Need people-to-people assistance in LA/MISS

Many of us think that since the U.S. has had many tragic experiences with hurricanes and storms and that it is a first world country, the crisis in Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Katrina is being adequately handled by U.S. government agencies. In another era (or presidency?), this would have been a correct assumption, but not today. Government funding has been used for you- know-where. Environmental programs, as well as disaster prevention and mitigation programs have been drastically cut because of you-know-what. U.S. military forces and importantly, equipment, that could be used in relief and rescue efforts, are overstretched and are in you-know -where. Thus, what you have now are the horrific scenes of floating bodies, the dead in hallways, rape, and people wasting away from the heat, hunger, and thirst.

The American people need help and the resources of the U.S. government are inadequate at the moment. Disaster relief efforts have been amateurish at best, borne out of the same reasons you are thinking of. Nevertheless, if you find it in your hearts to give/help in whatever way, please do so and insist that it go to the very young and old, the sick, and the poorest. The victims are the most vulnerable in society, i.e. of color, minorities, and without resources to leave the disaster area (even prior to the hurricane). Prayers do help too, as well as innovative actions. Spread the word at the very least.

The Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA), U. of Arizona, where I am a research assistant, has had long presence in Louisiana and is trying to get a more on-the-ground assessment and how to get the best bang for the buck/time/effort. If you want to help in anyway even if you are half-way across the world, contact me offline. I've attached an article summarizing how things went wrong and an email from my boss Dr. Diane Austin (daustin@u.arizona.edu)

Thanks and regards.





Published on Friday, September 2, 2005 by The Progressive
Katrina Compounded
by Matthew Rothschild

Even in the first seventy-two hours after Katrina came ashore near New Orleans, it became obvious that government had failed, at every level.

If ever there was an occasion for government intervention, this was it. People were drowning. People were stranded. People were cooped up in the Superdome in disgusting conditions. People were on the highway in the baking sun with no food or water or facilities or medicine. And none in sight--for themselves, or their elderly parents, or their infants.

The state and local authorities were woefully unprepared, and the Bush Administration responded with a lethal tardiness.

While Katrina was without question an extraordinarily vicious storm, the vast majority of people who died did so not because of Katrina but because of a laissez-faire federal government with skewed priorities. “A rightwing government that strangles public expenditures for public works is largely responsible for what happened in New Orleans,” says Paul Soglin, former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, and past chair of the committee on urban economics for the National Conference of Mayors.

It’s not like there wasn’t any warning. The New Orleans project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, Alfred Naomi, had warned for years of the need to shore up the levees, but the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress kept cutting back on the funding.

The most recent cutback was a $71.2 million reduction for the New Orleans district in fiscal year 2006. “I’ve never seen this level of reduction,” Naomi told the New Orleans CityBusiness paper on June 6. His district had “identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls, and pumping stations,” the paper said. But with the cuts, “Naomi said it’s enough to pay salaries but little else.”

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu blamed the Bush Administration for not making the funding a priority. “It’s extremely shortsighted,” she told the paper. “These projects are literally life-and-death projects to the people of south Louisiana and they are (of) vital economic interest to the entire nation.”

After Katrina hit, The New York Times interviewed Naomi. “A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising,” said Naomi, who had drawn up plans for protecting New Orleans from a Category 5 storm. “It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system, and [now] we’re talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you’ll never get over.”

Naomi wasn’t the only one who warned of this disaster. In 2001, prior to the terrorist attacks, the Federal Emergency Management Agency “ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing the country,” wrote Eric Berger in a prescient article in the Houston Chronicle on December 1, 2001, entitled “Keeping Its Head Above Water: New Orleans Faces Doomsday Scenario.” In that piece, Berger warned: “The city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of ten left behind as the city drowned under twenty feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston.”

In June 2003, Civil Engineering Magazine ran a long story by Greg Brouwer entitled “The Creeping Storm.” It noted that the levees “were designed to withstand only forces associated with a fast-moving” Category 3 hurricane. “If a lingering Category 3 storm—or a stronger storm, say, Category 4 or 5—were to hit the city, much of New Orleans could find itself under more than twenty feet of water.” One oceanographer at Louisiana State University, Joseph Suhayda, modeled such storms and shared his findings with “emergency preparedness officials throughout Louisiana,” the article noted. “The American Red Cross estimates that between 25,000 and 100,000 people would die” if the hurricane floods breached the levees and overwhelmed the city’s power plants and took out its drainage system.

On October 11, 2004, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story by Paul Nussbaum entitled “Direct Hurricane Hit Could Drown City of New Orleans, Experts Say.” It too said that “more than 25,000 people could die, emergency officials predict. That would make it the deadliest disaster in U.S. history.” The story quoted Terry C. Tuller, city director of emergency preparedness: “It’s only a matter of time. The thing that keeps me awake at night is the 100,000 people who couldn’t leave.”
But Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration could not be bothered. They were more concerned with diverting money to cover Bush’s Iraq War. “It appears that the money has been moved in the President’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq,” Walter Maestri, director of emergency management for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune on June 8. “I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished.”

Money was not the only valuable resource diverted to Iraq. So was much of the Louisiana National Guard. One reason that thousands of people were stranded without food or water in New Orleans for days is that 35 percent of the Louisiana National Guard was 7,000 miles away.
“Some 6,000 National Guard personnel in Louisiana and Mississippi who would be available to help deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are in Iraq,” Pete Yost of AP reported on August 29. “The war has forced the Guard into becoming an operational force, far from its historic role as a strategic reserve primarily available to governors for disasters and other duties in their home states.”

It’s not just having the uniformed personnel in place but the equipment, as well.“Earlier [in August] the Louisiana National Guard publicly complained that too much of its equipment was in Iraq,” reported Democracy Now! “The local ABC news affiliate reported dozens of high water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers, and generators are now abroad.”

Once again, George Bush fell to the occasion. He waited out the storm in Crawford, held his breath for a day, and then jetted off to San Diego to seize a propaganda moment for his war. His speechwriter did patch in two paragraphs on Katrina, and then made a clumsy transition to Iraq: “As we deliver relief to our citizens to the south [south of San Diego?], our troops are defending all our citizens from threats abroad. . . .”

When he finally, the following day, cut short his precious vacation and flew over the devastation on his return to Washington, he gave one of the most lackluster speeches of his colorless career. He bragged about all the supplies the federal government had delivered, but it was clear from the media that those supplies had not reached many of the people who needed them the most. He appointed the Homeland Security chief to head a cabinet-level task force, but why wasn’t such a task force in place when there was ample warning that a monster hurricane was going to strike?
Beaming with local pride that was painfully out of place, he went out of his way to “thank the state of Texas” for providing relief for some of the refugees.
He urged people to donate to the Red Cross—nothing wrong with that. But at a time like this, the government, which is supposed to represent us as a national community, should be providing the emergency relief. Bush lauded “the armies of compassion”—the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Catholic Charities. They are to be praised—but relief should not be privatized at a time like this. With a disaster of this magnitude, only the federal government has the resources to provide the crucial relief expeditiously.

Bush acknowledged, belatedly, that “repairing the infrastructure, of course, is going to be a key priority.” It would have been a whole lot easier to repair it beforehand.

And then he took the occasion to push through a long-awaited wish of the oil industry by granting a “nationwide waiver for fuel blends” on gasoline. He didn’t say one word on the price gouging that the oil companies and retailers were engaging in.

“To announce this repeal as the major initiative to control prices is nonsensical,” says Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. “It does not address the fundamentals. The fundamentals are you have speculators on Wall Street who are driving up the price of crude. For American cities that are suffering from very poor air quality from asthma and other respiratory diseases, this is going to make things worse.”

Then there’s Bush’s head-in-the-melting-iceberg approach to global warming, which may have contributed to the force of Katrina and may make similar hurricanes more likely.

“The hurricane that struck Louisiana . . . was nicknamed Katrina,” wrote Ross Gelbspan in The Boston Globe. “Its real name is global warming.”Gelbspan, one of the leading environmental journalists in the country, is the author of two books on global warming, The Heat Is On and Boiling Point. His assertion that global warming was the cause for the intensity of Katrina raised some hackles in the scientific community, with some scholars saying that any particular event cannot be pinpointed to changes in the Earth’s temperature.

But study after study on global warming has warned that as the water temperature of the world’s oceans goes up, the likelihood of more vicious hurricanes also increases. The most recent MIT study, released in the June 25 issue of New Scientist, showed that hurricanes were increasing in duration and intensity by 50 percent over the past thirty years as water temperatures increased.

Bush, for his part, won’t even admit that there is such a thing as global warming. He pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Accords, blocked efforts of other countries to move aggressively to curb greenhouse gasses, consistently downplayed scientific studies of the phenomenon, and had his political appointees even edit out some of the conclusions of the government’s own scientists.

Some disasters can’t be avoided. But they can be contained. Katrina was not. It was not contained because of a laissez-faire government that failed to bother to take warnings seriously, because of a Republican Congress and Administration that is stingy when it comes to spending on public goods but lavish on armaments and war, because Bush diverted much of the National Guard to Iraq rather than to keep them here to do the jobs they are meant to do, and because of an Administration that is pathologically hostile to science.

Katrina was a natural disaster. But it was compounded by a scandalous political disaster that took an even greater toll.
© 2005 The Progressive

________

Greetings.As most of you know, Tom McGuire and I have been working in south Louisiana for nearly a decade. We - along with Joanna Stone - were supposed to fly to New Orleans this morning as part of our ongoing work. Numerous students have worked in the communities impacted by the hurricane and some have started contacting me for information. I have been in touch with people in several communities over the past couple of days and wanted to give you a bit of an update of what is happening.

As Steve Shirley, the editor of Morgan City's local paper, said this afternoon, unlike most hurricanes and even Andrew (1992) where the hurricane passed and tremendous damage was done but people were able to get in there right away and start cleaning up and rebuilding, in this one things simply continue to get worse. Not only is New Orleans devastated (reports I received today include people passing up floating corpses to continue to search for survivors and people sitting on porches with rifles to guard their property from looters because our National Guard is you-know-where), but all the surrounding communities are continuing to be impacted. The full story of this one will take a long time to sort out. Here are some examples from Louisiana and ideas of where resources are needed.

1. Lower Plaquemines Parish has been nearly wiped out; some communities are gone, others are completely flooded. The United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe with communities in Plaquemines Parish, is organizing an effort to help its members there and can accept donations. Fortunately, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes are in relatively good shape - trees down, roofs off, etc. but nothing out of the ordinary as far as hurricanes go.

2. A major concern is that communities throughout the area that received evacuees are facing shortages of food, fuel, etc. Unlike in other hurricanes where evacuees come in for a few days and leave, in this case they are being told they may not be able to go home for 1, 2, or even 3 months. The surrounding communities - many of them small towns without many resources themselves - are trying to cope with people who stopped in their towns and have now run out of money, food, etc. and have nowhere to go. To make matters worse, in the wake of Andrew federal policies were established that no official disaster relief shelters could be set up south of I-10 because all of these communities are at risk in future hurricanes (the season is not over...). Thus, the communities are unable to receive any federal assistance to help the evacuees already there and are being told to send the people on to Houston, Alexandria, etc. where FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Act) shelters have been set up. These communities are setting up groups to raise funds and help provide gas and food vouchers for people to move on to the areas with shelters.

3. Electricity is still out in many places; the city of Houma, which is the largest in the region outside of New Orleans, has been told it will be without power for two weeks. In addition, New Orleans is the hub for regional infrastructure so communication and transportation networks are disrupted and will continue to fail as cell phone batteries, small generators, and other devices stop working. People are having trouble communicating via phone even across town. Organizations and institutions for which New Orleans houses the web server, for example, are no longer able to maintain web pages. There will be need for assistance in establishing and maintaining communication.The list goes on and on... I have asked a couple of friends to send me specific information about how people can help - unfortunately banks are running out of money so it is not even as simple as sending checks - and expect to receive that in the next day or so. As I told Steve, the least they can get out of us after nearly a decade of researching them is access to some of our networks. It would be great if we can organize something here. If you are interested in being part of that effort, please get in touch with me.

Diane