bottles of wine in the cellar of Antoine's Restaurant on the morning of Aug. 29 when Hurricane Katrina struck, some of them rare, most of them expensive and all of them ruined when the power failed, the air conditioning died and the ruinous heat and humidity of late-summer New Orleans could no longer be kept at bay.

Yet the restaurant's managers say the insurance company that covered the wine cellar, rather than quickly settle a claim for the value of the entire collection, proposed haggling over the cost of each bottle as the restaurant seeks to replace it--a painstaking process they expect will take years.

Meanwhile, each day the landmark French Quarter restaurant remains closed while struggling to repair storm damage and reassemble its staff--it has been more than 100 days and counting--Antoine's loses more than $17,000 in potential revenue. Yet the managers complain that the insurance company that provides the restaurant's business-interruption coverage has advanced only $250,000 so far toward the loss, which likely will exceed the policy's limit of $1.9 million.

"They sell you business-interruption insurance to keep you from going out of business in a catastrophe, but it turns out that's not how it works," said Rick Blount, Antoine's chief executive officer and the great-great-grandson of the restaurant's founder, who is hoping to reopen by Christmas Eve. "It will eventually pay, but not in time to save your business."

The next great tribulation

After the winds, the floods, the deaths and the massive destruction, the battle over insurance claims has emerged as New Orleans' next great tribulation. The city's silent, dust-blown streets, lined with 110,000 ruined houses, still await the return of three-quarters of the exiled population, as well as the reopening of marquee attractions such as the convention center, the Superdome, the fabled streetcar lines and three-quarters of the restaurants. And insurance problems are one major reason the gears of the recovery seem so clogged.

It's not just Antoine's, a bellwether New Orleans institution whose effort to revive itself mirrors the halting resurrection of the city it has served for 165 years. State officials warn that 4 in every 10 Louisiana small businesses, starved for cash flow, face failure while waiting for their insurance claims to be settled. Emergency loans from the federal Small Business Administration are barely trickling in: Fewer than 8,000 loans had been approved by mid-November, out of more than 200,000 Katrina-related applications.

Allstate Insurance Co., the second-largest insurer in the state, had managed to close 58 percent of its Katrina-related claims as of early December, more than three months after the storm.

"It's definitely overwhelmed the insurance industry as a whole, so things are moving slowly," said John O'Brien, a New Orleans insurance broker who specializes in writing policies for historic French Quarter businesses, including Antoine's. Ultimately, insurance industry experts predict that insurers will pay out more than $40 billion for damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Yet thousands of policyholders who have received their insurance checks find themselves fighting over settlements they perceive as too low and unfair. The state insurance commissioner's office has logged more than 26,000 inquiries from policyholders and received nearly 1,700 formal complaints so far.

More ominously, an estimated 60 percent of homeowners and business operators across the state carried no flood insurance and face the looming expiration of grace periods on mortgages for properties that in many cases no longer exist.

`False sense of security'

"People got lulled into a false sense of security over the last 40 years," said Robert Wooley, the Louisiana state insurance commissioner, noting that many homeowners assumed that the levees would protect them.

"It's just human nature," added Wooley, who lives in Baton Rouge, the state capital. "I'm the insurance commissioner and I'm underinsured. I don't have flood insurance. But if the Mississippi River levee breaks, this whole area is gonna flood. I'm taking a chance like everybody else."

Even those New Orleans residents with flood insurance who are satisfied with their settlements and would like to begin rebuilding are hobbled by multiple uncertainties. They're unsure whether they should try to elevate their houses to protect them against a future flood. They don't know whether they'll be able to afford new insurance coverage, or if it will even be available. They are waiting for local and state officials to decide whether their neighborhoods will be condemned and turned into flood plains.

Congress and the White House have given them little confidence that the federal government will provide the tens of billions of dollars necessary to build a better system of levees and floodgates to protect this below-sea-level city against future killer hurricanes.

"We're caught here between people wanting to return and an economy that needs to recover," said Michael Olivier, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development. "But the level of devastation is creating a huge uncertainty, and without rebuilding the levee system to a more secure degree, it will absolutely impact the confidence of business and investment to return to the city."

The absence of that confidence can be seen on the drive along Canal Street from Antoine's to Charles Daroca's house in the city's Lakeview neighborhood.

Cemetery of ruined homes

Before Katrina, the pleasant 5-mile drive took Daroca, the restaurant's chief financial officer, through tree-lined neighborhoods past an encyclopedic sampling of New Orleans' distinctive housing styles: Victorians and bungalows, shotguns and duplexes, housing projects and McMansions.

Nearly every one of those homes flooded when the hurricane burst the city's protective levees. Today, Daroca's drive traverses a cemetery of ruined and abandoned homes, most still filled with mud and mold and the putrefying contents that used to be furniture, clothing, books and pictures.

Yet outside every fifth house or so, a reeking pile of sodden wallboard, lumber and other debris spills onto the street--a sight that boosts Daroca's spirit.

"Those people are gutting their houses," he explained. "It means they want to rebuild."

Daroca, 46, a lifelong New Orleans resident, wants to rebuild his 4,400-square-foot Lakeview home, which steeped for weeks in 10 feet of water. He's spent every weekend for the past two months in a mask and gloves, tearing out the first floor to the joists and the walls back to the studs, stripping his beloved home down to its skeleton so the mold would stop growing and restoration could begin.

But Daroca, his wife and their two children, exiled for now in a rented townhouse in the New Orleans suburb of Destrehan, have decided to wait before taking any further steps. The problem is not money: Daroca had $250,000 in flood insurance and has received his settlement check, which he calculates should cover the cost of the repairs. The problem is uncertainty.

There still is no electricity in Daroca's blighted neighborhood. Only a handful of Daroca's neighbors have indicated that they intend to return. There are no functioning schools or stores or groceries or coffeehouses for miles.

"I live in a flood zone, but I don't know if my neighborhood will be protected in the future," Daroca said. "I don't know if my house has to be raised. What do I have to do? The frustration of it is, there is nowhere to go for answers, no official to ask what you can do."

Will insurers jump ship?

Another kind of ambiguity looms over the areas of Louisiana and Mississippi hit hardest by Katrina: whether insurance will be available, and affordable, in the future. Already the chairman of Northbrook, Ill.-based Allstate has indicated that his company is planning to reduce its exposure in the region, through a combination of approaches that could include new-business moratoriums and higher premiums.

"We think the risk is too great and too unpredictable," said Michael Trevino, an Allstate spokesman. "We can't charge the right amount of premium to collect in order to pay claims."

State Farm, the largest insurer in Louisiana with nearly 35 percent of the homeowners business, has said it still is writing new insurance policies, but premium rates are under review.

Wooley said he foresees no insurance crisis in his state--for now.

"I think if we do the right thing--make the insurance companies pay what they are supposed to pay, but don't try and make them pay something they weren't obligated to pay--I think they'll stay here," Wooley said. "But premiums are going up, there's no doubt."

What concerns Wooley--and the insurance industry--are proposed laws and lawsuits, like one filed by Mississippi's attorney general, that seek to force insurance companies to pay claims for flood damage under homeowners policies if the policyholders did not have separate flood insurance. That federal flood insurance, which is underwritten by the National Flood Insurance Program and capped at $250,000, is required for homebuyers in some low-lying areas to obtain a mortgage, and optional for everyone else.

Supporters of such efforts argue that the flooding was caused by storm surges and levee breaches directly attributable to Katrina's winds, and wind damage is covered under homeowners insurance. Moreover, they contend that the federal government's own flood plain elevation maps did not require the purchase of flood insurance in many of the areas that ended up submerged.

The insurance industry strongly disputes that it should be liable for flood claims when every policy contains language explicitly excluding floods.

For some, opportunity knocks

For all the tension over insurance issues, there are a few pioneers who have discovered unimagined opportunities amid the confusion and the ruins. Margaret Maher, a single mother of two elementary school children who lost all her belongings when her rented house was destroyed in the flooding, is about to buy her first home, thanks to Katrina.

The five-bedroom house, in an upscale subdivision in St. Bernard Parish adjacent to New Orleans, was valued at $324,000 before floodwaters filled it and every other house nearby to the first-floor ceiling. Now the first floor is stripped bare to the studs, like Daroca's home, awaiting reconstruction.

Maher, 32, the human resources manager at Antoine's, never could have afforded such a home before the hurricane. But the peculiarities of post-Katrina economics are now working in her favor.

The home's owner got a $250,000 settlement from his flood insurance and is selling the distressed property to Maher for $101,000, meaning he walks away better than whole. Maher, meanwhile, can obtain a special low-interest Federal Housing Administration loan, available to victims in disaster areas, for enough to cover the purchase price and $55,000 in necessary repairs--and her monthly payment will be only $200 more than she was paying to rent a much smaller place.

Maher knows it may take years before her withered new neighborhood looks anything like the kid-friendly place it was before the hurricane--to say nothing of the devastated parish as a whole. But she says she's endured other crises in her life before Katrina--a serious illness, the premature birth of her son--and she prefers to remain optimistic.

"This neighborhood is going to come back strong," Maher said. "Sure, our life will be limited for a while. But it's limited now. At least we will have a house. At least that will be normal."

=================

Report: California Unprepared for Tsunami

Study Finds Gaps in California's Readiness to Handle a Tsunami, According to a New Report

By ALICIA CHANG

The Associated Press

abcnews.com, 12/12/05

LOS ANGELES - Tsunami waves generated by a large offshore earthquake would threaten at least 1 million coastal residents in California and inundate the nation's largest port complex, according to a new report.

The bleak study being released Monday found gaps in the state's readiness to handle a tsunami, including flaws in the existing warning system, lack of evacuation plans by coastal communities, and building codes that don't take into account tsunami-strength surges.

In addition, many residents are unaware of the potential danger of tsunami waves and wouldn't know how to respond, the report said.

"I don't think we're ready yet, but we're getting there," said Richard McCarthy, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission, which issued the report. The commission, an independent advisory panel, formed a special committee to look at the dangers after last December's deadly tsunami in Southeast Asia.

In the past century, more than 80 tsunamis mostly minor have been recorded or observed along the California coastline.

The most deadly was in 1964 when a magnitude-9.2 earthquake in Alaska generated massive waves that killed 12 people. Scientists have also kept a close eye on a 680-mile fault 50 miles off the West Coast that behaves much like those that produced the 1964 Alaska quake and the Southeast Asia tsunami that killed more than 176,000 last year.

While catastrophic tsunamis rarely strike the West Coast, state officials are acutely aware of the potential for damage and loss of life as a result of booming development along the coastline.

About a million people live in low-lying coastal areas that are vulnerable to flooding by a tsunami. Existing building codes call for structures to be able to withstand severe shaking from an earthquake, but the report revealed that homes and businesses are rarely designed to hold up against tsunami-force surges.

The report also found most coastal communities lacked evacuation plans for residents because of funding problems.

The state Office of Emergency Services and the University of California have produced inundation maps that show the coastal areas most at risk, but few communities have used them to map out and mark evacuation routes, the report found.

Along with threatening lives and property, a giant tsunami would strike an economic blow to the state, given the vulnerability of its ports, the report said.

If a tsunami shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach for two months, the economic loss could reach $60 billion. The ports make up the third busiest port in the world, but its docks and terminals are only about nine feet above the water.

A massive wave higher than that could cause extensive damage, the report said. Thousands of pleasure boats and other crafts could come loose, and vehicles, equipment, containers and tools could get washed away.

In June, a tiny tsunami off the far Northern California coast exposed just how unprepared the region was to the threat.

Cities were confused by the differing tsunami warning messages that came from two centers operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Since then, federal, state and local officials have met several times to agree on the best way to alert communities an action that won praise from the authors of the report.

A joint program by the NOAA and Federal Emergency Management Agency is also working on design guidelines for tsunami shelters that could extend to strengthening hospitals and other facilities as well.

On the Net:

California Seismic Safety Commission: http://www.seismic.ca.gov

=================

December 12, 2005; NY Times

Court Extends Plan for Housing Katrina Evacuees

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A federal judge ruled Monday that a program that is putting tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees up in hotels must be extended until Feb. 7 -- a month beyond the cutoff date set by FEMA.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval said victims must be given more time in hotels because FEMA cannot guarantee that all applications for other aid, such as rent assistance or trailers, will be processed by the agency's Jan. 7 deadline.

The temporary restraining order was part of a class-action lawsuit filed in November by advocates for hurricane victims.

Attorneys pressing the lawsuit had argued that sticking to a January deadline would mean homelessness for thousands of evacuees.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency continues to pick up the tab for about 41,000 hotel rooms in 47 states and the District of Columbia at an estimated cost so far of about $350 million. In addition, the agency has provided rental assistance to more than 500,000 families who lost their homes to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said.

The agency ''will review the judge's decision and continue to reach out to help those evacuated get the help they need as they get back on their feet,'' she said.

The agency had set a Dec. 1 deadline for ending the hotel program but extended it to Dec. 15 after widespread criticism. In addition, 10 states -- Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee and Texas -- were allowed to apply for extensions that effectively stretched the deadline to Jan. 7 for most evacuees.

Duval ruled that those who have not yet received FEMA aid to rent an apartment or move into a trailer can stay in their government-paid hotel rooms until two weeks after their application is approved or denied. But he said everyone will have to be out by Feb. 7 at the latest, unless FEMA decides to again extend the deadline.

Duval noted that even those who have FEMA rent money in hand are finding it difficult to find housing in some areas.

''FEMA cannot assure the court that it will process all or most of the applications of the persons living in hotels and-or motels by Jan. 7, 2006,'' Duval wrote. ''The court is convinced that many persons in the putative class will be irreparably harmed by FEMA's admitted inability to process the pending applications.''

Lawyers for evacuees said victims often got conflicting information about when they would have to leave. At a hearing Friday, one hotel occupant, Lenora Brantley, said she received a letter dated Dec. 2 telling her she could stay in her hotel room until Jan. 7. Later she got a Dec. 5-dated letter telling her she would have to leave by Dec. 15.

''It is unimaginable what anxiety and misery these erratic and bizarre vacillations by FEMA have caused these victims, all of whom, for at least one point in time, had the very real fear of being without shelter for Christmas,'' Duval said.

The plaintiffs did not get everything they sought. Duval refused to order that FEMA act immediately on more than 84,000 aid applications still listed as ''pending.'' He said federal law is unclear on when FEMA must act on such applications.

Associated Press reporter Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this story.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

=================
Lament for New Orleans;
Love letter to old city raises hope for revival

TIM KINDSETH
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 11, 2005 Sunday

Why New Orleans Matters. By Tom Piazza. ReganBooks/HarperCollins. $14.95. 167 pages.

Verdict: An eloquent tribute.

Eighty years ago, a young William Faulkner used to shoot at nuns with a BB gun from the window of his Pirate's Alley pad in New Orleans' cobbled French Quarter.

After Hurricane Katrina walloped the city, more shots --- less innocuous --- were fired in New Orleans. Overworked police officers shot at looters and thugs, while demented malcontents sniped at emergency helicopter rescue teams with hot mortal lead.

Or so blared initial frantic media reports. As time passed, much fact turned out to be fiction. Girls violated on crowded streets? Mostly fiction. Soggy bodies that floated in putrid muck? A partial truth, overinflated by hype.

For the most part, Tom Piazza judiciously avoids peddling such bogus rumors and grotesqueries in "Why New Orleans Matters," an impassioned love letter --- at times loud and gruff, though mostly pensive and elegiac --- to his adopted, now ruined hometown.

Piazza does torridly refer to murky rape incidents throughout the slim book, including girls "raped in the labyrinthine halls and nooks" of the Convention Center. Here his prose overheats; with palpitant sincerity he furiously steams like Nancy Grace.

Without documentation, though, the rape claims are hard to believe. Piazza was in Missouri at the time Katrina hit; his stories come from unlisted sources.

"Why New Orleans Matters" is more credible and engaging when Piazza sticks to what he has seen with his own eyes, conjuring the city's glorious, elegant decay, pre-Katrina: dingy food joints and dusty music halls and bars, among other splendid visions.

"This isn't a history book," he disclaims; rather, it is a "book about the things that have evolved parallel to the city's history." He rejects stale lists of cold, stone-carved dates and focuses instead on lesser known, more personal and more resonant scenes.

Like the first day he ever spent in the Crescent City, after a chum in New York persuaded him to visit New Orleans for the 1987 edition of the famed Jazz & Heritage Festival.

When he arrived, he found that his room was occupied --- a hotel scheduling error. The ghoulish proprietor then made an uncomfortable pass at him. With a "raised eyebrow and a muted, arch smile," he creepily told Piazza that he could sleep on a cot in his room.

Piazza accepted the cot, but snoozed in the kitchen. He had a marvelous time in New Orleans. And he learned a crucial lesson about this weird town: "Take what comes."

Took he did and take he has. In 1994, after a three-year stint at the venerable Iowa Writers' Workshop --- in addition to this work, he is the author of a novel, a short story collection and a primer on jazz --- Piazza relocated to New Orleans.

For more than 10 years the city has given him a taste of what Edna Pontellier --- Kate Chopin's free-spirited heroine from her 1899 New Orleans novel "The Awakening" --- calls "life's delirium," and Piazza acutely describes the exhilaration kindled in him by the city.

With lush strokes he conjures redolence: "The fragrant bushes were an endless olfactory ambush in the evenings --- sweet olive and ligustrum and Confederate jasmine."

He vibrantly evokes New Orleans' famous food culture, from its gooey snowball stands to the elegant haute cuisine at Antoine's and Galatoire's, to bunches of red-hot tamales from Manuel's bundled in newspapers, to crawfish sacks hawked at the jazz festival.

He writes with contagious zest about the development of jazz in the city, invoking the ghosts of early pioneers --- Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, with Louis Armstrong pumping on cornet --- and more recent players, like Kermit Ruffins.

As for Mardi Gras, Piazza reveres the traditions followed by secretive groups of Mardi Gras Indians, while he dismisses the entirely pathetic, faux bacchanalian antics of drunks on Bourbon Street --- antics he electrically likens to a "toxic sybaritic freakout."

Piazza has a gift for sharp, steely phrases. Elsewhere he rails against the police force with its "cowboy culture" and rogue enforcers who intimidate citizens.

New Orleans never was perfect, and Piazza acknowledges all the warts: a failing public school system, endemic poverty, nasty racism and sanctioned, glorified violence.

Nonetheless, he still loves the city. Why? In the second half of the book he chronicles his quick return to New Orleans. "The city was dead, or at least in a coma," he writes. Before him: a "catalog of nightmare images," a "series of indigestible realities."

There was, however, a silver lining: Piazza happened upon a makeshift bar giving away free beers and sandwiches. He knew right then that "New Orleans had a chance."

Like a good jazz funeral, "Why New Orleans Matters" is both a mournful dirge and a vivacious ode to the city. Some have penned the city's epitaph, but Piazza is optimistic. Read this book, and you'll be with him. You, too, will want to dance in the boneyard.

Tim Kindseth, formerly of Poets House in New York, is a freelance writer in New Orleans.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

=================
OPINION
Cynthia Tucker

We can't help New Orleans? God help us

AJC, 12/11/05

A conservative Congress has drained the nation's treasury — stuffing the Christmas stockings of the rich with tax breaks, handing out corporate welfare to Big Business and sticking to idiotic boondoggles such as the Star Wars missile defense program. Suddenly, though, this spendthrift Congress and its enabler, President Bush, have gotten fiscal religion. It's funny how that didn't happen until the Gulf Coast needed big money for reconstruction.

This is far from what the president pledged in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, making 10 trips to the devastated Gulf Coast in the span of six weeks. Standing before TV cameras in New Orleans' historic Jackson Square, he promised "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." But that's just a distant dream now. Suddenly, the richest country in the world cannot afford to spend billions to restore the Gulf Coast. The same country that has laid out $20 billion so far for the reconstruction of Iraq.

How is it that the Gulf Coast has disappeared so easily from the list of priorities for public spending? Why is it that American citizens who suffered from a devastating act of God find so little support from their elected representatives?

The entire tone of the conversation about the coastal region, especially New Orleans, has shifted. Much of the dialogue — especially by the conservative pundits who act as the echo chamber for the GOP — has painted a picture not of victims of a hurricane but rather of shiftless do-nothings who don't deserve aid. That's what happens when any group of people falls out of favor with the ruling Republican Party: They are portrayed as lazy and worthless losers who would be worse off if the government lifted a hand to help them. It's funny how that philosophy has taken hold in America, allowing us to comfortably escape responsibility for our fellow citizens.

I don't have any doubt that some of the residents of the Gulf Coast are slackers who haven't tried very hard to rebuild their lives, relying on government support or the kindness of strangers. But many, many more are working folks whose lives have been turned upside down through no fault of their own. Though they had worked hard all their adult lives, they never earned enough to build up emergency nest eggs to take them through this sort of crisis.

Countless taxi drivers, singers, piano players, chefs and owners of mom-and-pop restaurants — the sort of souls who were the cultural backbone of New Orleans — are without savings and have not been able to find jobs to replace those they had. Many were homeowners who didn't carry enough insurance, or carried none at all. They will need help to rebuild. What makes them shiftless? What makes them worthy of contempt?

It's true that countless charitable groups, including many church organizations, have pitched in. Families have volunteered to take in the newly homeless, even some who were complete strangers; job fairs have been organized; schools have made room for children without books or records.

But the enormous job of rebuilding cities and towns is a responsibility only the federal government has the means to tackle. Never before in the history of this country has an entire metropolitan area been rendered uninhabitable for months, as New Orleans was. In addition, several smaller towns along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts will need massive infusions of capital and environmental and construction expertise to get going again.

Besides, some of New Orleans' woes are directly attributable to federal failings. Design of the levees — whose failure allowed floodwaters to pour in and swamp the city — was the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and early reports by investigators strongly suggest that the levees relied on a faulty design and were poorly built. If the federal government pledges to rebuild the levees properly, private businesses will be more likely to take the chance on moving back to the city.

The fate of the Gulf Coast — especially the nation's most distinctive city, New Orleans — will tell us a lot about who we are as a nation, as a people. If we are the compassionate, can-do people we say we are, then we can help the Gulf Coast rebuild. If we can't do that, then America has become a different and disturbing place.

www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/2005/121105.html

=================
December 11, 2005; NY Times

In Study, a History Lesson on the Costs of Hurricanes
By KENNETH CHANG

To better understand the potential for catastrophic damage from future hurricanes, scientists are looking to the past.

And the future looks very expensive, the scientists said this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. With wealth and property values increasing, and more people moving to vulnerable coasts, by the year 2020 a single storm could cause losses of $500 billion - several times the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, presented preliminary results of a study that retraced the path of hurricanes from the past 105 years and calculated the havoc they would wreak on the present-day United States landscape.

Dr. Pielke said the traditional way of looking at the damage inflicted by past hurricanes - calculating the value of property destroyed and adjusting for inflation - was misleading. "Something else is going on," he said. "That something else is society is changing underneath."

Using a database of information about property and people in 168 counties along the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard, Dr. Pielke and his collaborators, Christopher Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Joel Gratz of the University of Colorado, calculated the damage that would occur today from the winds and storm surges of past hurricanes. Their numbers, all adjusted for inflation to 2004 dollars, generally do not include damage from inland flooding.

Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and southwestern Mississippi in August, is No. 2 on the list, with an estimated $80 billion in damage. The researchers plan to refine their numbers on this year's hurricanes before publishing their study.

No. 1 is a storm that received little attention in the historical comparisons that followed Hurricane Katrina: the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. Similar to Hurricane Katrina in size and ferocity, it caused about $760 million in damage, in 2004 dollars. But if a hurricane of that magnitude followed the same track today, it would leave behind $130 billion of devastation across a Miami area that is far more crowded than it was in 1926, the scientists said.

Similarly, the hurricane that hit Galveston, Tex., in 1900 would cause $53 billion in damage today, and Hurricane Andrew, which caused a record $25.5 billion in damage when it hit Florida in 1992, would cause $51 billion in damage if it hit today.

The study is an update of similar calculations that Dr. Pielke and Dr. Landsea published in 1998. In that study, they found that a storm on the scale and path of the Great Miami Hurricane would cause $63 billion in damage, in 1998 dollars. The doubling in losses, to $130 billion now, largely reflects a growing population and greater individual wealth.

"I was quite surprised at the magnitude of increase of losses," Dr. Pielke said. "Not only are there more people, but they all have more possessions."

If current trends continue, a Great Miami Hurricane would cause $500 billion in damage in 2020 - the rise consisting only of additional property, not any consideration of inflation.

Dr. Pielke said he hoped the numbers would help officials make decisions about how to rebuild from hurricane damage and help them understand that disasters of similar magnitude were all too likely in the future. "This is not a one-off type of event," he said. "It's not just Katrina."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
December 11, 2005; NY Times

Political Willfulness
New Orleans Is Not Ready to Think Small, or Even Medium

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

NEW ORLEANS

THREE more bodies were found here last week, hidden away in forsaken homes where mold had crawled over the walls in a Jackson Pollock splatter. One hundred days after the hurricane, these belated discoveries seem to be one more sign of how far New Orleans has fallen. Even the dead are not yet at peace.

But if the listless recovery has raised doubts about whether the city can reclaim its former self anytime soon, the political culture here won't listen to them. It has become almost taboo to discuss any proposal more modest than an immediate and total rebuilding: for example, directing the money and energy toward getting less-damaged neighborhoods up and running.

Suggest that New Orleans needs to consider repopulating only elevated areas, leaving especially flood-prone ones to lie fallow, and you will be shouted down. Gingerly point out that Hurricane Katrina was probably more than a meteorological fluke, and you will be scolded that it is un-American to bar people from returning to their homes.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that a kind of denial has taken root. After all, the city has not shaken off its shock at the catastrophe's scope, and it is only natural that politicians and residents alike would react with ardent vows that the city's landscape, not to mention its rollicking spirit, will be made whole. "I want you all to come back, and we can work this out," Mayor C. Ray Nagin told evacuees the other day.

Still, the city's difficulties in coming to terms with a dismal situation may at a minimum be hindering the chances of winning approval of a sweeping federal aid package, which has been bogged down for weeks. Some members of Congress are questioning whether money should be used for rebuilding neighborhoods that might be wiped out in a future hurricane. The city and state already faced credibility problems in Washington because of their reputation, deserved or not, for corruption.

"The local administration has sort of blinders on, saying, 'Let's just charge ahead with redevelopment,' without really thinking about how to maneuver within this precarious site to minimize risk in the future," said Craig E. Colten, a professor at Louisiana State University and author of "An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature," published this year before the hurricane.

The facts on the ground are sobering. Power and other utilities have not been restored in many places. The city government has laid off much of its work force, and nearly all the public schools remain closed. On Thursday, Tulane University, the city's largest employer, announced major budget cuts.

It is unclear when the levees will be repaired, and it will probably take years and tens of billions of dollars to fortify them. Without assurances about the levees, many exiles do not want to move back. The longer the uncertainty lasts, the more likely it is that they will put down roots elsewhere.

More than 75 percent of the city's population of 460,000 is gone, by some estimates, and it would appear to make little sense to spend enormous sums revitalizing areas if they are to be sparsely populated.

Elected officials are often not candid even in the best of times, obviously, but natural disasters create their own warped politics. Leaders in New Orleans may fear that highlighting problems will worsen them. They do not want to touch off a new round of flight by spooking the people and businesses that remain. They desperately want exiles to return to bolster the tax base.

The city could also be caught in a trap in its dealings with Congress. If it acknowledges that it must pare its ambitions, as some in Washington suggest it do, lawmakers might respond that it does not need as much aid.

And so the city recoils at the idea of retrenchment. Soon after the flooding, Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission asked the Urban Land Institute, a prominent research group in Washington, to put together a report on the recovery. It was thought that the mayor might use the report as political cover to push through unpopular plans.

The institute called on the city to phase in rebuilding, starting with less-damaged areas. It warned that haphazard redevelopment would lead to what it termed a jack-o'-lantern effect - patches of homes in abandoned areas - that would be ruinous.

Some local officials and residents said the recommendation was a stake through the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and other devastated areas. Mr. Nagin, who is facing re-election next year, all but disavowed it.

Carl Weisbrod, who worked on the Urban Land report and led a business improvement group in Lower Manhattan before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, said, "There is always for politicians or leaders a fine line to be walked between what the reality is, and how do you mobilize public opinion." He added: "It's especially hard when you are putting yourself up to the approval of voters. The most votes win, not necessarily the right answer."

Officials here and in Baton Rouge also seem reluctant to acknowledge that their image is impeding efforts to obtain aid.

Despite the crisis, the Louisiana Legislature has refused to overhaul the local boards managing the levees, which have been criticized as inept. That fueled suspicion in Congress that state and local officials would mishandle the rebuilding, and the federal aid that goes with it.

"There are two levels of denial going on here," said Philip Hart, a real estate executive in California who worked on the Urban Land report. "One is related to the effects of the natural disaster. The other is denying the fact that the negative perception of Louisiana and New Orleans is hindering the rebuilding process."

One danger is that residents, already skeptical about all levels of government because of the response to the hurricane, might come to believe that politicians are not being straight with them about the fate of the city, and grow even more cynical.

"There is a part of me that wants to trust them," said Michael Grosch, who was standing last week in his gutted home in the Lakeview neighborhood, which he wants to rebuild, though it is not far from a ruptured levee. "But I don't anymore."

Asked, then, why he was rebuilding, he threw up his hands and said, "No one knows what is going to happen next."

In the 1880's, Currier & Ives, the printmaking company that was the Google Maps of its day, dispatched an artist to record a panoramic vista of New Orleans. The drawing shows a thriving port city - steamboats, church spires and all - whose populace clung to the elevated areas near the Mississippi.

There were few settlements in the flood-prone lowlands to the north. The swamps to the east were not deemed worthy of illustrating.

It is not easy to broach the idea of such a smaller-scale city. The people here have long defied the perils of this place, whether that meant the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1800's or Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

"New Orleans has survived for 300 years," said Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell.

But for much of that time, wasn't the city settled largely on the elevated areas?

"You are underestimating the intelligence of the people of New Orleans," Ms. Hedge-Morrell replied. "They know what they are doing."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
December 11, 2005; NY Times
Editorial

Death of an American City

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn't happen. President Bush said it wouldn't happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans." But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don't believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

At this moment the reconstruction is a rudderless ship. There is no effective leadership that we can identify. How many people could even name the president's liaison for the reconstruction effort, Donald Powell? Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words "pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly. Unless some clear, quick commitments are made, the displaced will have no choice but to sink roots in the alien communities where they landed.

The price tag for protection against a Category 5 hurricane, which would involve not just stronger and higher levees but also new drainage canals and environmental restoration, would very likely run to well over $32 billion. That is a lot of money. But that starting point represents just 1.2 percent of this year's estimated $2.6 trillion in federal spending, which actually overstates the case, since the cost would be spread over many years. And it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.

Total allocations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror have topped $300 billion. All that money has been appropriated as the cost of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. But what was the worst possible case we fought to prevent?

Losing a major American city.

"We'll not just rebuild, we'll build higher and better," President Bush said that night in September. Our feeling, strongly, is that he was right and should keep to his word. We in New York remember well what it was like for the country to rally around our city in a desperate hour. New York survived and has flourished. New Orleans can too.

Of course, New Orleans's local and state officials must do their part as well, and demonstrate the political and practical will to rebuild the city efficiently and responsibly. They must, as quickly as possible, produce a comprehensive plan for putting New Orleans back together. Which schools will be rebuilt and which will be absorbed? Which neighborhoods will be shored up? Where will the roads go? What about electricity and water lines? So far, local and state officials have been derelict at producing anything that comes close to a coherent plan. That is unacceptable.

The city must rise to the occasion. But it will not have that opportunity without the levees, and only the office of the president is strong enough to goad Congress to take swift action. Only his voice is loud enough to call people home and convince them that commitments will be met.

Maybe America does not want to rebuild New Orleans. Maybe we have decided that the deficits are too large and the money too scarce, and that it is better just to look the other way until the city withers and disappears. If that is truly the case, then it is incumbent on President Bush and Congress to admit it, and organize a real plan to help the dislocated residents resettle into new homes. The communities that opened their hearts to the Katrina refugees need to know that their short-term act of charity has turned into a permanent commitment.

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

Our nation would then look like a feeble giant indeed. But whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

=================
Katrina Deaths Lead to Real-Life 'CSI'
Coroners, Police Try to Solve Mystery of Katrina's Violent Deaths in
Real-Life 'CSI'

By CONNIE MABIN
The Associated Press
abcnews.com, 12/10/05

NEW ORLEANS - While hundreds drowned in Hurricane Katrina's filthy
floodwaters, at least 21 people died more mysteriously. From unexplained
gunshot wounds to stabbings and fatal blows to the head, these unidentified
victims are now the main characters in a real-life version of "CSI."

Coroners are using science, creative thinking and even a Crock-Pot to try to
answer the question many are asking: Who or what killed these 21 people?

With evidence that's washed away, witnesses who fled the state and an
overworked police department, at least one official says the mysteries may
never be solved.

"We don't know if they are suicide or murder or accident," says New Orleans
coroner Dr. Frank Minyard. "We may never know."

Coroners examining the 1,090 bodies recovered in and around New Orleans
occasionally find something suspicious a bullet lodged in a bone, a wound
that could match a knife blade.

When that happens, they set the bodies aside for a closer look, and notify
the police and district attorney, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state medical
examiner.

New Orleans police spokesman Capt. Juan Quinton said his department
investigates when the coroner declares a homicide, but he's unaware of "any
great volume" of deaths unrelated to the storm. He refused to discuss
details of any ongoing homicide cases because the coroner has yet to release
names.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan and his staff are
investigating four homicides that occurred in the aftermath of the
hurricane: one at the Superdome, one at the city's convention center and two
"on the street," said spokeswoman Leatrice Dupre.

Included in the morgue's mysterious 21 but not among the four on the DA's
homicide list are the police-shooting deaths of two people in September.
Cops say the men were among gunmen who opened fire on contractors traveling
across the Danzinger Bridge on their way to make repairs. The family of one
of the dead disputes the men were shooting at anyone, and Jordan's office is
investigating. The family's lawyer has advised them not to speak to
reporters.

"Those shootings may very well be determined to be justifiable; they may not
be," Dupre said.

The 21 mystery cases are in limbo until Minyard and his small staff can
re-examine the bodies for clues. Their priority now is identifying the
remains of hundreds of drowning victims in the state's temporary morgue so
they can be returned to families.

When the investigation does begin, Minyard's team will face challenges:
Flooding not only washed away evidence from crime scenes but also forced
both perpetrators and potential witnesses to flee.

And New Orleans' government is still wrecked in many ways. The police
department is in the midst of a leadership shake-up, the courts are barely
functional and the coroner's staff has been cut by three-fourths because
Katrina broke the city budget.

Still, Cataldie predicts no one will get away with murder because there's
one piece of evidence the storm didn't wash away: the corpse. "Don't forget
that the body is a crime scene. Always," he said.

At the top of the to-do list is retrieving bullets for ballistics tests to
see if the gun has been used in other crimes.

Skeletons also yield evidence.

"You can take a rib and cook it down," he said. "You can deflesh it, and we
do that in a Crock-Pot, and find a nick that would indicate a stab wound.
There are all kinds of things you can find scratches and nicks that don't
belong there."

However, Cataldie stressed, what may look like stab wounds may very well be
the marks of animals preying on the dead.

"There's definitely carnavoric activity on many of the bones we're seeing,"
he said.

And not all human-inflicted wounds lead to murder. Cataldie said he examined
the body of a man who died during the storm who police believe had been
slain.

"It was quite obvious the gunshot wound to the head was an old gunshot wound
because there actually had been surgery. So the person was not a homicide,
he was a drowning victim," he said.

In late October, prominent forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, the coroner
in Pittsburgh, helped Minyard with 30 Katrina-related autopsies, including
one shooting victim.

"I cannot tell you whether it was homicide or suicide," Wecht said. "I
really don't know."

The condition of the bodies made immediate determination of the cause of
death difficult, he said. Often, bodies were so badly decomposed there was
no blood, no obvious organs and in many cases, injuries that were sustained
after death, possibly by encounters with debris.

Coroners tried to rule out foul play by looking for and not finding obvious
signs: bullets, stab wounds, skull fractures, bodies found someplace other
than in water. And every victim had pieces of their leg bones removed for
DNA testing to help with identification.

In suspected cases of mercy killings in hospitals or nursing homes, tissue
was sent to a Philadelphia lab to test for morphine and other drugs.

But Wecht, who said he's never seen so many bodies from so many places in
such bad condition, said medical examiners can only determine so much.

"I think in many incidents, it's going to be impossible," he said. To him,
the best service coroners can offer in this situation is identification.

Still, Darlene Cusanza, executive director of the New Orleans Crime Stoppers
organization, said her group is counting on the coroners and law enforcement
to do everything they can to solve the mysterious deaths.

"There will be justice. It just may take a while," she said. "Nothing is
being forgotten."

Cataldie is also confident the murders will someday be solved, not only with
clues left behind by the dead, but with help from the living.

"Most homicides, despite what you see on 'CSI,' are not solved by
forensics," he said. "Most homicides are solved by people talking. People
talk."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures

=================
Crisis Communications Remain Flawed
Despite Promises to Fix Systems, First Responders Were Still Isolated After Katrina

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post , December 10, 2005

Emergency workers isolated and unable to call for help for themselves or others; radios and cell phones inoperable; and government unable to respond to a catastrophic event.

The chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, vividly recounted in thousands of pages of documents recently released by Louisiana officials, had an eerie familiarity to members of the Sept. 11 commission, who delivered their final report this week.

"On September 11, people died because police officers couldn't talk to firemen. And Katrina was a reenactment of the same problem," Thomas H. Kean, the commission co-chairman and former New Jersey governor, said in an interview. "It is really hard to believe this has not been fixed."

But four years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Kean and the commission concluded, emergency communications networks in most U.S. cities still cannot sustain a major natural disaster or terrorist strike, despite pledges from Congress and the Bush administration to rapidly upgrade the networks and implement national standards to make it easier for emergency workers to talk with one another during crises.

In their report card, the commission members gave the federal government one of its five F's for not setting aside a frequency for first responders -- a grade that many experts agree the response to Katrina only underscored.

"The New Orleans calamity proved overwhelmingly the government's inability to solve chronic, fundamental problems with communications," said Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for six years in the 1990s. "No one in the government has shown leadership on this issue, and now the results are tragic."

The patchwork quilt of incompatible systems that existed in the Gulf Coast remains the national norm. In a survey sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 60 percent of cities reported that their police and fire radios could not communicate with their state's emergency operation centers. Eighty percent of city emergency networks were incompatible with those of federal agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments. Among cities with major chemical plants, 97 percent reported they could not communicate with the plant's security force.

The thousands of pages of government e-mails and memos released by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco late last week documented the impact of the region's communications breakdown as it crippled the response to the disaster at every level of government.

During Katrina, virtually every system failed: Internet communications, radio transmissions, cell phones, even backup gear such as satellite phones handed out by federal relief workers after the storm. Even when the equipment worked, officials from different agencies and jurisdictions could not talk with one another. Their radios were simply not compatible.

"People could not communicate," said Louisiana Sen. Robert Barham (R), chairman of the state Senate's homeland security committee. "It got to the point that people were literally writing messages on paper, putting them in bottles and dropping them from helicopters to other people on the ground."

Because of its ports and oil terminals, coastal Louisiana was considered after Sept. 11, 2001, to be at risk from terrorist attacks as well as from hurricanes. The state received $19 million in federal grants to upgrade its emergency communications network before Katrina, and much of the money was used to upgrade a radio system used by state police.

But most of the state's cities and parishes continue to use older systems, some of them incompatible with those of state agencies or even their neighbors. Despite efforts by state police -- backed by federal grants -- to strengthen Louisiana's network before the storm, the improvements were not enough, Barham said. "This is bigger than a Louisiana issue," he said. "The federal government should use the lessons from Louisiana and provide more resources."

As early as 3 a.m. Aug. 29 -- hours before the hurricane's eyewall reached crossed the Louisiana coastline -- some state police barracks began losing Internet connections. At 9 a.m., a 800-megahertz communication tower used by emergency workers in Larose stopped working.

By early afternoon, more towers had failed because of wind and water damage, and the surviving portions of the network were jammed -- "overwhelmed with emergency response traffic," according to a state police log. In the next two days, state dispatchers would log more than 1,900 distress calls. By the next day, flooding had swamped generators and knocked out many of the surviving towers.

Field reports and incident logs from that time reflect the frustration of police and rescue workers cut off from their commanders and dispatchers.

"Our current 800 radio system failed miserably in the time of need," Capt. Wayne Brescher, a rescue team leader, wrote in a report. "Cell phones were useless."

Meanwhile, rescue teams who crossed geographical and jurisdictional boundaries to perform missions encountered a different set of problems.

"It is difficult to coordinate missions with other police agencies, when every agency uses a separate radio system," states an after-action report by the state Wildlife and Fisheries Division, the agency responsible for waterborne rescues. "This causes confusion and delay."

The federal response was no better. In the days after the hurricane hit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency doled out scores of mobile satellite phones to emergency workers. But many of them -- perhaps half -- did not work or were judged too complicated to operate in the field, state police officials say.

The inability to communicate across jurisdictions -- known as "interoperability" in industry jargon -- is viewed as a critical weakness in the nation's defense against terrorism and natural disasters. A month after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration created Project Safecom, an umbrella program intended to spur the transition to more efficient, interoperable wireless communications systems for first responders. The While House has pledged $6.8 billion over five years to fund improvements in interoperability.

A study by the Government Accountability Office last year found that Safecom had made only "very limited progress," in part because it had "not received consistent executive commitment." Reflecting its lowly status within government, the project had been shuffled through three agencies and has been assigned four management teams in its first three years, government auditors found.

"The lesson that was reiterated by Katrina is the same lesson we should have learned from September 11: Police, fire and medical personnel should be able to talk to one another throughout a metropolitan area," said Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, co-chair of the Conference of Mayors' Homeland Security Task Force.

The federal government must lead the effort to upgrade local systems, O'Malley said, because only it can set national standards and rules for interoperability. In addition, he said, cash-strapped U.S. cities simply cannot afford to buy new equipment, although some are trying. Baltimore recently spent $6 million to create what O'Malley described as a fully interoperable communications system across the city and surrounding suburbs.

Louisiana, which is rebuilding its communications network largely from scratch, is trying to do the same thing. Federal emergency funds are helping -- to an extent.

In the days after Katrina hit, as state and local officials scrambled to restore function to their ruined network of wrecked towers and flooded generators, FEMA approved the purchase of a new, $15.9 million system designed to be robust enough to survive most future hurricanes. The new system would also give the state a new level of interoperability, allowing state police and state officials easy access to emergency workers in the state's cities and parishes.

The problem is, hand-held police radios in many Louisiana parishes cannot tap into the new network. FEMA officials initially promised to buy the new radios but balked after the price tag turned out to exceed $150 million, according to Louisiana officials who participated in the discussions.

Despite the mix-up, the new network offers advantages over the old one, and it will eventually bring interoperability to the state's smaller parishes, as they slowly replace older radios with new ones, said Col. Henry Whitehorn, head of Louisiana's state police.

Whitehorn only wishes the state possessed the network three months ago.

"There were places we were not able to get to because of inadequate communications," Whitehorn said. "If there is a next time, we hope the new system will be in place with enough redundancy to ensure that we can communicate with everyone. It will save lives."

=================
Furry `evacuees' seek homes after hurricane
The Buddy Foundation of Arlington Heights aids pets separated from Gulf Coast owners

By Robert Channick

Chicago Tribune, December 9, 2005

After serving on the front lines of Hurricane Katrina animal rescue operations, Danielle Pennett came away with more than a sense of satisfaction: The Des Plaines pet groomer also brought back four dogs and five kittens orphaned by the storm.

"You can't go down there and not bring somebody home," said Pennett, 26, a foster parent for the Buddy Foundation, an Arlington Heights organization that saves stray and abandoned pets.

Pennett was among hundreds of animal rescuers who descended on New Orleans after Katrina. Moved by the plight of thousands of displaced dogs and cats in late September, she took a week off from her job at Petco in Mt. Prospect to volunteer.

Pennett showed up at an emergency relief center in Tylertown, Miss., and was put to work bathing and scraping the muck off scores of rescued pets.

"I probably did about 15 haircuts a day," she said. "One morning I bathed 30 dogs before lunch. It wasn't stellar grooming, but the main concern was getting the stuff off of them."

In the three months since Katrina struck, more than 10,000 animals have been rescued in the region, according to Melissa Seide Rubin, vice president of field services for the Humane Society of the United States. About 1,500 pets have been reunited with owners, but the magnitude of the displacement has required more than 300 shelters in 44 states and Canada to take on an unprecedented number of homeless pets.

"It was larger than any animal disaster we've ever dealt with," Rubin said. "We needed all these different shelters to place them."

Operating entirely through a handful of foster homes, the 10-year-old Buddy Foundation saw nearly 500 pets adopted last year. The recent acquisition of land for a new shelter on Seegers Road in Arlington Heights should substantially increase capacity, according to Carmella Lowth, president of the not-for-profit group.

"I'm sure there's been animals that we've had to turn away because we just didn't have the foster facilities to accommodate them," Lowth said.

Pennett, who moved to the area from Ontario three years ago, already has provided temporary quarters for more than two dozen Buddy Foundation dogs and cats. Not surprisingly, she took in all four Katrina dogs herself, and the kittens found another haven.

Among her boarders were three American Eskimo dogs surrendered by an elderly New Orleans resident who could no longer provide for them after his home was submerged.

Caring for the newcomers wasn't without its challenges, Pennett said. Like many of the dogs rescued from New Orleans, the American Eskimos had heartworms, and they just received a clean bill of health after a series of difficult treatments, she said.

Fluffy white and weighing between 15 and 20 pounds, the affectionate but still slightly wary siblings--two brothers and a sister--are inseparable. Pennett wants to keep it that way and hopes to place them all in one home.

===============
December 8, 2005; NY Times

Gulf Planning Roils Residents

By BRADFORD McKEE

BILOXI, Miss.

EVER since the water rose over Andrea Harris's white bungalow on Elmer Street during Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Harris has been keeping a scrapbook. It holds three daily prayers, news clippings, the business cards of people who have helped her and angry letters to those who have not - including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she said took two months to deliver trailers. Until then, she and her neighbors lived in tents.

Now her scrapbook is filling with new worries. At a town meeting Nov. 30, Ms. Harris, 43, and her neighbors had gotten their first glimpse of new plans for Biloxi, developed by a state commission organized by Gov. Haley Barbour and a group of architects known as the Congress for the New Urbanism.

The plans made passing references to restoring sleepy older neighborhoods like hers, but focused heavily on remaking Biloxi as a more polished tourist magnet to rival Paradise Island. The plans proposed changing Highway 90 along Biloxi's coast, home to several of its casinos, into a new "Beach Boulevard." They also envisioned recreating a fishing harbor as a "seafood village," with clusters of condominiums, stores and restaurants. And it envisioned a streetcar running through town to shuttle people to new resorts and casinos.

"We want to see the casino activity here go beyond gaming," said Elizabeth Moule, an architect in Pasadena, Calif., and a founder of the New Urbanist group. "You're really competing with Myrtle Beach."

But for homeowners like Ms. Harris, golf courses and shopping promenades are not a priority. "It's like they're making it for Casino Row," she said last week. Her hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and her eyes flashed from exhaustion to fury. "Are you trying to turn this into a Sin City, or what?"

The Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, established in late September, is charged with planning the reconstruction of 11 coastal towns, including Biloxi, along with issuing a broader set of recovery guidelines due at the end of December. The town plans, drawn up in about six weeks, are meant to serve as blueprints for state and local leaders.

The New Urbanists, who organized in 1993, have become controversial for opposing suburban sprawl, instead designing old-fashioned town centers with picturesque streets lined by traditional parks, dense housing and stores. New Urbanism's critics, mostly modernist architects and academics, consider its designs a form of nostalgia catering to developers and rich homeowners, too rigid and retrograde for contemporary needs.

But politicians in the hurricane zone are finding New Urbanism's formulas for rebuilding persuasive. Last week, following Governor Barbour's lead in inviting New Urbanists to develop plans, the Louisiana Recovery Authority said it had hired three firms to develop "a comprehensive regional vision," for areas outside New Orleans hit by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The firms include those of the leading New Urbanists, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami and Peter Calthorpe of Berkeley, Calif.

This week, KB Home, one of the nation's largest homebuilding companies, announced plans to build up to 20,000 houses across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, near Avondale. KB Home specializes in the type of suburban tract development that the New Urbanist movement opposes.

Ms. Harris knew nothing of the New Urbanists. She went to the meeting hoping for answers to basic questions, such as what the new building codes and flood elevations for Biloxi will be, so she and her neighbors can begin rebuilding their houses.

She found the town meetings had more to do with plans for replacing her neighborhood than restoring it. Lately, she and several neighbors said, surveyors have started showing up daily on her ruined street, some taking pictures of their houses and one bearing a plan that would place a resort on her property. "We were told by the surveyors that a golf course was going to run through my yard," Ms. Harris said.

Like other people in the neighborhood, called Point Cadet, she said she wonders whether city officials will encourage her and her neighbors to stay put and rebuild the houses they own, or whether they will be run off to make the town a tourist playground. Before the storm, Point Cadet was home to several floating casinos. In October, Governor Barbour signed a law that allows casinos to be built on land within 800 feet of the water, rather than restricting them to floating barges. At least one is planned for Point Cadet.

With their hold on Gulf Coast planning, the New Urbanists face their biggest task to date. In the past, many of their developments have been built on virgin sites, or were made to replace run-down public housing in cities. Now they have large areas of 11 badly damaged towns, from Waveland eastward to Pascagoula, to serve as blank slates.

"They're approaching it as if it's raw land," said William Morrish, a professor of architecture at the University of Virginia. In 1993, Mr. Morrish was a founding member of the New Urbanist group but later broke away over what he believed was intolerance toward new eclectic forms of architecture and urban design. "On the issues of transportation and transit, they've done an excellent job," Mr. Morrish said. But he objected to what he said was the New Urbanists' imposing particular architectural styles - namely "neotraditional" styles - in a place like Mississippi

"A particular style does not promote a certain kind of sustainability or democracy," Mr. Morrish added. "You can't approach building a city like it's a 30-acre development."

Ms. Harris left the meeting unsatisfied. "It's like they just push us away," she said. She found the plans mostly "worried about the beachfront, condominiums, the fishing harbor." She did not like what she heard about plans for housing. "They said 'affordable low-income housing,' " she recalled. "We already own our homes."

Her concerns, she said, have not been alleviated by her mayor, A. J. Holloway, or by William Stallworth, her city council member, both of whom, she said, had turned away from her questions in public meetings.

Mr. Holloway disputed her account. "I never turned my back on anybody," he said. He said he did not know the precise location of Elmer Street. "I do know that Elmer Street won't be a casino," Mr. Holloway said. "But somebody might be surveying. It's not anything the city is doing." Mr. Stallworth was traveling and could not be reached.

Ms. Harris's fears are resounding through Point Cadet's shattered streets as wholesale land clearing by the government rolls slowly westward from the point's eastern tip. Three blocks from the water on Oak Street, Martha Bryant, 44, a licensed contractor, said she is rebuilding her house with her friend, Richard Fredrickson, despite what she sees as resistance from the city.

"They've made my life a living hell since they found out I'm going to move back there," Ms. Bryant said, requiring permits that she found excessive.

She noted that plans for a $400 million Golden Nugget resort with a 60,000-square-foot casino near her home were announced in late November.

"They want to put up an amusement park, a golf course," she said. "I'm east of Oak Street. They're saying everything east of Oak is going to go."

Ms. Bryant, who owns a painting business, erected a multicolored plywood sign on the front of her house that reads: "Hell No I Won't Go."

Her neighbor Elaine Parker, 61, with whom Ms. Bryant made a pact not to sell their houses, hung a protest sign as well. It read: "Now Recruiting Point Cadet Militia People vs. City."

Soon after she hung the sign behind her front fence, a city code enforcement officer came and took it down, she said, for being on city property.

"Of course, you had to be born and raised on Point Cadet to understand the humor in it," Ms. Parker said. Point Cadet has historically been a tough part of town. "We've lost everything, and now are you going to take my sense of humor away from me?"

Ms. Parker asked the enforcement officer whether she could hang the sign on her house, well within her property line. "He said a citation will be issued and you will be put in jail for up to two days," she recalled.

"Can I get 30 days?" she said she asked him. "Because three hots and a cot is more than I got."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company