Tag: Natural Disasters

Topic

New Emails Show FEMA Covering Its Ass in Miami A Year Before Katrina

Trish

People in Florida scratched their damp, sweaty heads in the fall of 2004 after four hurricanes in six weeks left much of the state without hot coffee in the morning, light before sunup or after sundown, or fuel for cars — the only source of charged cell phones, air conditioning and radio news.

People, that is, except in Dade County.

Miami was spared in 2004, although a year later God made an honest county of it by sending both Katrina and Rita. So how come FEMA’s intrepid director Michael Brown awarded so much aid to Dade County in 2004? That’s what one Florida newspaper wanted to know. South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

FEMA awarded more than $21 million in Miami-Dade for Hurricane Frances, the Labor Day weekend storm that struck 100 miles away.

Newly released e-mails of former FEMA Director Michael Brown show top federal officials scrambling to explain millions in disaster aid going to Miami-Dade County residents for a 2004 hurricane that missed the county and coaching Brown “not to appear defensive”…

“We need you calm cool and collected,” former FEMA chief of staff Patrick Rhode wrote in 2004 after the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had awarded more than $21 million in Miami-Dade for Hurricane Frances, the Labor Day weekend storm that struck 100 miles away. “We need our best spokesperson … to combat these issues in a diplomatic way to wave the flag for the admin -“

The 29 pages of emails were released this week only after a direct order from U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra on behalf of the Sun-Sentinel. In an amazing feat of foreshadowing, FEMA staffers kick around various strategies for covering up glaring malfeasance. Left out is any indication of why the agency actually gave so much money to Miami. Was it because South Florida is a gushing fountain of funding for Republican candidates across the nation? Or was it just because FEMA was totally and completely inept? Tough call.

“Should we say the density in population in Miami-Dade versus the other affected counties (just sheer numbers) to somewhat explain the disparity in funding,” [FEMA Press Aide LeaAnne] McBride wrote to seven FEMA officials. “However, FYI — the reporter and those she contacted have driven around looking for physical damages to justify the funding and that will not be seen because those type of damages just did not occur in Miami-Dade.”

The email makes crystal clear that whatever else was going on, politics was the biggest determining factor in FEMA staff’s decisions. McBride’s advice to Brown shows just how caught up in election year issues they were.

In another e-mail, McBride wrote Brown, “Be cautious not to appear defensive or show that the ridiculous questions get under your skin when you’re at the press conf today [Sun-Sentinal Reporter] Megan [O’Matz] will show up. Just don’t want your expressions to give away your exasperation with this non-issue the way that the President’s did in the first debate.”

No indeed. Brown could have done a lot worse than the blinking, lip-twitching, murder-on-his-tiny-mind-revealing the president was doing. Still, one wonders. The email shows an agency whose soul was long ago sold. More unsettling is the thought that we are still at the mercy of shallow cynics more concerned with CYA than with actually helping people like us.

Congress Set to Fight Over FEMA’s Fate

Buck Banks

Push for independence: With another hyperactive hurricane season set to begin in just over six weeks, Congress members are gearing up for a fight over whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency should remain under the control of the Department of Homeland Security or become a stand-alone agency answerable only to the president.

According to a report in Congress Daily:

Removing FEMA from DHS would only exacerbate the agency’s problems.
— House Homeland Security Committee

House Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., said Wednesday he wanted FEMA removed from Homeland Security and under the president’s direct control. “The response [to a disaster] has to be able to bring all the assets of the federal government together quickly,” Davis told reporters at the 2006 Homeland and Global Security Summit in Washington, organized by Equity International. (Davis headed a special House panel that investigated the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.)

But leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee say such a move would cripple the agency and the government’s ability to respond to disasters.

“Removing FEMA from DHS would only exacerbate the agency’s problems,” committee Republicans and Democrats said Wednesday in a joint statement, which aides said was not prepared as a response to Davis. “It would reduce FEMA’s access to the vast resources available within the department, create duplicative response efforts for natural and manmade disasters and significantly delay our ability to prepare for future emergencies. It is imperative that we strengthen FEMA while keeping it within DHS.”

A turf war is shaping up with members of both parties coming down on both sides of the issue.

House Transportation and Infrastructure Economic Development Subcommittee Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Pa., whose panel oversees emergency management issues, has drafted legislation that would remove FEMA from Homeland Security. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., has introduced a bill that would make FEMA an independent agency. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, says the agency should stay within DHS.

Bush’s Nomination of Paulison Causing ‘Exodus’ at FEMA

Buck Banks

Perils of cronyism: According to government labor union leaders, President Bush’s nomination of Federal Emergency Management Agency acting director R. David Paulison to be permanent director is causing middle managers to flee the agency.

GovExec.com reports that labor leaders are terming it an “exodus”:

“We have mid-level managers flying out the door [at FEMA],” said Charles Showalter, president of the American Federation of Government Employees’ National Homeland Security Council. “Any time you put a political appointee over public safety and operational issues, it scares the hell out of people.”

‘Any time you put a political appointee over public safety and operational issues, it scares the hell out of people.’
— Charles Showalter

Leo Bosner, a 27-year FEMA veteran and union representative, said Paulison’s 30 years of fire and rescue experience in Florida do not necessarily qualify him to lead FEMA, and called for someone with broader disaster management expertise. Bosner also was critical of Paulison’s support of FEMA remaining within DHS.

Apparently, before Paulison’s nomination as announced several candidates for the directorship had quietly asked to be removed from consideration. The unions asked for a broader search for a permanent director, but Republican Congress members came out in support of Paulison. The Dems appear to be waiting for confirmation hearings (which have not been scheduled) before publicly criticizing — or supporting — Paulison.

Note: Hurricane season begins in 49 days.

I Owe $30,000 — And So Do You

Trish

I just found out I’m deeper in the red than I thought. But at least I’m not alone. Every single American is right there with me, thanks to a Senate vote today to increase the national debt to $9 trillion. We’re all paying the price for Bush’s bad decisions, like tax breaks for the rich, pre-emptively going to war in Iraq and a delayed response to Hurricane Katrina.

It’s the fourth such move increasing the debt limit by a total of $3 trillion since Bush took office five years ago.

The measure allows the government to pay for the war in Iraq and finance Medicare and other big federal programs without raising taxes. It passed hours before the House was expected to approve another $91 billion to fund the war in Iraq and provide more aid to hurricane victims.

The partisan vote also came as the Senate continued debate on a $2.8 trillion budget blueprint for the upcoming fiscal year that would produce a $359 billion deficit for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

…It’s the fourth such move increasing the debt limit by a total of $3 trillion since Bush took office five years ago.

So how much is $9 trillion? Well, it’s got 12 zeros, but…

“It’s hard to understand what a trillion is. I don’t know what it is,” confessed Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, this week when debating the government’s staggering fiscal obligations.

This is so going to screw up my credit rating…
Comment by: mikefromtexas

It doesn’t help that the standard hand-held calculator comes nowhere close to computing numbers in the trillions. About the best it can do is 99,999,999.

John Nolan, a mathematics professor at American University in Washington, said… “But in terms of practical numbers it’s just overwhelming.”

So he conjured up a spending spree, something Americans might be able to relate to. “If you spent a million dollars a day for a million days (2,739 years),” you’d hit $1 trillion, Nolan observed…

The federal government has been on a spending binge. Just since 2002, the Republican-controlled Congress has had to hike the Treasury Department’s credit card limit four times, for a total of more than $3 trillion.

Allowing Bush’s tax cuts in the first place was idiotic but continuing to squander America’s former wealth this way is criminal. The worst part is we’re all going along with it. Is it O.K. if I post-date my check?

New Orleans — And Even Brown? — Tell the Truth About Katrina

Trish

Gotta love the people of New Orleans as they put on Mardis Gras.

Brown: “Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that

This year’s parade theme was C’est Levee, a pun on the French expression c’est la vie , or that’s life.

Floats and props built for the Saturday evening parade in the French Quarter included hand-pulled carts elaborately decorated with blue tarps, fake broken levees, cardboard travel trailers and effigies of Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D).

One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting that the state might get better treatment from the French than it has from the U.S. government.

Indeed. As PR editor Jon notes, Bush Etc. didn’t give a crap about the people of New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, except for losing one day of vacation.

And even I had to hand it to Brownie the other day. He did a heckuva job at nailing the feeling at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.

“Had there been a report coming out . . . that said, ‘Yes, we’ve confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee,’ then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could,” Brown said.

But how do you exploit the weather for political gain? True, Bush did use it as a convenient exit strategy to get away from a summer of press coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s fruitless attempts to get him to acknowledge her. But let’s face it, a hurricane doesn’t offer the “talkin’ tough” and fanning-the-flames-of-fear opportunities of a terror attack.

Meanwhile, New Orleans makes the best of it.

The Mid-City parade, scheduled for Feb. 26, will have floats called “New Orleans Culture” — that’s culture as in mold — and “I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone,” a bitter twist on the line from Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

John Edwards: Americans Need Hope and Inspiration

Trish

Say what you will, but I think John Edwards has it right.

America needs leaders who understand that the country needs to be inspired again, former Sen. John Edwards said Friday.

Edwards gets that Americans like you and me are…better than snarky rich idiots who act like assholes because they know deep down inside no amount of money or external success makes up for the fact they are small, nasty people

Edwards said that after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Americans reached out to volunteer and take families into their homes.

“It says something about the heart and character of our country,” said Edwards, a Democrat. “What we need is we need leaders who tap into that.”

Ain’t it the truth? Full disclosure: I voted for Edwards in the Florida primary in 2004, even though the press and my party had already given the state to Kerry. I see something in him that I saw in Carter and in Clinton, and it’s not just the Southern thing, although “not for nothin’,” as we say down here.

Edwards now heads the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina law school and has previously said he has not decided whether he will run for president in 2008…

“The people I’ve met, they violate every stereotype that exists about people who are struggling,” Edwards said.

He said the great moral issue in the country today is that 37 million people live in poverty.

“They have never had a champion,” Edwards said. “They can’t even imagine someone actually being willing to speak up for them.”

Contrast Edwards’ remarks with those of former First Lady Barbara Bush, who in the wake of the most devastating natural disaster of our times looked on her idea of the bright side for the evacuees:

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them. They are faring far better than before Katrina.

Edwards gets that Americans like you and me are better than that, better than snarky rich idiots who act like assholes because they know deep down inside no amount of money or external success makes up for the fact they are small, nasty people.

During his travels, Edwards said he has learned that there is a hunger in the United States for something big and important that people can be involved in and inspired by…

“We need hope,” Edwards said. “We need the belief inside us that we are good, strong, honorable people and we can do great things together.”

Somebody say “Amen!”

Avian Flu: Turkish Samples Show Mutations

Buck Banks

From the journal “Nature”:

Scientists studying virus samples from the human outbreak of avian influenza in Turkey have identified three mutations in the virus’s sequence. They say that at least two of these look likely to make the virus better adapted to humans.

The Turkey outbreak is unusual, because of the large family clusters of cases; the fact that many of those infected have only mild symptoms; and the speed with which infections have arisen — 20 cases, including four deaths, in less than two weeks.

So scientists are urgently trying to establish whether the virus is behaving differently in this outbreak from previous ones in Asia. In particular, international teams are investigating the possibility that the virus is moving between people.

“With such a large number of cases within such a short period of time, human-to-human transmission is something that we’ve had to consider,” says Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman at World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters in Geneva.
[…]

2005: Year One

Trish

Ten years ago, what American would have believed they’d someday be living in a country that denies global warming and evolution? In 2005, nature provided all the proof of herself we need.

The Sierra Club is calling it Year One. Bill McKibben:

So far we’ve raised the temperature of the planet by about one degree, and that’s been enough to set the poles to melting and the winds to roaring. Even if, right now, we started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we’d probably still be stuck with a couple more degrees of warming, and the world would change more profoundly than at any time in human history.

…a month before Katrina hit, [the] Massachusetts Institute of Technology…published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that in the past half century tropical storms have been lasting 60 percent longer and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful. Two weeks after Katrina struck, Science published another paper, by a Georgia Institute of Technology team, demonstrating that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes have become twice as likely in recent decades… Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to monster size in the abnormally hot waters of the Gulf. Within a day, a million people were homeless. That’s far too many, we soon found out, for the federal government to cope with. And it’s just the beginning…

Katrina cast up ironies like so much flotsam and jetsam. The storm, for instance, wreaked particular vengeance on Mississippi, a state governed by Haley Barbour (R), who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President George W. Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Thanks to Barbour and the other lobbyists-turned-administrators who throng the White House, the federal government has done exactly nothing to slow the progress of climate change. Today we’re emitting 20 percent more carbon than we were in 1990, when scientists were first issuing their prescient warnings. […]

Bush’s Broken Promises to Katrina Victims

Pensito Editors

He really does not care: President Bush only roused himself to become engaged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina because it would have been political suicide to do anything less. But he has moved on, and, predictably, so has his government, leaving the citizens of the Gulf Coast to fend for themselves:

Officials from both parties say the bottlenecks have occurred in large part because of a leadership vacuum in Washington, where President Bush and Congress have been preoccupied for weeks with Iraq, deficit reduction, the C.I.A. leak investigation and the Supreme Court.

Less than three months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, relief legislation remains dormant in Washington and despair is growing among officials here who fear that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight.

As evidence, the state and local officials cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes they say are crucial to rebuilding the city and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return, including measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured.

“There is a real concern that we will lose the nation’s attention the longer this takes,” said Representative Bobby Jindal, a Republican from Metairie, just west of New Orleans. “People are making decisions now about whether to come back. And every day that passes, it will be a little harder to get things done.”

Officials from both parties say the bottlenecks have occurred in large part because of a leadership vacuum in Washington, where President Bush and Congress have been preoccupied for weeks with Iraq, deficit reduction, the C.I.A. leak investigation and the Supreme Court.

Congressional leaders have been scrambling to rein in spending, and many in Washington have grumbled that Louisiana’s leaders have asked for too much, while failing to guarantee that the money will be spent efficiently and honestly.

By contrast, many say, Washington’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks seemed more focused and sustained.

Now, with the holiday season days away and the 2006 midterm elections just around the bend, many Louisiana officials say they fear the sense of urgency that spurred action in September is swiftly draining away.

By the way, weren’t the Republicans going to investigate the fatal fumbling of the government’s actions during the story? What ever happened with that?

Katherine Harris in Trouble – and Denial

Trish

Hope springs eternal for Florida’s U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris in her bid to take Sen. Bill Nelson’s seat in 2006, no matter how bad things look. And they look awful.

Last week, the news climaxed when, on the same day, word broke that Harris’ campaign manager had quit and a poll showed her 24 points behind Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

That followed stories in October about how her fundraising, considered her strong point, was disappointing.

Not to worry, Harris said, showing a Rove-worthy capacity for surreal spin.

…in an interview late in the week, Harris insisted the campaign remains healthy, the bad news has been over-hyped and “We have turned a corner.”

The problems, Harris said, are only temporary. “We’re completely viable, and we have a great chance.”

Harris went through the predictable routine of questioning the poll’s accuracy and citing how early it is in the process. Oddly, she also took the unusual tactic of blaming the weather and her own record.

She acknowledged the campaign has had stumbles — caused in part, she said, by the fall hurricanes and a focus on her congressional work.

“The only issue where we have to focus now is fundraising,” she said. “We will not pay much attention to polling a year out. A year to go is a world of difference, and polls won’t change until we go up on TV.”

The scary part is, she’s right. Bill Nelson, God love him, isn’t Mr. Excitement when speaking. And Katherine has started working the cult of personality thing pretty hard.

I wish I felt safe ruling her out but even if she fails to win over her own party by its unofficial Dec. 31 deadline, the prospects for her possible replacements – like Florida House Speaker Allan Bense – worry me even more. Let’s hope the newfound questioning of Republicans by the voters continues and intensifies.