Katrina – Page 3 – Feministe

Promises, Promises

5,000 units of public housing are to be razed in New Orleans, and there doesn’t appear to be any firm plan to ensure that the residents of those units are guaranteed spots in the new housing units that are planned but not yet underway.

Smells fishy to me.

The announcement, made by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso R. Jackson, provoked strong criticism from low-income tenants and their advocates, several of whom noted that thousands of public housing apartments had been closed since Hurricane Katrina. But local officials have for months said they do not want a return to the intense concentrations of poverty in the old projects, where crime and squalor were pervasive.

I agree in principle that this might be a great opportunity to break up the concentrated poverty of the old housing units with mixed-income housing. New York’s public housing is mixed-income and has been more or less free of the problems endemic to some of the massive low-income public housing blocks in other cities. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the buildings are just so damaged that they simply have to come down.

But follow-through has never been the strong suit of the Bush Administration. Without a rock-solid commitment to house every last resident of the projects who want to return, I look at this plan with a very jaundiced eye.

His announcement appeared to heighten the fears of many displaced tenants that they would be pushed out in favor of higher-income families.

“Right now, we feel it’s not the time to start huge building projects because there are lots of people who are displaced as we speak and need a place to stay,” said Lynette Bickham, who was evacuated from the St. Bernard project. “We’re going to continue to fight for our homes.”

This month, former residents began demanding the right to return, setting up a tent city outside the St. Bernard project, the largest of the developments. Local and federal officials refused to open the developments, saying they were unsafe.

Mr. Jackson outlined the first official plans for the projects since the storm, and they were incomplete. He did not specify how many units in the new developments would be set aside for public housing or whether there would be units for all the low-income residents who had such housing before the storm. Planning for the new developments, which are to be financed by bonds, tax credits and federal housing money, has not begun, he said.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin responded to Mr. Jackson’s announcement enthusiastically.

The proposed demolitions have renewed a debate about the future of the city’s enormous poor population, most of which remains displaced.

“I think the people who’ve been planning the recovery process never wanted poor people to return to the city in the first place,” said Lance Hill, the director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. “And they haven’t made it easy.”

More on Why New Orleans is Fucked

The Rude Pundit explains why.

Of course, electing a new mayor of New Orleans at this point is pretty much the same as forming a unity government in Iraq: it’s nice to see the processes going on, but, really, and, c’mon, what’s the difference? Baghdad’s gonna go up in flames, New Orleans is destined for the drink. It’s not blind, nihilistic pessimism to say so.

And that’s because New Orleans is fucked, yes, it’s true, and there must come a time when we accept exactly how fucked it is so that we can figure out what the hell to do with the people there and scattered to the winds.
. . .

It’s awfully nice that Ray Nagin wants to have unity in the city, something that’s a hell of a lot easier to do with half as many people in New Orleans as last year at this time. But New Orleans is fucked, between bearing the damage of long-term neglect (isn’t it time someone realized that doing anything on the cheap, whether it’s wars of choice or levees of life support, is just gonna end up fucking over the very people it’s supposed to help?) and bearing up for another hurricane season, with a prediction for this year that’s pretty much the exact same as last year. New Orleans, that sinful town, now bears the weight of the sins of national incompetence on environmental and urban policies, corporate cronyism, budget cuts and tax cuts, and more. It is a weight that will collapse the Crescent City without the will to put more than a cotton ball on an arterial wound.

Read the rest.

Annals of Bad Advertising

This has to be a joke, right?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A little girl blows away dandelion fluff as an announcer says, “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life,” in an advertisement targeting global warming “alarmists,” especially Al Gore.

Who just happens to have a film coming out about global warming, called “An Inconvenient Truth.” It certainly doesn’t sit well with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of those industry-funded “think tanks” where mediocre conservative mouthbreathers can get paid very well to sit around coming up with boneheaded ideas like this:

Against backdrops of a park, a beach and a forest, one celebrates the benefits of greenhouse gas-producing fuels.

“The fuels that produce CO2 (carbon dioxide) have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love,” the ad runs. “Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed — what would our lives be like then?”

Perhaps, just perhaps, we’d be forced to look reality in the face and do something about our energy consumption and get serious about looking for alternative sources of energy that *don’t* give off greenhouse gases. Hm?

The other ad questions media reports of the threat of climate change, especially a Time magazine issue devoted to the topic, and shows film of a glacier melting and then runs in reverse to show the glacier reconstituting itself.

“We had started work on this several months back, but we sort of changed course once the flood of glacier-melting stories began,” said Sam Kazman, an institute lawyer who worked on the ads. “So we did want to get out there before the Al Gore film got into national opening.”

That is just startlingly stupid. Do they honestly think that people won’t get that the glacier is, in fact, melting?

Oh, but here’s the hand of the Kyoto-shredding, climatologist–suppressing, report-dismissing, overwhelming-evidence-ignoring Bush Administration in these ads:

Fred Smith, president of the institute, a lobbying group closely allied to the Bush administration that stresses limited government regulation and a free-market approach to environmental issues, said he had seen the film and found it “very alarmist,” although well-produced.

There have certainly been some free-market solutions to pollution that have had some effect, but it’s going to take government action to make the kind of huge changes in everything from CAFE standards to alternative fuels to factory emissions that are needed to give us any hope of arresting and reversing the damage we’re doing to this planet. Unfortunately, our government is in the hands of someone who probably thinks that global warming is just swell, because it gets us closer to the Rapture. If, as Al Gore says, we have about 10 years left to put the brakes on, we effectively have only 7, because Bush is in the White House for another 3, and he didn’t learn a damn thing from Katrina and Rita and the death of a great American city.

But the institute questions the impact of global warming while a broad range of scientists and environmentalists, including Gore, have linked it to more severe storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

“They fly in the face of most of the science,” Charlie Miller of Environmental Defense said of the institute ads. “The good news is that there’s not a trade-off here between prosperity, jobs, growth and protecting the Earth. We can do both.”

Environmental Defense and the Ad Council released public service announcements in March featuring children as future victims of global warming, and these were mentioned critically at the briefing where the new ads were released.

How much do you want to bet there’s some under-the-table illegal government propaganda funding in there somehow, a la Maggie Gallagher, Armstrong Williams, and Mike McManus? Only now that the use of columnists and fake newscasts has been exposed, they have to turn to think-tank ads?

UPDATE: Pam’s got a link to one of the ads.

New Orleans is Fucked

The Rude Pundit tells us why, and how bad.

Bodies

Are still being found in New Orleans, in houses that have already been searched:

NEW ORLEANS, April 5 — When August Blanchard returned to New Orleans from Pennsylvania in late December, his mother was still missing. Family members, scattered across the country, had been calling hospitals, the Red Cross and missing persons hot lines, hoping she had been rescued.

But Mr. Blanchard, 26, had a bad feeling. Twice, he drove past the pale green house on Reynes Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he and his mother, Charlene Blanchard, 45, had lived, yet he could not bring himself to enter.

It was not until Feb. 25 that one of Mr. Blanchard’s uncles nudged the front door open with his foot and spied Ms. Blanchard’s hand. Dressed in her nightgown and robe, she lay under a moldering sofa. With her was a red velvet bedspread that her daughter had given her and a huge teddy bear.

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. Many of them, like Ms. Blanchard, were overlooked in initial searches.

Not To Be All Critical And Shit

But I’m not, I’m really not, trolling for praise in my Katrina posts.

I do hear you, I appreciate your words of praise and encouragement, but I’d like to start a discussion on the issues of the FEMA fuckupedness and the general things-are-NOT-OK seven months after the storm. I’m thrilled that we’ve heard from NOLA-area lurkers (please come back and post!), but I’d like to see things move from “you’re doing a great thing” to “wow, tell me more about what’s going on” or “what can we do?”

My goal is to not only tell about my experience, but to start a discussion about why things just haven’t progressed very much in the last seven months and what we can do about it.

Storytelling

I mentioned in my earlier post that the St. Bernard Parish-area residents who used the community soup kitchen in Chalmette needed to tell their stories. Unlike my team member Chris, who wound up at the soup kitchen, I didn’t meet that many local residents, but I did meet the homeowners of two of the three homes I worked on, plus the bus drivers who brought us to and from the sites, Paul and Gerard (or, more accurately, “Gerahhhd”). I also met Mary, who lived across the street from the third house we worked on and insisted, STRONGLY, that we use her trailer’s bathroom rather than go down the street to the port-a-potty.

The homeowners from the first home had built their place 35 years ago and were helping us to gut it. They were in their 60s, and since they’d been involved both in the construction and the gutting (and before we got there), they’d already made peace with what we were doing. Thing is, they didn’t get emotional until they started talking about the neighbors and friends they missed because they had scattered (the HOs were in Baton Rouge).

The second set of homeowners had not been in their house in months when they walked in on us on the second day of our demo (and the third day of the house). They were in their late 60s, had grown up in the neighborhood along with most of their friends, and their daughter and grandson had lived nearby. They owned show horses and had been in Jackson, Miss., at a horse show when the hurricanes hit. The wife had a heart attack a week after the storm and spent five weeks in the hospital in Jackson, and had been told not to go near their house because of the mold.

They told us that one of the few things they’d salvaged from the house had been their wedding album, which had also been one of the few things they’d salvaged after Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago (they’ve been married 47 years). They told us that for all the months that their stuff had been in their home, sitting there, it was difficult to let go, but once they saw the stuff on the curb, it was much easier, almost cathartic.

Mary told us that she’d been denied a FEMA trailer at first because one of her houses (she owned two on the street) had been determined to be livable. However, when she asked when that determination had been made, since she hadn’t let anyone in her houses to inspect them, the FEMA people said 9/3. So Mary said, “Did someone swim in? Because the house was under 10 feet of water on 9/3.” Turns out FEMA had done a flyover and determined that any house with a roof was livable regardless of what was in it. Mary finally got a FEMA trailer after getting her Congressman, Bobby Jindal, involved (my sister had a similar experience in 1995, when her Navy base housing went up in flames while her husband was not only out to sea but underwater on a sub, and she was dicked around and blamed for the fire (even though it was due to faulty wiring) until she called her senator in Hawaii, Daniel Inouye. Within 16 hours, her husband’s sub was ordered to surface and he was on a flight home, and she was in front of the commandant, explaining why she went over his head (um, because she was a civilian and had rights and her friend was in the house when the fire started)).

A Bit On The Lower Ninth Ward

Several members of my team* and I took a trip to the Lower Ninth Ward to survey some damage. I didn’t take any photos there, since I not only dislike disaster tourism, but I remember getting very pissed off at the people who posed for pictures in front of Ground Zero. But I felt it was important to give a description of the damage.

Things were bad in St. Bernard Parish, which borders the Lower Ninth Ward and Bywater (NOLA natives correct me; for some reason I have a hard time getting a handle on the geography of the area). There’s a waterway connecting Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borges which got inundated when Pontchartrain overflowed, sending a 20- or 30-foot wave through the area. But a lot of houses are brick, and except for the ones that were the first hit, didn’t have a lot of structural damage. I heard about, but never saw, a brick house that had been lifted up and floated into the street because of its waterproof foam insulation.

The Lower Ninth Ward was another story. The houses were mostly of wood, and wood does not stand up well to rushing water and falling trees. Every house I saw had been obviously damaged, and most had orange tags denoting that they were structurally unsound. With the way the houses were damaged — just snapped in the middle, lifted up and thrown on top of cars, knocked onto their sides, caved in, roofs torn off, trees driven through them — I can see why it was difficult to search them for bodies.

However, it was apparent that the searches in the Lower Ninth Ward were conducted very late in the process. On nearly every house in the area, there was a big X in orange spray paint, with the date searched in the top quadrant, the search team in the left quadrant, the number of bodies found in the bottom quandrant, and what I’ve variously heard as the floors searched or the number of people found alive in the right quadrant. The dates in St. Bernard were in the 9/12 to 9/17 range, while the dates in the Lower Ninth Ward were at the end of September, a month after the storm.

But what was really freaky was seeing what looked like an open field, wondering what that was doing in the middle of an urban neighborhood (albeit one that looked suburban to my NYC-adapted eyes), and then noticing the slab foundations and cinderblocks, and looking at the levee and realizing that that was where the levee had broken. As bad as the damage had been in the rest of the neighborhood, the houses in front of the levee break were simply gone. I’d heard so much about how the damage in New Orleans had really been from slowly-rising floodwaters rather than from high winds that I suppose I never gave much thought to the fact that even if the rest of the city had a steady rising, the area where the levee had broken would have been hit with much more force.

— ———————
*I realize that I’ve been talking about “we” but not explaining who I meant. “We” refers to my Habitat team. We went out in groups of 10, ideally at least. The first day, we had all 10: me, Duane from Wisconsin, Debbie from Jersey City, Becka from Orlando, Chris from Cambridge, Cindy from Maryland, Sophie and Marley, two high school seniors from Berkley, and John and Ginny, a father-daughter team from Rochester, NY. We lost John after the first day because he was an electrician and needed to set up the new camp, and Ginny was tapped to do plumbing the next day. We picked up Yael, about whom the less said the better, and also lost Chris, who had had problems with the heat and with the idea that we were potentially stirring up carcinogens (her husband had died of lung cancer). Chris went to go work in the community soup kitchen, where much of her job was to listen to the residents who came for meals because they really, really needed to tell their stories. On the last day we picked up Ashley, who was a student at Tulane and had rotated into the project since January as her class schedule allowed. All were great workers and terrific people except the one about whom I will follow my mother’s dictate not to say anything at all if I can’t say anything nice.

Hurricane Cleanup With Pictures

Hey all.

I’m home now, enjoying the affections of my pets and my nice dry, entire, functioning home and thanking all that is good in the world that I no longer have to use a port-a-potty.

In case you were curious about what I looked like, here’s a pic:

More pics and commentary below the fold.

Done

Finished our last house today. Well, didn’t finish, but we came close. This was the first house my team had had that hadn’t been touched since the hurricane. Um, wow. Stuff had floated around everywhere, the ceiling had collapsed, and there was very little ventilation in the place. Fortunately, we had another team come join us, and they had a lot of men who were doing the competitive thing, so they were more than willing to deal with the couches and the appliances — but not so much with the living-room carpet.

The carpet was a thing to behold. The floodwaters had brought in mud and sludge, and then the ceiling collapsed on top of that, so there was a lot of drywall and sludge fused to the carpet. My work buddy Cindy and I wound up taking care of it ourselves by pulling up part of the rug, folding it over and kicking the back to loosen the crap, then cutting it into strips.

All the appliances had water in them, and there were two rats killed during the clean-out (we were lucky in that we had seen few critters).

I’m getting the two-minute warning for internet time, so more later.