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| These are all over the city. |
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| Map shows most vulnerable areas of the city. |
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate dismissed criticisms of President Barack Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy lobbed by Michael Brown, who oversaw the disastrous Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina.Read the rest and listen to the NPR interview HERE.
"Better to be fast than to be late," Fugate said in an interview on NPR Tuesday morning.
Brown, whom President George W. Bush infamously praised for doing a "heckuva job" in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005, told a Denver paper that Obama had acted too quickly in mobilizing relief for Sandy.
"Here's my concern," Brown told Denver's Westword on Monday, suggesting that the prompt official response was actually making people complacent. "It's premature [when] the brunt of the storm won't happen until later this afternoon."
Fugate also addressed the role of FEMA, which has been a hot topic since Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said he wanted to abolish the agency so that states would have direct responsibility for disaster response.
His campaign later clarified that he would not eliminate FEMA.
"Governor Romney believes that states should be in charge of emergency management in responding to storms and other natural disasters in their jurisdictions,” said campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg. “As the first responders, states are in the best position to aid affected individuals and communities and to direct resources and assistance to where they are needed most. This includes help from the federal government and FEMA.”
But as Fugate explained on Tuesday, this is exactly how FEMA already works.
"We're a federal government; we're not a national government," he said "Disasters are local. Through state constitutions, the governors are the primary incident commanders for the entire state response in support of that. And the role of the federal government is to support the states when the disaster exceeds their capabilities. And when it's this bad, we work as one team. But we are in support of the governors, as they are in support of the local officials. It's a federal system of government."
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered criticism of President Obama’s early responses to Hurricane Sandy yesterday, including a dig at the administration’s response to last month’s attack in Libya.The bastard should have been thrown in jail for incompetence, if not brought to trial for the deaths of almost 2,000 innocent men, women, and children.
Yesterday, ahead of the storm’s pummeling of the eastern seaboard, Brown gave an interview to the local alternative paper, the Denver Westword, on how he believed the Obama administration was responding to Sandy too quickly and that Obama had spoken to the press about Sandy’s potential effect too early.
Brown turned then to a reliable right-wing attack on the President’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi that killed four Americans:
“One thing he’s gonna be asked is, why did he jump on [the hurricane] so quickly and go back to D.C. so quickly when in…Benghazi, he went to Las Vegas?” Brown says. “Why was this so quick?… At some point, somebody’s going to ask that question…. This is like the inverse of Benghazi.”Conservatives have been hitting Obama for weeks on his attendance at a fundraiser in Nevada following the assault in Benghazi, claiming at alternate times that the President either cared more about politics than lives lost or that he was trying to downplay the attack’s significance. Now the critique has mutated into a belief that Obama is currently “playing President” to score points during disaster relief in the run-up to the election, in contrast to his actions in September.
Brown is not the only one making the insinuation that Obama and his administration are responding too quickly to Sandy only for political reasons. He’s joined in his accusations by such prominent right-wing commentators as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and columnist Charles Krauthammer .
However, Brown’s comments carry a special irony due to the role he played during the Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005. As director of FEMA during the legendarily botched response, Brown, famously dubbed “Brownie” by President Bush, was in the center of criticism from both sides of the aisle that the Bush administration was too slow to respond. An internal review by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector-General following the disaster concluded, “Much of the criticism is warranted.” Brown resigned from his position as director less than two weeks after Katrina hit.
Tropical Storm Isaac is intensifying and now expected to make landfall late Tuesday or early Wednesday on the northern Gulf Coast as a hurricane, forecasters said on Monday.The storm--with sustained winds of 65 mph--is moving northwest at 14 mph. According to the National Weather Service, New Orleans is in the projected path of the storm. Wednesday marks the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005.Hurricane warnings have been issued along the northern Gulf Coast from Morgan City, La., to Destin, Florida. According to the National Hurricane Center, a storm surge between six and 12 feet could threaten the northern Gulf Coast if the storm makes landfall during high tide.[Slideshow: Tropical Storm Isaac]Isaac was blamed for as many as seven deaths in Haiti on Saturday and forced the delay of the start of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, where GOP leaders are still mulling how to hold a convention as a hurricane concurrently thrashes the Gulf Coast."Even if the storm largely bypasses this region," the New York Times said, "it holds the risk of creating an uncomfortable split-screen image, especially if it continues barreling toward New Orleans."
A former FEMA supervisor and the owner of a disaster services company were indicted Friday by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and witness tampering stemming from their participation in what the government contends was the illegal awarding of a contract worth up to $100 million to service and deactivate thousands of trailers in Plaquemines Parish in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.The incompetence of FEMA and its failure to perform background checks to avoid this kind of activity is mind-boggling. No wonder the agency isn't taken seriously anymore. Credibility is gone. It's all a money-grabbing joke perpetrated on the American public who suffer at the hands of these trolls.
If convicted of the conspiracy and wire fraud charges, former FEMA employee Robert Blevins, 74, of South Carolina, and 3-D Disaster Services Inc. owner David Dangler, 58, of Roatan, Honduras, face a maximum of 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Blevins also faces up to three years in prison on the witness-tampering charge.
Prosecutors also will attempt to recover $31 million paid to the disaster services company.
Blevins was an accounting property officer and contracting officer’s technical representative with the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he advised Dangler on how to successfully underbid for the contract in 2006, according to the indictment. During the time he was assisting Dangler’s company, he also was negotiating to work for it, the indictment said.
At the time, 3-D was based in Fort Pierce, Fla., and Blevins lived in Texarkana, Texas.
Blevins, who had worked for FEMA since 1997, had acted as the FEMA technical representative on an earlier contract between the agency and Dangler and his company.
That meant the company and Dangler were prohibited from participating in other federal contracts in which Blevins was involved, according to the indictment.
Blevins also was prohibited from assisting or advising the company and from seeking employment with the company until he was granted permission by the proper FEMA official.
Instead, according to the indictment, beginning in January 2006, Dangler and a person identified as B.S.D. worked with Blevins and his girlfriend, identified as “K.L.,” to prepare the 3-D contract. In doing so, they falsified the firm’s number of employees and their qualifications.
The paperwork was submitted to FEMA on Jan. 16 of that year. Two months later, 3-D was awarded the contract, which was to begin in May.
Between November 2005 and April 2006, Dangler and Blevins had discussed Blevins going to work for 3-D if FEMA awarded it the contract, according to the indictment, including at a meeting at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans. The company paid to fly Blevins and his girlfriend to New Orleans.
On April 14, 2006, Blevins resigned from FEMA, according to the indictment. Between June and November, he was hired by unnamed joint venture companies owned by an individual identified in the indictment as “T.C.” who was also “involved” with the 3-D Disaster Services contract. In 2007 and 2008, Blevins was paid directly by 3-D with proceeds from the FEMA contract, according to the indictment.
Blevins failed to inform FEMA of the job offer and failed to get permission to discuss it, again in violation of federal regulations, the indictment said. But both Dangler and Blevins told others that Blevins had written permission from FEMA’s ethics officer allowing him to go to work for the company and to participate in the contract talks, and that Dangler had confirmed that approval in a conversation with the ethics officer.
The disaster services company was paid more than $31 million by FEMA between May 2006 and January 2010. The indictment does not say anything about the quality of the firm’s work.
My childhood home – upper 9th ward...(click to embiggen)Read the rest of this story and view the photos HERE.
After being born at Ochsner, I was brought back to this home. I lived here the first 8 years of my life, in the upper 9th ward. My parents were poor, their first home was in the Desire housing projects, then they moved here several years before I came along. We lived here until my parents were able to purchase their first home.
My dad parked his old Chevy in this garage. It was flooded out by Hurricane Betsy in 1965, but he was able to salvage it by drying out the gas tank and then drove it for a few more years until it rusted out. I learned how to ride a bicycle along this sidewalk.
"I saw a lot of homes tagged indicating that dead pets were found inside – or were being fed and watered, hence the F/W on many homes – however it was difficult to find one that had a number other than zero at the bottom of the X-mark. Any marking at that position on the X indicated a body was found inside, and there were many homes where more than one person perished.My friend's remains were found under some debris in what had been his backyard. I guess they just bulldozed everything into the back of the property.
Many people refused to leave because they could not get accommodations for their pets, and chose to stay at home. Besides, why leave for what turned out to be a Category 3 storm Winds were clocked at no more than 110-115 mph in the city? They never dreamed that the steadfast levees would break, flooding and trapping them and their beloved pets inside.
Someone told me that “officials” made extra efforts to make sure homes where a person/persons were found dead inside were demolished. That could possibly explain the reason for all of the empty lots in Lakeview and the Lower 9th ward…"
After almost five years post Katrina, volunteers recently discovered a house that was washed into a marsh by the storm from Bay St. Louis' Second Street.What follows is a recent piece on NPR about the house and family. Talk about "the never-ending story." Fascinating and tragic.
NEW ORLEANS — Amnesty International says the U.S. government and Gulf Coast states have consistently violated the human rights of hurricane victims since Hurricane Katrina killed about 1,800 people and caused widespread devastation after striking in August 2005.That's it. No details or link to the report. Check it out for yourselves. HERE.
Amnesty's report entitled "Un-Natural Disaster" says government actions in housing, health care and policing prevented poor minority communities from rebuilding and returning to their homes.
The White House and Louisiana and Mississippi officials said they had gone to great lengths to help people recover from Katrina.
Amnesty urged Congress to amend the nation's main disaster response legislation, the Stafford Act, to guarantee the humane and fair treatment of all disaster victims.
Jed Horne, distinguished visiting lecturer in the University of Southern Mississippi College of Arts and Letters, will offer The Katrina Seminar, a weeklong examination of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, during the May 17-21 mini-session.Read the rest at the link above.
Horne is the former metro editor of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, which garnered two Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
He is also the author of the critically acclaimed "Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City."
"We're approaching the fifth anniversary of the storm (Aug. 29), and I think the seminar will have a lot of interest for our students and for other members of the public," said Denise von Herrmann, dean of the College of Arts and Letters. "Mr. Horne certainly brings an informed perspective to the seminar."
Horne plans to feature a number of guest speakers in the class, which will meet from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 17 to 21.
Guests will include storm surge expert Ivor van Heerden, WLOX-TV news director Dave Vincent, filmmaker Lolis Elie, photojournalist Ted Jackson and Reilly Morse of the Mississippi Center for Justice along with several other experts and municipal leaders.
(New Orleans) On February 10, 2010, Dr. Ivor Van Heerden, a world-recognized disaster science specialist, hurricane researcher, author, and former deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in Louisiana state court alleging that LSU officials waged a campaign of retaliation against him that culminated with the termination of his position at the university. The whistle-blower suit alleges that Dr. van Heerden, an LSU Associate Professor and leader of the state team that conducted a comprehensive investigation into the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, was subjected to a multi-year campaign of retaliatory harassment after he made critical comments concerning the failure of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to safeguard the City of New Orleans.I hope LSU gets nailed on this one and that our "press" such as it is, follows this story. Well, I can dream, can I?
You may remember that Rep. Cao, a Republican from Louisiana, was the only Republican to vote for the Health Care Reform Bill. As if that didn't get him into enough trouble with party leaders, now there's this from Think Progress:Last month, President Obama visited New Orleans for the first time since taking office and touted his administration’s focus on assisting the area’s still on-going recovery effort four years after Hurricane Katrina. “I’m pleased to report that we’ve made good progress,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve made progress.”
But conservatives such as Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) criticized Obama’s visit calling it a “drive-through daiquiri summit,” while others “criticized the president for not touring the battered wetlands.”
Yesterday during an interview with Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) — the lone Republican to vote for the House health care bill last week — Washington Times radio channeled the GOP criticism. “He didn’t even stick around very long during his trip,” the host said. But Cao defended what the administration has done for the area:
CAO: Well, I just want to set the record straight, that even though the President only visited New Orleans once since his election, it was a brief stay, but this administration has been tremendous for the people of the 2nd district. Secretary Napolitano has been down here three or four times, the secretary of HUD, the secretary of Education, they have been down here numerous times. [...]
So I guess for me, it’s not that important to have the visit of the President, its much more important for me that I have a good working relationship with the administration and have the commitment…from the administration to push all the recovery issues of the 2nd District forward and they have been doing that in the last 9 months.
Paul Rainwater, the executive director of the state-run Louisiana Recovery Authority, agrees with Cao’s approach. “I would say it’s more important to have your cabinet secretaries down here,” he said last month. Indeed, the White House said there were 22 visits by senior administration officials to the area from March to August, 13 of them by cabinet secretaries.
Nine months into the Obama Administration there have been many visits and meetings helping to move recovery forward. Four years of Bush paying lip service to NOLA didn't get much of anything positive accomplished. His promises were hollow; most of his rhetoric were lies.
And so it goes.
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Homeless and Struggling in New Orleans.Crawling through a hole in a fence and walking through an open doorway, Shamus Rohn and Mike Miller lead the way into an abandoned Midcity hospital. They are outreach workers for the New Orleans organization UNITY for the Homeless, and they do this all day long; searching empty houses and buildings for homeless people, so they can offer services and support. "We joke about having turned criminal trespass into a fulltime job," says Rohn.The rest is here, if you've got the stomach for it. How will we commemorate this fourth anniversary, I wonder, or will it even be addressed and acknowledged?
Up a darkened stairway and through the detritus of a building that looks like its been scavenged for anything of value to sell, Rohn and Miller enter a sundrenched room. Inside is Michael Palmer, a 57-year-old white former construction worker and merchant seaman who has made a home here. Palmer - his friends call him Mickey - is in some ways lucky. He found a room with a door that locks. He salvaged some furniture from other parts of the hospital, so he has a bed, a couch, and a rug. Best of all, he has a fourth-floor room with a balcony. "Of all the homeless," he says, "I probably have the best view."
Mickey has lived here for six months. He's been homeless since shortly after Katrina, and this is by far the best place he's stayed in that time. "I've lived on the street," he says. "I've slept in a cardboard box." He is a proud man, thin and muscled with a fresh shave, clean clothes and a trim mustache. He credits a nearby church, which lets him shave and shower.
But Palmer would like to be able to pay rent again. "My apartment was around $450. I could afford $450. I can't afford $700 or $800 and that's what the places have gone up to." Keeping himself together, well-dressed and fresh, Mickey is trying to go back to the life he had. "I have never lived on the dole of the state," he says proudly. "I've never been on welfare, never collected food stamps." Palmer rented an apartment before Katrina. He did repairs and construction. "I had my own business," he says. "I had a pickup truck with all my tools, and all that went under water."
Palmer is one of thousands of homeless people living in New Orleans' storm damaged and abandoned homes and buildings. Four years after Katrina, recovery and rebuilding has come slow to this city, and there are many boarded-up homes to choose from. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center counts 65,888 abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans, and this number doesn't include any of the many non-residential buildings, like the hospital Mickey stays in. Overall, about a third of the addresses in the city are vacant or abandoned, the highest rate in the nation. UNITY for the Homeless is the only organization surveying these spaces, and Miller and Rohn are the only fulltime staff on the project. They have surveyed 1,330 buildings - a small fraction of the total number of empty structures. Of those, 564 were unsecured. Nearly 40% of them showed signs of use, including a total of 270 bedrolls or mattresses.
Katrina stories and investigations are far from over - four years on. Every phone conversation with my sister or friends contains new revelations about the days and weeks following the storm. Now this...From Raw Story:Nearly four years after the police shootout that took the lives of Ronald Madison and James Brissette on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, the FBI raided the offices of the police investigators who had been looking into the deadly incident.It appears that George Bush isn't the only person who doesn't care about black people. Another piece of our national shame over this disaster.
The bureau’s move suggests that the federal government may be serious about seeing police officers prosecuted over the Sept. 4, 2005 shootout, when Madison and Brissette were allegedly killed by police while four others were wounded as they crossed a bridge in the midst of the Hurricane Katrina crisis.
It also suggests the FBI may be worried that New Orleans police are trying — or may in the future try — to destroy evidence of what happened that day.
According to ProPublica, “the police officers involved say they began shooting in response to gunfire from the civilians; that claim is vigorously disputed by the shooting victims.”
“Survivors of the high-profile shooting incident have said they were unarmed when ambushed by officers on the bridge, who came to the site because they heard a radio call that described other police officers in distress,” the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported last year. “But police officers have maintained that police were in a firefight, shooting only after they were fired upon.”
According to an article in Friday’s Times-Picayune, FBI agents seized “the files and computer hard drives of two officers assigned to investigate police conduct” in the incident.
Last year, the federal government announced it would be investigating the possibility of federal charges against some or all of the officers involved in the shootout, after a state prosecution of the incident fell apart.
According to New Orleans TV station WDSU, the “investigation had been years in the making and the probe into the police department is broader than the events that happened on the Danziger Bridge that left two dead and four wounded.”
Harry Rosenberg, a former US attorney, told WDSU that FBI raids on police homicide squads are rare. “It’s done when the FBI believes evidence may be destroyed if officers or other individuals become aware of a criminal investigation and are likely to dispose of electronic data or paper evidence that might assist the FBI in its investigation,” Rosenberg said.
WDSU also stated that the federal investigation would look at “the police-involved shooting of Adolph Grimes on New Year’s Eve and the death of Henry Glover, whose body was found in a burned out car in the days after Hurricane Katrina.”
The Times-Picayune reported in June that federal authorities are investigating Glover’s death. According to the paper, the owner of the car in which Glover’s body was found said he last saw it in the possession of the New Orleans police, before it was found burned with Glover’s body inside.
“A community group that has been monitoring each of the cases said it’s glad to see the FBI push for more information,” WDSU reported.
“This has been a long time coming,” Evelyn Lynn of the activist group Safe Streets Strong Communities told WDSU. “The police department here has been in crisis for a long time. Having federal help is going to help a lot in terms of the cases and the reforms that we need to make in the department.”
WASHINGTON — The Federal Emergency Management Agency ignored the law and misused millions of dollars to build two warehouses after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, according to government investigators.Yes, well, we'll see, won't we?
Some of the money FEMA misused should have gone toward Katrina victims in Louisiana, according to a Homeland Security Inspector General report obtained by The Associated Press. The report is expected to be released Thursday.
"FEMA had no authority to use appropriated funds to construct the two buildings," the investigators said, adding that the agency violated a prohibition against agreeing to spend money without congressional authority.
In the summer of 2006, FEMA spent more than $7 million on two warehouses the agency said it needed to repair trailers and mobile homes used by disaster victims. One of the warehouses was paid for from federal disaster relief fund, which investigators say is not permitted. The other warehouse was paid for with proceeds from sales of travel trailers and mobile homes _ also not allowed.
The report says senior officials at FEMA rejected the proposals for these warehouses, but they were built anyway.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said this report confirms his ongoing concerns about FEMA's lax contracting policies.
"It shows, in this instance, FEMA's disregard for the law," said Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security committee. "This is another example of FEMA gone wild."
After the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, FEMA set up 12 sites to store emergency housing units. Once hurricane victims left the disaster housing, the units were moved to these storage sites to be cleaned, repaired and refurbished. FEMA wanted to put up maintenance buildings at two of the sites _ Selma, Ala., and Cumberland, Md., the report said.
FEMA officials told the inspector general that senior agency officials "disallowed" the proposals to build these sites, but "eventually the projects were approved and funded," the report said.
The Cumberland building was delivered without electricity, lighting or other utilities and couldn't even be used for repairs, the report said.
FEMA spokesman Clark Stevens said he could not comment on a report that hasn't been released.
But, he said, "FEMA does not tolerate wasteful spending and is committed to making sure that any past mistakes are not repeated."
He has taken on drugs, crime and corruption in Baltimore; and brutalised young soldiers in Iraq. Now David Simon, the creator of the hit TV series The Wire, is to create a drama that treats Hurricane Katrina as an allegory for the financial, social and cultural disasters that have shaken the US over the past year.
The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, "an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later".
"The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor," he said. "New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today."
Simon, whose The Wire has been hailed as a masterpiece of novelistic, sophisticated television was speaking to the Guardian ahead of his appearance at the Guardian Hay festival, which opens tomorrow. Simon will be speaking at the festival on 30 May about his book The Corner, an account by him and his collaborator, Ed Burns, of a year spent observing life on the street in West Baltimore. The book, published in the US in 1997, became the basis of The Wire, along with Homicide, Simon's earlier book about the year he spent shadowing officers in the Baltimore Police Department.
Read the rest here.
More later.
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