Tag: Hurricane Katrina

The Houston Chronicle reported today that Hurricane Katrina refugees at the overcrowded Reliant Astrodome were refusing to relocate to two Carnival Cruise Lines ships docked at Houston. As a result, FEMA officials decided to delay the relocation effort.

How do they decide who gets to go to the cruise ships? People over 60 get first dibs, followed by single parents with children, followed by two-parent families. The feds are making noise about setting up schools on board the ships, no doubt to indoctrinate the hapless children in compassionate conservatism.

But why wouldn’t folks prefer to move into a private stateroom, complete with bathroom and television, rather than stay at the noisy, crowded stadium shelter?

Some say it’s just too soon to uproot and relocate again, that they need to feel more settled before taking a next step. Others are weighing their options or trying to find missing relatives.

I have my own theory — I think that, as long as they are in a shelter, it’s a short-term situation, and there’s the sense that they will be going home sometime soon. The cruise ships, on the other hand, represent a long-term situation of perhaps six months, maybe more.

Like survivors of any life-threatening experience, I think many of those folks cannot or are not willing to admit that their situation is really as hopeless and as long-term as it truly is.

It’s almost like a take on Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” — come up with what is arguably the worst idea for a Broadway show and tie it to a fundraising event:

The one-night only, one-man show by America’s most listened to talk radio host will be a special benefit performance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “Rush On Broadway” will have a single performance on Oct. 18 at New York’s New Amsterdam Theater. The rare live appearance by Limbaugh will also feature a special introduction by ABC Radio Networks personality and WABC/New York afternoon host Sean Hannity.

I bet it will be SRO — Spewing Room Only. I’d like to see a sequel: “Rush In Hell.”

A Newsweek story has President Bush ending his vacation 24 hours earlier than he did:

When Air Force One dipped below the clouds on Tuesday so the president could peer out the window down at the disaster, the image was uncomfortably imperial.

Wrong:

In fact, Bush didn’t fly over New Orleans until Wednesday afternoon, a full 60 hours AFTER the hurricane… Had Newsweek, and the rest of the media, bothered paying more attention to the fact that our president stayed on vacation until the 3d day after the hurricane, they might have gotten this fact right.

They must not know how to use the Internets.

George Bush took a highly unusual and largely unreported measure last Thursday when he suspended the Jones Act to allow foreign-flagged oil tankers to transport oil to U.S. ports. Though the move was aimed at appeasing citizens who raged as gas prices jumped 75 cents in two days, it actually accomplished nothing — kind of like FEMA.

An arcane holdover from the 19th century, the Jones Act is designed to protect U.S. shipping interests from foreign competition. It prevents a foreign-flagged vessel from moving cargo between U.S. ports and requires foreign oil distributors to use U.S.-flagged ships to deliver petroleum products.

The Bush edict declared that foreign distributors that could not find a U.S.-flagged ship to deliver their oil could apply to the U.S. Maritime Administration for assistance in finding one. In the event that no U.S.-flagged ship could be found, MarAd would issue a “letter of non-availability” allowing the distributor to use a foreign-flagged vessel that would be cited for a Jones Act violation, but not fined.

Needless to say, foreign oil companies were confused, since it is U.S. Customs, not MarAd that administers the Jones Act. Further, although the Colonial Pipeline that moves oil from the Gulf to the South and Southeast was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, it was expected to by at 90% capacity by Sunday, eliminating the need for the supposed rush on U.S.-flagged ships.

Finally, besides the fact that no U.S.-flagged tankers were lost in the storm, thereby not creating the nonexistent shortage, Bush issued the order over the Labor Day holiday weekend when MarAd was closed. The pointless order is expires today, meaning that shippers had exactly Thursday afternoon and Friday to apply to MarAd to take advantage of the suspension of the Jones Act.

In the aftermath of Katrina, this is just another hollow, meaningless act of the Bush administration designed deflect attention from its mismanagement of the disaster.

“Our government failed those people in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it. One hundred percent of the people recognize that — that it was a failure.”

— Former President Bill Clinton

Vote in the CNN Poll: Do you agree with former President Clinton that government “failed” the people in the aftermath of Katrina? VOTE!

A shelter for hurricane evacuees was closed Sunday, Sept. 4, after more than 20 people fell ill in what could be an early sign of a public health crisis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Officials at the Biloxi, Miss., shelter suspected that those showing symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea had contracted dysentery — a painful, sometimes fatal intestinal disease — from fetid standing water.

“Who knows what they swallowed before they got here,” said Biloxi police Corporal Kayla Robert.

In addition to the risk of dehydration, health experts are warning of numerous potential illnesses refugees in New Orleans and the shelters around the region could be exposed to. Some, like hepatitis and salmonella, could lurk in contaminated water. Others, such as West Nile virus, could be transmitted by mosquitoes that thrive in stagnant waters.

“We have the potential for a crop of diseases we haven’t seen in years,” said Dr. Richard deShazo, head of the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Michael Leavitt, U.S. secretary of health and human services, left Washington for the Gulf region on Sept. 4 with a team of health and social service leaders. “We have the ingredients for a bad situation there,” Leavitt said on CNN Sunday, Sept. 4.

Leavitt was criticized after he said on Wednesday, Aug. 31, that officials were “gravely concerned about the potential for cholera, typhoid …”

Some experts say those diseases rarely suddenly appear in flood regions where they didn’t exist before. But who knows what diseases lurked in the slums of New Orleans and Biloxi?

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have moved quickly to dispel some of the misinformation regarding the health risks in the hurricane’s aftermath. Chief among those was Mayor Ray Nagin’s assertion on CNN Sunday that mosquitoes feeding on dead people would spread disease. As the CDC was quick to note, mosquitoes feed on blood, which requires a living organism.

According to the CDC, dead bodies pose little health risk, and diseases like cholera and typhoid are unlikely to erupt in the Gulf region. Let’s hope they are right.

Count us among Americans who yearn for the days, not so long ago, when James Lee Witt was the man our country turned to handle operations on the ground in times of crisis.

Witt served as served as FEMA director in the Clinton Administration, and handled 348 national crises with extreme competence.

Consider this: Of all the scandals trumped up by the Republicans during the Clinton era, not one was related to how those 348 disasters were handled.

Yesterday, after he was named as Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s liaison with FEMA, Witt was interviewed live by Rita Cosby on MSNBC. The full transcript follows, but here are the salient points:

I‘ve talked to emergency managers across this country, and firefighters across this country, and they told me … “You know what,” they said, “what [the Bush Administration has] done to FEMA is like driving [a stake in the] heart in emergency management in this country.”

[You] cannot expect a federal agency, like FEMA, to be able to fulfill its role and its responsibility to the American people [when] you take away the resources and … a lot of the funding. [You] have to work every day, every month, every week, to be able to make sure you partner with state and local emergency management, firefighters, to be able to respond together.

And if you don‘t plan, prepare, and exercise together, then you – it‘s difficult to respond together.

The mitigation prevention program in FEMA was a strong program. When we reorganized FEMA, we put in a division for mitigation prevention, working with state and local government, to minimize risk. It is almost null and void now…

While it is a hopeful sign that Witt is handling the situation for the state Louisiana, his presence on the scene is a constant reminder of how inadequate the federal team has been in fulfilling it’s responsibilities. We can only hope that they are able to turn the situation in the Gulf Coast around before there is another major disaster.

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As we have been saying, the blame game about who is responsible for the disaster in New Orleans is a fictional construct invented by the White House message machine. Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo outlines key facts about the responsibility of the federal government to deal with disasters like Hurricane Katrina:

Now, it seems to me there are three points that make sense to raise with all this data.

The first is the importance of keeping an eye on the big picture and that is the fact that this whole conversation we’re having now is not about substance, but procedural niceties, excuses which is it is beyond shameful for an American president to invoke in such a circumstance. We don’t live in the 19th century. All you really needed was a subscription to basic cable to know almost all of the relevant details (at least relevant to know what sort of assistance was needed) about what was happening late last week. The president and his advisors want to duck responsibility by claiming, in so many words, that the Louisiana authorities didn’t fill out the right forms. So what they’re trying to pull is something like a DMV nightmare on steroids.

Second, as long as the White House wants to play this game, there are various invocations of federal statutes in this proclamations. And we’d need a lawyer with relevant experience to pick apart whether the right sections and powers were invoked.

Third — and this is key — even on its own terms, the White House’s claims seem false on their face. The plain English of this documents shows that states of emergency had been declared on both the state and federal level before the hurricane hit and that at the state’s request the president had given FEMA plenary powers to “identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.”