Katrina and NOLA flood Politics...

[CptSternn]

The term 'hubris' comes to mind when I read this, along with 'inept'.


Scant offered intl. aid helped Katrina victims-WPost

http://news.**********/s/nm/usa_hurr...UWvVMYe4XMWM0F

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Just $40 million of $854 million offered to the United States to help the Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Katrina has been used so far, and most of the offered aid was never collected, the Washington Post reported in Sunday's editions.

Key supplies and services such as mobile telephone systems, medicines and cruise ships to house victims were delayed or refused because the U.S. government could not handle them, the newspaper said.

The 2005 disaster so far has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion, and complaints continue about the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans, which was devastated by floods.

The public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington amassed more than 10,000 pages of documents from U.S. diplomats around the world that have been released intermittently since last fall under the Freedom of Information Act, and made them available to the Post, the newspaper said.

It cited an exchange of documents in which State Department officials worried over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medical supplies had been left to spoil and were destroyed.

"Tell them we blew it," one official wrote, according to the newspaper. But then she added: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

U.S. officials turned down numerous offers of troops and search and rescue teams, even as New Orleans residents waited to be rescued from rooftops, the newspaper said.

The United States declined 54 of 77 recorded offers of aid from three of its closest allies -- Canada, Britain and
Israel -- according to a State Department table, the newspaper said.

"There is a lack of accountability in where the money comes in and where it goes," the newspaper quoted Melanie Sloan, executive director of the public interest group, as saying.

"It's clear that they're trying to hide their ineptitude, incompetence and malfeasance," she said, according to the Post.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in a statement the U.S. government appreciated support from around the world and that Katrina had proved to be "a unique event in many ways," the Post said.

"As we continue our planning for the future, we will draw on the lessons learned from this experience to ensure that we make the best use of any possible foreign assistance that might be offered," it quoted Casey as saying.

[ArtificialOne]

Still, everyone wants to blame Bush and not the decades of corrupt and incompetent local government of LA.

If they would have listened to other representitives when they were told to evacuate the city less people would have died.

But, of course people like stern who don't look at the entire issue will blame it Bush and anyone not a lefty.

The people of New Orleans re-elected the incompetent mayor and others. Hurray for them. Way to fix a problem.

And before anyone says anything. I lived in Bellchase, LA for 4 yrs in the late 80's and still have family and friends in the area.

[CptSternn]

I would argue that yes, in some part you are right - there was local officials whose actions also led to the catastrophe, but that being said, the responsibility goes all the way to the top on this - bush was warned, lots of federal mistakes were made which made the lower officials mistakes almost unnoticeable

I mean, if a office in a building catches fire and a few rooms are burned because the local office manager for that company doesn't know what to do, well, thats their fault. However if you can't tell exactly what happened in that office because the building management let all 40 floors burn to the ground, who is more responsible?

[ArtificialOne]

Um... Let's see...

Bush and oh... I don't know how many others warned the mayor he better evacuate the day before it hit. Also Katrina wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the land developers didn't line the pockets of the local polies to drain the wetlands south of New orleans for the last decade or two. The wetlands helped protect New Orleans.

Hate to rain on your parade stern, but local officials are the first responders in this country. Everthing they do before and directly after a disaster is key to how well it's handled. The feds move in later to help afterwards, whether that's hours, days or weeks. Granted the feds did a poor job. But, LA has been a mess for nearly a century. Unfortunately people like you and others who politicise this topic to bash bush and the reps don't want to admit that it was a century of dems and liberal rule that did New Orleans in.

Here's an example: "Hundreds of perfectly good school busses sit empty when they could have been used to evacuate people." Who's fault. Not Bushes, the mayor of NO. But who gets the blame? Bush.

[CptSternn]

If a company goes under, you don't blame the local office manager - you blame the CEO.

Also, as far as resources go - your saying the mayor of a city as the resources available to take on a 3 state disaster? I don't think so. Furthermore, I have never heard of ANY mayor having the power to call for evacuation of a three state area.

The mayor wasn't the one with NOLA and other organisations calling him days before warning him of the pending tragedy.

[ArtificialOne]

Hm... must of hit a nerve when mentioning that "some" people are just using this to bash Bush.

Other areas got the message and left. New Orleans didn't. It was clearly the mayors fault, as he was first in line. If he would have listened to the dozen or so people who told him to close down and evacute the city the day before (Like Pres Bush told him) there wouldn't have been a Superdome etc..

Funny how you didn't also address the Wetlands issue. Also how you haven't mention the fact many areas south of NO like Bell Chase, LA and Gulfport, MIssissipi were evacuated a day to a couple of days before and had much less casualities.

The blame lies clearly on the first responders. Which are the mayor and his crew, even the governer of LA for not ordering the mayor to evacuate when all the US was telling them to do so even the Pres.

You like to bash Bush and anyone who supports that side. Which is making you blind to the real cause of the problem. Bush didn't make them drain the wetlands to build suburbs. Bush didn't force the mayor not to evacuate, Bush didn't ignore dozens of people including a president to evacuate the day before. Bush didn't continually ignore the levy problems and fail to investigate corrupt politicians that led to a degredation of cities infrastructure. Which would have helped greatly in preventing 80% of the death and damages caused.

Yes, the feds were slow in responding. But that being said. If a drunk crashes their car, you blame the drunk, not the cops responding. Even if they were slow in responding. Why, because the drunk caused the crash to begin with.

Hope you can understand that one.

[ArtificialOne]

Oh, and before anyone becomes a smartass. I'm not saying the mayor and his people caused Katrina. Just that their incompetence caused a great deal of suffering and made a bad thing much worse.

[CptSternn]

Big Insurers Win Ruling On Katrina Levee Break

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080201162.html

Hurricane Katrina victims whose homes and businesses were destroyed after floodwaters breached levees in the 2005 storm cannot recover money from their insurance companies for the damage, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

The case could affect thousands of residents and business owners in Louisiana who are attempting to rebuild. Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist at the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute in New York, said in June that a ruling against the industry could have cost insurers $1 billion.


Worth the read. The government paid billions to the insurance companies to help cover the costs, the insurance companies then turned around and still didn't pay out on the policies, and kept the government money.

Why? Because the policy covers 'act of God' but not water damage. Since this was an 'act of God', but had water damage, it is not covered because 'act of God' is subjective and water damage is listed verbatim on the policies.

They are arguing that the water clause trumps the 'act of God' clause.

In the end, thousands now will get nothing on their home owners polices which they paid on for decades even though their homes are demolished.

Go American capitalism.

[CptSternn]

One Billion Dollars Later, New Orleans Is Still at Risk

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/us...syahoo&emc=rss

Six inches.

After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.

Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.

By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.

“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”

New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina; now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little. New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.

The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.

The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city.

And its most successful work, building enormous floodgates to cut off the fingerlike canals that brought so much flooding into the city, had a divisive effect. The gates now protect prosperous neighborhoods like Lakeview, and though corps officials say there has been no favoritism, the effect has been to draw out old resentments and conspiracy theories in a city that never lacked for them.

The whole article is too big to fit here, so check it out.

Basically, after all those BILLIONS spent, New Orelans is only protected if the flood waters stay below six inches. Any more than that and the city will flood again when faced with the same conditions.

Oh, with the exception of the well-to-do ritzy neighborhoods, which now have flood walls, pumps, and other things installed to keep the rich areas from flooding. Everyone else will have to wait until at least 2011 until they can work on a solution for protecting the 'commoners'.

...but it's not a conspiracy, it just somehow worked out that all the upper class neighborhoods got the best protection and the rest of the people didn't. Odd how that seems to happen isn't it?

Reminds me of 14th century Europe, with the royalty having their homes built inside the castle walls and the peasants living in thatched huts outside the walls, open to attack by enemies.