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Tag: Katrina

Things I Have Learned

1. Sunscreen only works if you put it on.
2. Black mold smells bad, but water that leaks out of a refrigerator that’s been sitting for six months after being inundated by floodwater and sewage smells worse.
3. Drywall that’s soaked with floodwater and sewage comes down easier than dry drywall.
4. For some reason, fiberglass insulation does not make me itch.
5. Beignets from Cafe du Monde taste even better than they did four years ago.
6. The sledgehammer is my new favorite tool.
7. I’m way less sore than I expected to be, yet I worked my ass off.
8. Diaper-rash ointment stinks almost as bad as black mold, but it will take care of your heat rash right quick.
9. I want my own hard hat.
10. I find myself surprised that we’re working in what appears to be fairly affluent neighborhoods.
11. And yet, fairly affluent people lost everything they had, too.
12. Very few people in the neighborhood I was working in today plan to come back.
13. In any event, there’s a possibility that FEMA will wind up buying the house I worked so hard to demo down to the studs and bulldoze it.
14. FEMA sucks.
15. FEMA is shutting down the volunteer camp, so the various organizations involved are just setting up a new one.
16. The people I’ve met from the area are astonishingly nice after all they’ve been through. We met the homeowners of both the homes my team has worked on, various firemen who are our safety supervisors, shop owners, etc. They’ve been very happy to have us here — one souvenir-shop owner in New Orleans said he kept the shop open late for the volunteers and disaster workers in the area.
17. It’s really eerie to see the French Quarter nearly empty.
18. The scale of the devastation, this many months after the storms, is just unbelievable.
19. Playing Scrabble when you’re tired results in some interesting spellings.
20. I’d do this again in a minute. Well, after a chance to get home and use a real toilet instead of a port-o-let, but I’d do it again.

Greetings from Chalmette, La.

Hi there — just a quick drop-in to let you know that I’m in Louisiana, at the base camp from where my Habitat group is operating to gut houses in St. Bernard Parish. I don’t get much internet time, so I have to make this quick.

Very hard work, very tiring day. The homeowner was at the site where my group was working, and the house had already been half-gutted by another team when we showed up. Lots of moldy drywall and dust-choked carpet to take out. I didn’t think we’d finish, but we did, with the exception of one tile wall.

I’m off to the airport to pick up someone who missed her plane Sunday. I myself lost my wallet between the apartment and the airport, but luckily had thought to bring my passport. And also luckily, my neighbor found the wallet and slipped a note under my door, which my catsitting friends found today.

More later.

It’s Not Mardi Gras For Everyone, Charlotte Allen

Charlotte Allen of the Independent Womens’ Forum, you’ll remember, shook her finger at “liberal-elite puritans” (read: one guy at the Washington Post) for not unreservedly embracing this year’s Mardi Gras even though many of its black and poor residents are unable to participate and the city still lies in ruins.

I guess Ms. Allen didn’t want to be reminded that not everyone is able to indulge in the “simple pleasures” of Mardi Gras. Here’s an example of what she doesn’t want to think about because, well, beads! While white society dances the night away at the Comus and Rex balls, there are no cotillions for the black Carnival societies in New Orleans.

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But I Thought Liberals Were a Big Bunch of Hedonists!

In what I can only surmise is an example of IOKIYAR, Charlotte Allen of the Independent Women’s Forum tut-tuts at “liberal-elite puritans” for raining on the Mardi Gras parades.

Mardi Gras is the season in New Orleans for having a good time–for some people too good a time–and in my opinion, the Katrina-embattled city sure could use it. That’s the way a lot of New Orleanians think, too, so they’re out parading and dancing in the streets, although on a somewhat reduced scale. For one thing, the city’s businesses, closed for weeks and even months for Katrina cleanup, could sure use the tourist money. So who can fault them for setting aside their hardships for a few days to have a good time, show some civic pride, and hold their signature celebration?

Who can fault them? Well, our out-of-town liberal elite pundits sure can. Here’s Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, tut-tutting the New Orleanians for daring to revel when they should be home beating their breasts:

Don’t you love how she drops that “out-of-town liberal elite pundits” in there? I haven’t been able to determine where, exactly, Allen herself hails from, but she seems to be well entrenched in the elite herself, what with the Stanford and Harvard education and the writing gigs at The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and (gasp!) The New York Times.

I should also like to point out the delicious irony of someone who got the vapors about good conservative Americans being called puritans by a Frenchman because they were scandalized by Bill Clinton’s penis turning around and affixing the same label to a liberal who thinks the Mardi Gras parades are a waste of time and energy this year.

I expect, therefore, that Ms. Allen will be standing topless along Bourbon Street tonight, hurricane in hand, jumping up and down and yelling, “Throw me something, mister!” and hoping for pearls. I expect that instead of beating her breasts, she’ll be flashing them.

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Since I’m Bogarting the Blog

Might as well share this story about the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Armed with sharp tongues and images such as the blue tarps that still protect broken roofs across the city, the clubs that stage Mardi Gras parades are targeting Hurricane Katrina and the politicians they blame for the chaotic response to the catastrophe.

One display in the Krewe du Vieux parade Saturday asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting the state might get better treatment than it has from the American government.

Dressed as a pink flamingo and accompanying a cart fashioned to resemble a FEMA trailer, Sally Durkin of Mississippi said the satire is helping to heal the city.

“There’s so much despair around it all,” she said. “Sometimes you have to just take it on the chin and have some humor about it, or we all go crazy.”

Still, in the midst of revelry and satire, even the city known as the Big Easy has a serious side.

The Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club, a 90-year-old historically black group that holds one of the city’s most beloved Mardi Gras parades, lit 10 candles at a service in honor of club members who have died since the storm. They lit an eleventh candle to honor the hundreds of people killed by Katrina.

Can’t keep good people down.

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“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Er, well, maybe the White House could have, because they were warned:

In the 48 hours before Hurricane Katrina hit, the White House received detailed warnings about the storm’s likely impact, including eerily prescient predictions of breached levees, massive flooding, and major losses of life and property, documents show.

A 41-page assessment by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), was delivered by e-mail to the White House’s “situation room,” the nerve center where crises are handled, at 1:47 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, according to an e-mail cover sheet accompanying the document.

The NISAC paper warned that a storm of Katrina’s size would “likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching” and specifically noted the potential for levee failures along Lake Pontchartrain. It predicted economic losses in the tens of billions of dollars, including damage to public utilities and industry that would take years to fully repair. Initial response and rescue operations would be hampered by disruption of telecommunications networks and the loss of power to fire, police and emergency workers, it said.

In a second document, also obtained by The Washington Post, a computer slide presentation by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prepared for a 9 a.m. meeting on Aug. 27, two days before Katrina made landfall, compared Katrina’s likely impact to that of “Hurricane Pam,” a fictional Category 3 storm used in a series of FEMA disaster-preparedness exercises simulating the effects of a major hurricane striking New Orleans. But Katrina, the report warned, could be worse.

Heckuva job, indeed. No wonder the White House doesn’t want to release documents showing Katrina-related communications among White House staff.

Update: The Rude Pundit on why Katrina’s not going away.

Lowered Expectations

President Bush needs to raise the bar.

The president’s recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he’s doing a great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it’s the current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine because the founding fathers didn’t give women equal rights either.

(emphasis mine).

Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters.

Ouch.

In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law.

It’s true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But it’s offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised since 1787. We don’t agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough for Iraq.

I have nothing else to add; this is spot-on. And yet another reason why I love the New York Times editorial pages.

Purging the Poor

Naomi Klein is a must-read this week, as she rakes through the racial and socioeconomic politics of the new New Orleans.

Wearing a donated pink T-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan (“It’s the hidden little Tiki spot where the island boys are hot, hot, hot”), Nyler tells me what she is nervous about. “I think New Orleans might not ever get fixed back.” “Why not?” I ask, a little surprised to be discussing reconstruction politics with a preteen in pigtails. “Because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Nyler that I suspect she is on to something; that many of the African-American workers from her neighborhood may never be welcomed back to rebuild their city.

Why? Because Washington is offering huge incentives — tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations — to big firms for their help rebuilding the city, which will be designed by people Klein calls the “white elite.” (And considering that whites make up only 27% of people in New Orleans, she’d be correct).

So what could they do? Well, integrate neighborhoods, for one:

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, [New Orleans’ top corporate lobbyist, Mark] Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for “twenty-first-century thinking”: Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with “mixed income” housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.

What Drennen doesn’t say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans’ poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate–17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn’t improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It’s much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.

The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor’s repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that’s a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it’s doable.

But why do I get the feeling that it won’t be done?

Bush *hearts* black folks

The worst storm in our history proved perfect for exposing this president because in one big blast it illuminated all his failings: the rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of “compassionate conservatism,” the lack of concern for the “underprivileged” his mother condescended to at the Astrodome, the reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.

Frank Rich, I love you. Perhaps GWB would be better off if he called on Sally and Johnny for some help.

(Disclaimer: the site is a joke. It’s also obviously anti-racist, but I suspect that some people may be a little too slow to catch on, so please, no one flip out.)