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	HURRICANE KATRINA . . . see "NATURE" for related links We would see 10 and 20 block areas where there was nothing. Not one house standing. . . There were so many places where a home had been and there was nothing left but slab. It looked like it had been swept off with a broom. --Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour _Los Angeles Times_ [August 30, 2005] "Hurricane Flattens Mississippi Coast" Today I saw reporters cry. --Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour _Los Angeles Times_ [August 30, 2005] "Hurricane Flattens Mississippi Coast" This is our tsunami. --Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway (Comparing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to the disaster in southern Asia in December 2004.) _Los Angeles Times_ [August 31, 2005], "This Is Our Tsunami" - In newspapers across the world, commentators believe Hurricane Katrina marks a profound change in the way the US is perceived at home and abroad. Some speak of the American "myth" being shattered by the poverty and racial divisions which they say the disaster has revealed. Others hope the floods will douse US "arrogance" over its refusal to ratify the Kyoto accord on climate change. An Italian paper, however, jumps to President George Bush's defence. Michael Streck in Germany's Die Welt Hurricane Katrina will bury itself into the American consciousness in the same way 9/11 or the fall of Saigon did. The storm did not just destroy America's image of itself, but also has the power to bring an end to the Republican era sooner than expected. America is ashamed. Stephan Hebel in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Bush's people will say that the moment of need and willingness to help should not be poisoned by political manoeuvres. Maybe this will serve them well enough in a media world where images of victims and heroes are valued more highly than complex background. But then the lie would have won - against the desire to understand things so as to avoid them. Jean-Pierre Aussant in France's Figaro This tragic incident reminds us that the United States has refused to ratify the Kyoto accords. Let's hope the US can from now on stop ignoring the rest of the world. If you want to run things, you must first lead by example. Arrogance is never a good adviser! Philippe Grangereau in France's Liberation Bush is completely out of his depth in this disaster. Katrina has revealed America's weaknesses: its racial divisions, the poverty of those left behind by its society, and especially its president's lack of leadership. Robi Ronza in Italy's Il Giornale Everything can be used in Europe to badmouth Bush, so it may be worth clarifying a few key points: New Orleans was below sea level even before drilling for oil began. Second, there is no certain proof that the increase in the mean global temperature is a consequence of the emission of so-called greenhouse gases. Finally, the federal government has no specific responsibility for the post-hurricane chaos. Yildirim Turker in Turkey's Radikal The biggest power of the world is rising over poor black corpses. We are witnessing the collapse of the American myth. In terms of the USA's relationship with itself and the world, Hurricane Katrina seems to leave its mark on our century as an extraordinary turning point. Editorial in Iran's Siyasat-e Ruz Hurricane Katrina has proved that America cannot solve its internal problems and is incapable of facing these kinds of natural disasters, so it cannot bring peace and democracy to other parts of the world. Americans now understand that their rulers are only seeking to fulfil their own hegemonistic goals. Editorial in Iran's Jomhuri-ye Eslami The devastating waves of Katrina have unmasked the real face of America's profoundly corrupt society, and proved that under the beautiful surface of modern American life, there are decadent thoughts that always try to exploit the situation to fulfil inhuman goals. Although Bush and his team proved their inefficiency in dealing with the disaster, its aftermath proved that America's corrupt system is the main culprit. Shen Dingli in China's Dongfang Zaobao Katrina is testing the US. Katrina is also creating an opportunity for world unity. Cuba and North Korea's offer of sympathy and aid to the US could also result in some profound thinking in the US, and the author hopes that it will not miss this opportunity. Editorial in Malaysia's Berita Harian What's more saddening is that there have been riots and looting in New Orleans. It turns out that in a developed country with the most powerful economy in the world, some of its citizens are not much different from the poor in Third World countries. Xiong Shu Li in Malaysia's Sin Chew Jit Poh Co-operation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can no longer be delayed, but there are still countries - including the US - which still do not take the issue seriously. However, faced with global disasters, all countries are in the same boat. The US hurricane disaster is a "modern revelation", and all countries of the world including the US should be aware of this. Editorial in Media Indonesia The superpower United States has finally succumbed to nature's wrath. The US must eventually admit that it is unable to deal with the victims itself. Something has changed: Hurricane Katrina has destroyed some of the US's arrogance. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, quoted in El Nacional The rich were able to leave, the poor stayed there, and it is now that they are evacuating them, four, five days later. That is the model they want to sell us. Racial segregation - the mayor of New Orleans said it - is a question of social classes; the rich were able to leave, the poor were left, enduring the hurricane. It is capitalism, in its extreme individualist phase. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4216142.stm - Man-Made Mistakes Increase Devastation Of 'Natural' Disasters September 2, 2005 The Wall Street Journal While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made. As Theodore Steinberg argues, God is getting a bum rap. "This is an unnatural disaster if ever there was one, not an act of God," says Prof. Steinberg, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "If the potential for mass death and destruction from extreme weather existed anywhere in the U.S., it existed in New Orleans." In his 2000 book "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America," Prof. Steinberg documented how much of the toll from "natural" disasters, from the 1886 Charleston earthquake to 1990s hurricanes, has been exacerbated by human actions. The temporary lull in hurricane activity in Florida, from 1969 to 1989, spurred a reckless building boom, for example, putting billions of dollars worth of condos and hotels within reach of storm surges, notes Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would have caused an estimated $90 billion damage had it occurred in 2000, he calculated. It caused just over $1 billion, in today's dollars. It isn't only hurricanes whose destructiveness has been increased by human actions. Tornadoes turn mobile homes into matchsticks (one of Prof. Steinberg's first jobs was at a New York brokerage firm, where he followed the trailer-home industry). From 1981 to 1997, he found, more than one-third of all deaths from tornadoes occurred among people living in mobile homes; federal regulations didn't require them to withstand high winds, and a 1974 statute actually pre-empted stricter state standards with more lax federal ones. Throughout the South and Midwest, mobile-home communities and poor neighborhoods are also much more likely to be sited in flood plains. In New Orleans, the worst-hit parishes were the lower-income ones. But the city also ignored the power of nature. More than one million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity. "If these had been in place, at least some of the energy in the storm surge would have been dissipated," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis. "This is a self-inflicted wound." Studies estimate that for every square mile of wetlands lost, storm surges rise by one foot. Leaving aside whether the levees that broke in New Orleans could have been better constructed, their very existence contributed to the disaster. Built to keep the city from being flooded by the Mississippi, they also keep the Big Muddy from depositing silt to replenish marshes and the river's delta, as do projects that direct the river's water and sediment out to sea to create a deep shipping channel. The result is that much of New Orleans fell below sea level. Combined with the dredging to build canals, "the Gulf of Mexico is a lot closer to New Orleans than it was when Hurricane Betsy ripped through in 1965," says Prof. Steinberg. Now the gulf is in the city. The ultimate question is whether Katrina's power reflects human-caused global warming, or is at minimum a harbinger of the kinds of storms we can expect in a warmer world. No single freak storm can be attributed to global climate trends. But for hurricanes to form, the surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic must exceed about 80° Fahrenheit. That is more likely in a warmer world. The best science to date suggests the frequency of hurricanes doesn't reflect global warming. Straightforward physics, however, says their intensity might. As the seas and air warm, there is more evaporation, which fuels storms, and more energy available to pump them up. A new analysis by atmospheric physicist Kerry Emanuel of MIT suggests the net power of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and Pacific typhoons), a combination of the energy they pack and how long they last, "has increased markedly since 1970." The power of storms in the North Atlantic has tripled, while the power of those in the western North Pacific has more than doubled. Similarly, a 2004 study from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that a warmer world is likely to deepen hurricanes' central pressure (a measure of their power) and intensify the rainfall they bring. Today's storms, the scientists write, "may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." By continuing to blame weather extremes on random events, the "stuff happens" attitude, officials and city planners are ignoring their contributions to the disasters that have pummeled the planet and promise to become only worse. You can e-mail me at sciencejournal@wsj.com mailto:sciencejournal@wsj.com JEFFERSON PARISH, La. - When the last free sandwich was handed out late Wednesday afternoon, a ragged line of unwashed refugees waited empty-handed behind a metal gate at Alfred Bonnabel High School on the western edge of the New Orleans metropolitan area. "That's it--all the food is gone," a sheriff's deputy told the disappointed throng. At that moment, a pickup pulled up, loaded with tortillas, pork and cheese--a last-minute donation from a local restaurant. "You saved our butts," the deputy told Christian Castro, a restaurant manager who said he emptied his establishment's larder when he heard that 700 Hurricane Katrina refugees there were low on food. For the moment, dinner resumed. [...] As dusk fell, the last of the Mexican restaurant food was served at the school. Refugees pushed again against the metal gate. As the deputy tried to console them, a white pickup pulled into the school parking lot. Inside was Duaine Duffy, a sweaty man in shorts and a T-shirt who hopped out to unveil a huge metal pot filled with steaming jambalaya. Duffy said his family and neighbors in La Place, just west of New Orleans, had heard on the radio that the school was low on food. "I guess you could say God sent us here," he said. --David Zucchino, L.A. Times Staff Writer _Los Angeles Times_ [September 1, 2005] "Refugees Tax the Resources of a Neighboring Parish" - Get Off His Back The American Spectator http://www.americanprowler.com/util/print.asp?art_id=8693 09-02-05 by Ben Stein A few truths, for those who have ears and eyes and care to know the truth: 1.) The hurricane that hit New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama was an astonishing tragedy. The suffering and loss of life and peace of mind of the residents of those areas is acutely horrifying. 2.) George Bush did not cause the hurricane. Hurricanes have been happening for eons. George Bush did not create them or unleash this one. 3.) George Bush did not make this one worse than others. There have been far worse hurricanes than this before George Bush was born. 4.) There is no overwhelming evidence that global warming exists as a man-made phenomenon. There is no clear-cut evidence that global warming even exists. There is no clear evidence that if it does exist it makes hurricanes more powerful or makes them aim at cities with large numbers of poor people. If global warming is a real phenomenon, which it may well be, it started long before George Bush was inaugurated, and would not have been affected at all by the Kyoto treaty, considering that Kyoto does not cover the world's worst polluters -- China, India, and Brazil. In a word, George Bush had zero to do with causing this hurricane. To speculate otherwise is belief in sorcery. 6.) George Bush had nothing to do with the hurricane contingency plans for New Orleans. Those are drawn up by New Orleans and Louisiana. In any event, the plans were perfectly good: mandatory evacuation. It is in no way at all George Bush's fault that about 20 percent of New Orleans neglected to follow the plan. It is not his fault that many persons in New Orleans were too confused to realize how dangerous the hurricane would be. They were certainly warned. It's not George Bush's fault that there were sick people and old people and people without cars in New Orleans. His job description does not include making sure every adult in America has a car, is in good health, has good sense, and is mobile. 7.) George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell. 8.) George Bush is the least racist President in mind and soul there has ever been and this is shown in his appointments over and over. To say otherwise is scandalously untrue. 9.) George Bush is rushing every bit of help he can to New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama as soon as he can. He is not a magician. It takes time to organize huge convoys of food and now they are starting to arrive. That they get in at all considering the lawlessness of the city is a miracle of bravery and organization. 10.) There is not the slightest evidence at all that the war in Iraq has diminished the response of the government to the emergency. To say otherwise is pure slander. 11.) If the energy the news media puts into blaming Bush for an Act of God worsened by stupendous incompetence by the New Orleans city authorities and the malevolence of the criminals of the city were directed to helping the morale of the nation, we would all be a lot better off. 12.) New Orleans is a great city with many great people. It will recover and be greater than ever. Sticking pins into an effigy of George Bush that does not resemble him in the slightest will not speed the process by one day. [ . . . ] - As Evacuees Pour In, A Flood of Generosity And Some Unease The Rev. Middlebrook Checks Volunteers' Backgrounds; A School Finds 150 Places The Wall Street Journal September 6, 2005 HOUSTON -- As pastor of Impact Houston Church of Christ, the Rev. Charlie Middlebrook is matching refugees from Hurricane Katrina with volunteers who have offered to share their homes. [. . . ] To Jerome Lyons, a New Orleans construction worker who spent five days trapped in waterlogged New Orleans, the wave of help in Houston seems more powerful than the hurricane. "All races, all colors, all express their love," he says. Mr. Lyons, who was rescued by boat from his home, says strangers have given him money on the street to help him get a new start. [ . . . ] Interviews with evacuees from New Orleans suggest that some have no intention of returning. Even a modest job in a new home may represent an improvement over what they left behind. Reco Parker, 31, a hairstylist now staying at Houston's Astrodome complex, says he's going back to New Orleans, but only long enough to try to salvage the more than $1,000 worth of hairstyling equipment he left behind. He plans to return to Houston, saying he's bowled over by Texan hospitality. "They seem like loving people here," he says, adding that he's scared of staying in New Orleans after the hurricane. One caller to Impact Houston Church of Christ was Janice Stocks, who has offered to share her three-bedroom country home with a couple from 50 to 70 years old. "It's the right thing to do," says Mrs. Stocks, whose husband is an executive with a Houston chemical company. "That could be us on the road, without a place to go." [ . . . ] Mr. Middlebrook, the Houston pastor, says virtually all callers have been as enthusiastic and sincere as Roxanne Grice, a member of the congregation who on Saturday night cooked a feast of ribs and beans for some 20 hurricane victims. "I just want to hug somebody," said Ms. Grice, stirring a huge pot of beans as she waited for her guests to arrive. The church did receive a call from one man offering to share his one-bedroom apartment with up to "four ladies." Mr. Middlebrook declined the offer. --Roger Thurow and Gary McWilliams contributed to this article. Survivors' Stories September 7, 2005 The Wall Street Journal Raymond and Katrina Delmar 1659 Sere St. The Delmars share a two-story home on a middle-class block in the Gentilly area with Mr. Delmar's parents, Gloria and Bertrand Delmar. At 5 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, after two days of begging and pleading with the elderly couple to leave, Raymond and Katrina decided to leave without them. The elderly couple had lived through Hurricane Betsy and decided they could live through this storm too. Mr. and Ms. Delmar seriously considered drugging the elderly couple and hauling them with them. "We would have had to sedate them. We could have given them an overdose of Nyquil," says. Ms. Delmar. "We would have done parent abuse. We couldn't have taken them." Ms. Delmar went to Baton Rouge to stay with friends. They talked to the elderly couple at 8 a.m. Monday, as the storm was hitting. The couple reported a little wind that blew off the gutter. That's the last time the parents were heard from. Mr. and Ms. Delmar were at CC's Coffee House on Saturday night in suburban Baton Rouge making frantic phone calls to hospitals and shelters and scanning blogs and Web sites to try to locate them. They heard that Lake Area Middle School, near their home, was under water. They saw an image of the Rite-Aid nearby on television and only the top of the tall sign was visible. They fear the worst for their parents. * * * Armando Amador 1520 Caton St. Mr. Amador says he was in chest-high water on the second floor and wrote three notes that he showed out the window. "Please help us," then "Please save us," then "No food or water." He wrote all on manila envelopes and eventually was picked up by a family of four in their own boat. He says rescue boats passed him by a dozen times. * * * Wilfred Gause 2440 Verbena St. After retreating to his attic, Mr. Gause on Tuesday broke a second-story window and dropped down to free his boat, a 16-foot Boston Whaler. Miraculously, the boat started, and he set out to rescue his brother, a diabetic who lived across the street and had survived the storm clinging to the door of his house. Crossing the street, which was under some 13 feet of water, Mr. Gause pulled his brother to safety. Then Mr. Gause saved many more. "We picked up about 30 people all over the city," he says. He saw "six or seven bloated, floating bodies," he adds. * * * Albert Johnson 2125 St. Anthony St. He says he and his son Louis had four feet of water inside their home. They were stranded for two days at home and two on I-10 before being taken to the convention center. "We ate the food the looters stole. Not all of the looters were bad." They saw three dead bodies, one at Circle Food Store on St. Bernard and Claiborne. People had to move the body to get in and out of the store. Another was on the offramp at I-10 and Elysian Fields Ave. A third woman died while sleeping on I-10. On St. Anthony, a boat came to get them. He doesn't think anyone else was stranded that he knew of. He wants to go to Houston now, where he has three sisters. "It's our fault we didn't evacuate. We didn't heed the warning." * * * Lloyd Dyson 2211 Mandeville St. Mr. Dyson noticed the water rising quickly around 6:30 a.m. on Monday. By 5 p.m., he thought the water had risen to eight feet. That was when a police boat rescued him and family members from the second level of his house. The boat carried him, his family members and three others down the street to a safer location. As he evacuated his neighborhood, he noticed people in trees and on roofs trying to escape the rising water. * * * Cedra Washington, 41 2136 Reynes St. Ms. Washington and seven family members were trapped in a three-story house. A medical assistant and nursing student, she says she didn't have the money or the means to leave. Even if they could get out, she refused to leave her grandmother behind. Ms. Washington went to retrieve the 300-pound woman from a nursing home on Sunday afternoon, using the city's light para-transit system for the handicapped. She awoke Monday to find the first floor submerged. An hour and a half later it had risen to the second floor, where she and her relatives had huddled. All eight of them, six adults and two children, struggled to carry her grandmother to the third floor. "The water came so fast there was no time to do anything," she says. "It was up to our beds." Late Monday some people from the neighborhood with a boat came by. They only had room for one and Ms. Washington's sister got on. She hasn't seen her since. They remained on the house's third floor until Tuesday afternoon when a boat from the Wildlife and Fisheries Department, which was going house to house looking for survivors, rescued them. The boat deposited them at the St. Claude Bridge. An Army truck carried them to the Superdome. "The beginning of our hell." Ms. Washington eventually made it to the Dallas Convention Center. She says she plans to stay in Dallas. "This is now home." * * * Kenya Green 5131 Bundy Road Ms. Green was stranded in a second-floor apartment, then got a ride on a boat from a neighbor to a bridge on the Chef Menteur Highway. She tipped the neighbor $10 for his trouble. She says water at her apartment was five feet deep, and there were 50 people stranded in a nearby apartment complex. New Orleans police were there trying to rescue people. She arrived at the convention center Wednesday night, which she says was one of the few spots on dry ground. She says she worried for her life at the convention center. * * * Lawrence Paul Menant and his two children 2320 Fazzio Road, Chalmette The power went out at 5 a.m., and before Mr. Menant had a chance to make breakfast, the water started rising. "It came up that quick," he says, snapping his fingers. His son looked out the window and cried for him. The water was moving so quickly that there were white caps, he says. Water starting seeping through the cracks in the door. The patio blew off the house. "Then I knew we had to get out of there," he said. The water came up to nine feet. He saw a man trying to hang on to a telephone wire, but the water pushed the man off and carried him to the highway, Mr. Menant says. He and his children climbed out of an upper window and swam across the street to a two-story apartment building, where they waited on the second floor until they were rescued by boat on Wednesday. The Menants are at a large Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge. Mr. Menant is relieved to have been saved, but uncomfortable being at a shelter. "See that line over there?" he says, pointing to a line of people waiting for disbursements of clothes, food and other necessities. "We don't do that." He and his family went to the Salvation Army instead of taking clothes from the shelter. * * * Daniel Eaton, 44 Chalmette Medical Center 9001 Patricia St., Chalmette Before the storm, Mr. Eaton had been staying day and night at Chalmette Medical Center with his mother. She was on a respirator and had a feeding tube because she was chronically ill with emphysema, bronchitis and high blood pressure. As Chalmette flooded, so did the medical center. When the water started to rise, he and the other people who could walk or carry patients had to evacuate. His mother was too sick to move. He was evacuated by boat from the roof of the medical center and taken to a ferry stop then by bus to the River Center in Baton Rouge. Mr. Eaton, sobbing on the lawn outside the River Center, says that he had to leave her to die. His children, Brandy, 14, and Daniel Jr., 12, stayed at home on Jennie Drive, two towns to the south. Perhaps they went with a neighbor when the water started to rise, but Mr. Eaton doubts it. "I lost my mom, I had to leave her. I lost two kids, they drowned. I lost my car, my house. I got no clothes, I got money in the bank but I can't get to it. I got nothing." - Jim Geraghty NRO Contributor September 07, 2005 We Failed You? Try Again. Anne Rice blames America, not local officials. "To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs." - novelist and New Orleans resident Anne Rice. Let me get this straight. Ms. Rice, you live in (what was) a very attractive city which lies below sea level. On one side you have a giant lake; on the other side you have the Gulf of Mexico. Running through the middle is the Mississippi River. All of which are above you. Preventing those giant bodies of water from flooding and drowning you are levees. These levees are described as "century-old." People have been warning about the devastating effects of a direct hit from a hurricane for decades. I've heard a great deal of complaint in recent days that the federal government may not have allocated enough money to speed up the upgrades to those levees. This does, however, raise the question of why city and state residents were waiting around for the federal government to send enough money to upgrade this, instead of paying for it themselves. I mean, it was only your homes, businesses, and lives at stake. Perhaps these upgrades would have been expensive. If only this city had some sort of events to attract tourists, from which to collect taxes. Anyway, your state and local officials decided to spend your tax dollars on something else that they (and presumably you) found more important, and then they waited for the rest of the country to pay for these life-preserving necessities. Your beloved city and region has a colorful political history, in which there is, oh, a wee bit of corruption. I'm from New Jersey, so I can't throw stones at that glass house. But you guys have managed to pick leaders who give you the worst of both worlds - they're scandal ridden and incompetent in a crisis. Look, Rudy Giuliani might have run around with Judith Nathan before his divorce, but he was a hell of a leader in our darkest hours. You know the National Review crowd isn't a fan of Pataki, but the man was a rock after 9/11 compared to Governor Weepy I'll-Evacuate-Eventually and Mayor It's-Everybody's-Fault-Except-Mine. Nobody's throwing around the adjective "Churchillian" about any of your officials these days. We didn't pick your local officials; you guys did. Rice asks, "how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid?" Ahem. What about those buses left unused, less than a mile from the Superdome? JunkYardBlog notes that it's written in the Southeast Louisiana Evacuation Plan that buses are supposed to be used for evacuation of those who don't have personal vehicles. As JYB observes, "there is something very peculiar about a city and a state that have a plan on the books for years that outlines what to do when a hurricane is about to strike, yet when a hurricane comes roaring in, the responsible officials just chuck the plan and try winging it. Delaying and then winging it in the face of a monstrous Cat 4/5 hurricane is never, ever a good idea, especially for New Orleans." Ironically, Nagin told CNN, "I need buses, man," when he had plenty sitting around unused before the storm hit. Now they're flooded and useless. But it's not like state and local officials could have seen this coming. They have never had a hurricane bearing down on them before and, oh, wait, there was Hurricane Ivan just last year. And after that dodged bullet, Blanco and Nagin both acknowledged they needed a better evacuation plan. I would note that we've seen some pretty intense disasters in other parts of the country, like planes crashing into skyscrapers and subsequently collapsing, earthquakes, tornadoes, blizzards, and yet somehow, none of these disasters had the total breakdown of law and order, civil society, etc. Jonah Goldberg's early joke about a Mad- Max style post-apocalyptic tribal anarchy may have been in poor taste, but it has turned out to be nightmarishly prescient. We failed you? No, oh brilliant creator of Exit to Eden, you failed. You might not think of it this way, but: Your leaders failed to upgrade the levees. You elected a bunch of weepers and blame- shifters who lost their head in a crisis. Over the past decades, your elected officials have let a criminal element incubate and grow until they ruled the streets, instead of the forces of law and order. In pop culture, a New Orleans thief is always a charming rogue with a devilish smile. In reality, they're a bunch of thugs. If the number of residents who are looting thugs were such a "tiny minority," we wouldn't have seen this widespread, relentless anarchy. Madam, a noticeable number of your neighbors saw this disaster as an opportunity to smash a window and run away with a television, an act that reveals much about the inadequacies of the local school system, since that thief won't be enjoying that television with any electricity anytime soon. I would also note that this is one hell of a police force your local officials hired and that you and your neighbors tolerated. 50 percent turned in their badges during the crisis and quit. Your police superintendent is conceding that some cops were looting. Just want to refresh your memory - four years ago, New York and Washington, planes falling out of the sky, thousands dead, no idea what the hell is coming next. and the cops, among others, showed up to work. To save you guys now, I - and a lot of other Americans - will pitch in. We are witnessing the biggest mobilization of civilian and military rescue and relief crews in history. But I have a sneaking suspicion you're going to want the rest of us to pay for the rebuilding of your city. (In the near future, we're going to have to have a little chat about the wisdom of building below sea level, directly next to large bodies of water.) And if you're going to come to the rest of us hat in hand, demanding the rest of us clean up after your poor judgment, I'd appreciate a little less "you failed us" and a little more "we've learned our lesson." -Jim Geraghty is reporting from Ankara, Turkey, where the locals keep asking him how something like this could happen in America. http://www.nationalreview.com/geraghty/geraghty200509070826.asp For auto mechanic Roy Mullet, who lived on Meraux Lane, where the streets fade into the marshes stretching toward Lake Borgne, the flood kicked off a furious and lonely fight to survive. His struggle, and that of his extended family and neighbors, was capped by an unexpected and critical act of charity. [ . . . ] To the north, water poured through black and Vietnamese neighborhoods closer to Lake Pontchartrain, where another 96,000 people lived. Like Mr. Mullet and his family, large numbers of people in these areas had not evacuated. Some families didn't think it was necessary to heed an order from Mayor Nagin to leave before Katrina arrived. Many others, particularly older people or the poorest residents without transportation or cash for hotels, say they couldn't comply. Other residents here adamantly refused to take shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, where crowds had become unruly during previous hurricanes. "There was going to be thousands of people in there, and I knew that was going to be a problem," said Ernest DeJean, a 52-year-old carpenter who hunkered down in his brother's house on the western side of the Industrial Canal. They locked the wooden shutters tight and filled the bathtub and bathroom sink with water for drinking. 'A Few Inches' Sometime after 7 a.m. that Monday, Mr. Mullet, 55 years old, was on the phone with a friend. A steady rain fell on Meraux Lane as Katrina whipped across the city's eastern districts and suburbs. The eye of the storm had hit the coast about an hour earlier. How much water had collected on the street, the caller asked. Mr. Mullet looked out the window and replied: "A few inches." Less than 10 miles northwest of Mr. Mullet's house, Stanley P. Stewart, a 49-year-old mechanic living on Tricou Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, also watched the rain come down. His house sat close to the Mississippi River, on higher ground, and he had lived through floods such as the legendary Hurricanes Betsy and Camille in the 1960s. With him were 13 family members ranging in age from 4 to 71. "Where was I going to go?" Mr. Stewart said later. "I'd like to ask the mayor how you take 14 people with no finances and book them in a hotel. It's not that we didn't leave. It's that we couldn't leave." Many Lower Ninth Ward residents say that about 7 a.m., as the storm neared its peak, they heard a loud noise, possibly a transformer blowing, possibly the generators failing at the nearby Florida Avenue pumping station, a key element of the system keeping water out of that part of town. Whatever happened, residents noticed the water rising dramatically. "You didn't have five minutes to get anything," Mr. Stewart says. "My brother was outside in about two feet of water, and he was about 25 to 30 feet from me. By the time he got back to the house, we have seven or 10 feet of water, and I'm trying to get everyone up to the second floor. This was not from the rain. I knew there had to be a breakage in the canal." In the back of the Lower Ninth Ward lived Cheryl Denise Thomas, a substitute teacher for St. Bernard Parish schools. She opened the front door of her second-floor apartment on Delery Street just after 7:30 a.m. and saw water about to top a 13-foot-high iron gate. Her mother had come to the house the day before, begging Ms. Thomas to leave with her. She refused because she didn't think the storm would be a big deal. Her mother waited in the car for 45 minutes before giving up. Now she knew her mother had been right. In the time it took to grab a towel, toothbrush and cellphone, water was coming through the closet in her bedroom. "I thought the roof was leaking," says Ms. Thomas. Instead, she found water surging up from the flooded apartment below. Ms. Thomas, a heavyset 41-year-old, climbed on top of the dresser in her bedroom, praying the waters would stop rising. In Meraux, Mr. Mullet looked out the window again, about an hour after telling his friend that a few inches of water had collected. He saw his Jeep floating down the street. Mr. Mullet, a large man with a bulky frame, opened the front door. Four feet of water rushed into the home. He turned to his son John, 25, and yelled: "Get out!" The two men rushed out the side door and hurried to John's small skiff parked beside the house. Within five minutes, water was at the eaves of the house, Mr. Mullet recalls. They struggled to control the boat as powerful currents driven by winds over 100 miles per hour threatened to carry them down the street. Meraux Lane, the closest street to the marsh leading to Lake Borgne, had become a sea with 6-foot waves. Unable to control the boat, the Mullets grabbed on to a neighbor's roof and held on. The rain felt like tiny bullets. Roy Mullet gripped the roof so tightly that he began to bleed from a long abrasion on one finger. "All I kept thinking about was my son. Several times I looked at him and thought we were goners," Mr. Mullet said later. Nearby, Mr. Mullet's cousin Louis was giving refuge to Louis's mother and two aunts. The water rushed into the house so quickly that there was no time to reach the attic. They began swimming frantically for high ground. When the group pulled themselves out of the water into a cluster of trees, they realized one aunt, 65-year-old Peewee Minock had disappeared. A few houses away, Yockey Patcheco, 60, a retired ship-boiler maker, and four family members were startled by the sound of a loud crash outside. They looked out to see that a neighbor's car had just slammed into their home, carried by the force of the wave rising from Lake Borgne. Suddenly, water was gushing through gaps in the door. They pushed a few items, including a chain saw, into the attic of the one-story house and clambered up one by one: his 81-year-old mother, two sisters and Steven Battaglia, Mr. Patcheco's nephew. The water kept rising. The clan tried to saw through the roof in case the attic began to flood but the saw's chain broke on nails. They turned to a small ax and finally chopped through. By 9 a.m., less than an hour after the storm had peaked, tens of thousands of homes across the eastern areas and suburbs of New Orleans had been filled with water, trapping anyone unable to escape. Witnesses said houses lifted from their foundations skitted around town, turning orderly neighborhoods into an unrecognizable jumble of rooftops and chimneys. [ . . .] As the wind slowed, shortly after noon, Steven Battaglia, 19, poked his head through the hole in the Patcheco roof to take a look at Meraux. He saw a flash of brilliant blue sky during a pause between the leading edge of the storm and its tailing end. The neighborhood was awash in water, debris and, fortuitously for those still alive, boats. Mr. Battaglia could see a neighbor named Bobby Newman coming down the street with several friends in a tiny boat. They climbed on board, altogether packing 11 people and three dogs into a 16-foot boat, and then continued moving down the street to check on friends. Struggled to manage the current, the group tied the boat to a clump of trees and waited for the storm to pass. Mr. Mullet and his son took advantage of the lull in the wind to bail out several inches of water from their sinking 21-foot skiff and break into a neighbor's attic. It was nearly two hours later, more than four hours after the flood had hit, that the storm finally died down, and the residents of Meraux Lane sat dazed and exhausted. They didn't know surviving Katrina's landfall was the easy part of their ordeal. Roy Mullet and his son John, a deckhand, set out in their boat through a stand of pine trees choked with debris to check on their cousin and aunts not far away. They picked up Louis Mullet, Roy's cousin, who was jumping from roof to roof. A short distance away, they found Aunt Peewee Minock's body trapped, caught in the trash on the water's surface. She wore a life jacket. As the men tried to pull her body free, water moccasin snakes slithered out of her clothes and all over her body. "We left her on a neighbor's roof," Roy Mullet said later, pausing to compose himself. "We tied her to the roof." Three miles to the west, the Lower Ninth Ward was an otherworldly scene of suffering and despair. In every direction, soaked families clung to roof tops. Wails and screams emanated from the vents under attic eaves. Animal carcasses and storm debris floated between houses. There was water to the horizon in each direction and no way to be certain how far it might extend. Sirens sounded in the distance. In the middle of the afternoon, Ms. Thomas, the substitute teacher, began to hear boats pass through the neighborhood, probably Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries agents who had set sail in an armada of flat-bottomed boats late Monday afternoon. But she was terrified to walk to the window. Water had filled the first floor and risen to a height of 3 feet in her second-floor bedroom. Floorboards had buckled. She was concerned she might fall through. Ms. Thomas can't swim. As a calm night sky thrust a devastated city into total darkness, the sound of boat motors died, replaced by pleas for help. Ms. Thomas was left atop her dresser, with no food or water. The next morning, wildlife agents put more than 130 boats in the water from a staging area near a bridge across the Industrial Canal. Over the next day, rescuers pulled more than 1,000 people out of the Lower Ninth Ward, picking up the 14 people in Mr. Stewart's house after pulling up to a second-floor bedroom. They coaxed Ms. Thomas off her dresser at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday. "They told me to jump, but I'm too heavy." She made a stretch toward the boat but nearly capsized it, sending herself and an agent into the water. A hand pulled her into the boat. Her glasses were still on but the right lens had popped free. Though they were safe, the ordeal for the residents wasn't over. Mr. Stewart says they were left on St. Claude Avenue, at the impromptu boat launch, unsure how to reach food, water or shelter. They feared going to the Superdome because of the mayhem they were starting to hear about. As Tuesday progressed, the buses stopped coming. Late that night, an unexpected deliverance arrived. Someone had stolen a city bus and driven it through the only dry approach to the St. Claude Avenue bridge. Roughly 40 people jumped on as it made its way to the New Orleans Convention Center. There, however, they found a hellish, fetid scene and opted to camp outside on nearby Julia Street. By the end of the week, the Lower Ninth Ward bus passengers had made it to refugee centers outside the city. Three Boats, 19 People As Katrina faded, Mr. Newman gathered his relatives and the Patcheco clan into the boat they grabbed during the storm, unsure if anything nearby was above water. They floated to a nearby home, broke in and took clothing. As darkness fell, they navigated by the memory of the rooflines of buildings along Judge Perez Drive. They heard people trying to break out of their attics and took in several stranded victims, including one man who was floating in a refrigerator with his dog. About noon on Tuesday, they met up with other neighbors in boats and formed a small convoy. A total of 19 people and six dogs in three boats, they caravanned down a bayou heading for a dock where a friend of Mr. Mullet's kept an oyster boat. He knew it would be big enough to hold them all. Along the way, people begged to be taken from their rooftops. "It was a horrible thing, but we couldn't help," Mr. Newman says. "We were packed on our boats already." Some of the men in the group foraged for food and water and gas. "We survived on chips, tuna and sardines," Mr. Newman recalls. They siphoned fuel from adrift boats. [. . . ] --- More information at: http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/ Why Levee Breaches In New Orleans Were Late-Breaking News By JOE HAGAN and JOSEPH T. HALLINAN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL September 12, 2005 On Sunday, Sept. 4, Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain President Bush's statement that the government couldn't have anticipated breaches in levees in New Orleans. Mr. Chertoff talked about news coverage. "Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers, and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet,' " he said. "Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse. It was on Tuesday that the levee -- may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday -- that the levee started to break." But now it is known that major levee breaks occurred much earlier than that, starting in the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Even as the storm veered off and many observers felt a sense of relief, the Industrial Canal levee in eastern New Orleans was giving way, and a rush of water swiftly submerged much of the Lower Ninth Ward and areas nearby, trapping thousands of people on rooftops and in attics. The 17th Street Canal levee also was breached early Monday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now believes, resulting in a slower-rising flood over a larger area. Yet it wasn't until Tuesday that most people across the country, apparently including Mr. Chertoff, realized that any levees at all had been breached. Did media outlets get it wrong, as Mr. Chertoff claimed? Some did, some didn't. A look at news reports of the events of Aug. 29 paints a picture of confusion, miscommunication and conflicting information among some government officials and news media. Several major news outlets, including Viacom Inc.'s CBS network and National Public Radio reported the breaking of the Industrial Canal and flooding on Monday, although not all of the reports acknowledged the extent of the devastation. The Wall Street Journal reported the Industrial Canal breach but no others. The New Orleans office of the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 8:14 a.m. Monday, saying "a levee breach occurred along the industrial canal at Tennessee Street. 3 to 8 feet of water is expected due to the breach." The media largely ignored it. The NWS's source of information was ham-radio transmissions by the Orleans Levee Board, a city-state agency. The 8:14 warning was the last one the local office issued before its communications were cut off. The statement was repeated only once more, at 10:52 a.m., by the National Weather Service office in Mobile, Ala. Yet some government officials certainly appeared aware of a breach and said so on network television. At 7:33 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, Gov. Kathleen B. Blanco said on NBC, "I believe the water has breached the levee system, and is -- is coming in." In its Aug. 29 online edition, the New Orleans Times-Picayune first reported a breach in the 17th Street Canal levee at 2 p.m., citing City Hall officials. No other major news outlets picked up that report. The newspaper's Web site also reported massive flooding near the Industrial Canal, writing that city officials "fielded at least 100 calls from people in distress in the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans." At about 2:30, it reported that the Industrial Canal had been breached, citing a National Weather Service report. But in the hours immediately following the storm, some news organizations seemed to play down the damage in New Orleans. Introducing "World News Tonight" on Aug. 29, anchor Charles Gibson said: "In New Orleans, entire neighborhoods are underwater, but the levees held. The nightmare scenario of an entire city underwater did not happen." A spokeswoman for ABC, a unit of Walt Disney Co., had no comment. Officials with the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers said last week that one canal breach came to the attention of corps personnel early Monday, Aug. 29 and another by midday. But the "fog of war" and "massive logistical problems with communications in the hours after the storm hit" created some confusion, said John Rickey, a spokesman for the corps. No major newspaper printed a headline that literally said New Orleans "dodged a bullet," as Mr. Chertoff claimed. But some did say the city had escaped a direct hit -- which was true, but misleading --while others focused on the levees along the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, it was the levees along canals extending south from Lake Pontchartrain that gave way. "But the city managed to avoid the worst of the worst," read a front-page Washington Post article on Tuesday. "The Mississippi River did not breach New Orleans's famed levees to any serious degree, at least in part because Katrina veered 15 miles eastward of its predicted track just before landfall." Leonard Downie Jr., the Washington Post's executive editor, says the paper's reporting was hampered by communications problems caused by the hurricane. "Unfortunately, where our communication was good was where it wasn't flooding," he says. "All the media were hampered by the fact that people on the ground didn't know what happened." In the 5 p.m. news report on Fox News Channel, anchor Shepard Smith informed viewers of "late word" that the levees had held. But a few minutes later, in the same program, a public-health expert told the channel the exact opposite: "Well, the National Weather Service are reporting that one of the levees was breached. ... People have been forced out onto the roofs of their homes." Why the confusion? A Fox News spokeswoman says Mr. Smith was referring to levees near his "physical location," which was Bourbon Street in the French Quarter -- that is, levees on the Mississippi. Many reporters, working on foot, isolated in higher, drier sections and focused on the survival of the city's tourist districts, were unaware of the unfolding disaster in poor neighborhoods of New Orleans. It wasn't until Monday evening that a private helicopter company, Helinet Helicopter Services of Los Angeles, began feeding the first aerial images of New Orleans to Fox News, ABC, NBC, CNN and CBS. By early Tuesday morning, most major media had become aware of the awful extent of the destruction. [ . . . ] Some National Weather Service statements on Aug. 29 described levees in the Orleans and St. Bernard parishes as "overtopped." On its Aug. 29 "World News Tonight" broadcast, ABC News showed a computer-generated model of water pouring over a levee, but not breaking it. The wind-lashed correspondent in New Orleans, Jeffrey Kaufman, said, "It was simply the volume of rain that left many areas under water. ... This was not the apocalyptic hurricane that many had feared." What Are the Lessons of Katrina? By GEORGE MELLOAN September 13, 2005 The Wall Street Journal In answer to the question above, there are many lessons, but because of bureaucratic realities, most will not be applied to the disasters of the future. Yet here are a few for what they might be worth: First, the blame game is missing the mark. George W. Bush is being accused by his natural enemies of everything from being asleep on the job to racism. But his real error came long before Katrina, when he and Congress created a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to 9/11. After a disaster, politicians want to "do something." Striking back at U.S. enemies was essential and Mr. Bush did that against al Qaeda with the enthusiastic approval of Congress, launching the war that continues today with considerably less support. The DHS also had overwhelming congressional approval, but was based on a flawed concept. Creating a bigger bureaucracy to deal with the failures of two existing bureaucracies -- the FBI and the CIA -- was simply giving free rein to Beltway gluttony. The DHS has spent many billions, but when a hurricane equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction struck, the DHS was too cumbersome to respond quickly. That leads to lesson No. 2: If an agency is meant to cope with emergencies, don't put lawyers in charge. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff is an admirable man but former federal judges aren't trained for quick executive action. To his credit, he recovered from early fumbles by pulling fellow lawyer Michael Brown out of the front line in Louisiana and replacing him with a military man, Vice Adm. Thad Allen. Sen. Trent Lott of hurricane-ravaged Mississippi was referring to Mr. Brown's missteps as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he said: "Pencil pushers make lousy crisis managers. Michael Brown has been acting like a private instead of a general." In Mr. Brown's defense, lawyers are conditioned by training and experience to read all the rules first before taking decisive action, so the administration that hired him is at fault. Which brings up lesson three: There sure are a lot of rules. Laws and regulations are mass-produced by regulatory agencies and all the various levels of government. In an emergency, the first response by government bureaucrats is to look at the rule book to find out what they are allowed to do. Time was wasted after Katrina struck. Some of those limitations were built into the Constitution's limits on federal powers. President Bush could not nationalize the Louisiana National Guard without the consent of Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, which was not immediately forthcoming. The Northern Command of the U.S. Army, set up specifically for homeland defense three years ago, also was prevented from acting immediately because the Posse Comitatus Act (circa 1878) bars the army from conducting police activities on U.S. soil without a waiver. The best army in the world was ready, with equipment and men in place, but was left waiting for orders. On to lesson four: In the U.S. federal system, state and local governments are the first line of defense, simply because the first responders -- police, firemen, emergency medical services -- report to mayors and governors. When Katrina hit, New Orleans first responders were not up to the challenge. One-third of the police force deserted, leaving the streets to looters and felons, one reason householders and business owners were reluctant to flee the rising waters. Mayor C. Ray Nagin panicked, leaving the city's fleet of buses sitting in the flood's path instead of using them for evacuation. He neglected to provide the thousands who fled to the Superdome and convention center with adequate police protection and supplies. Acting more the private than the general in Trent Lott's terms, Mayor Nagin instead raged to the TV cameras about the lack of federal help -- as if the feds were supposed to do his job. You're only as good as your first responders: New York rose to the occasion after 9/11; after Katrina, New Orleans didn't. Lesson five is that the media play a central role. They and the national weather services did a great job of warning Gulf Coast residents that a big one was coming, enabling a million to flee. They were at their best, as usual, covering the suffering and destruction. But then they became involved in the political debate, as Republicans and Democrats tried to outdo each other in assigning blame, with often spurious charges. Mayor Nagin's wild estimate of 10,000 deaths was broadcast world-wide. The death toll for all the Gulf Coast, when fully tallied, may be well below 1,000, judging from the numbers counted so far. The media have a natural tendency to make a big story sound even bigger than it is. Politicians and bureaucrats know that the bigger the disaster, the more money is likely to be showered on them. They are being proved right by the $60 billion in federal aid envisioned so far. But there is a good side. Katrina was indeed a huge tragedy for the many thousands of people who were displaced and whose homes in many cases are no longer there or uninhabitable. Global media coverage arouses global compassion. Governments around the world are offering help, reciprocating for the massive U.S. effort during the Asian tsunami. NATO commanders agreed in an emergency meeting to provide ships and planes to help deliver aid to the victims. The private sector came up with the quickest responses. Drug companies sent medicine. Wal-Mart is pitching into the reconstruction effort. Families in cities near and far are taking refugees into their homes. Money and gifts are pouring in from non-governmental organizations in the U.S. and abroad. Individual acts of heroism by helicopter crews and other volunteers who helped pull people off the roofs of flooded homes are too numerous to count. So that brings lesson number six: While America's critics cry shame about the less-than-adequate governmental response to the needs of a poor and predominantly black community, Americans acting on their own are picking up the slack. That kind of individual initiative is what has made the U.S. a great country. end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos |

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