Tag: Natural Disasters

Topic

It’s Like Katrina Except with White People

Trish

All I’m saying is it’s hard not to notice parallels with Katrina when you hear about flooding, evacuations, and levee breaks. But there are several key differences with the Fargo flood.

For one, the area is about 93 percent white, which could affect how some respond to the victims. For another, a competent president is in the White House this time and is on top of the situation. From FEMA:

Republican North Dakota Gov. Hoeven has been under fire by his own party for refusing to join grandstanders like Bobby Jindall who made a show of declining Pres. Obama’s stimulus assistance.

On Tuesday, President Obama declared a major disaster declaration for North Dakota. The President’s action made federal funding available to state and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations to help in flood fighting efforts.

Prior to the disaster declaration, North Dakota’s State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) was operating around the clock with support from FEMA’s Region VIII (Denver) Emergency Response Team (ERT), the national Incident Management Assistance Team (IMAT-West), the National Guard, the American Red Cross, and other federal partners including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“This is a true state, local, and federal effort, with volunteers and private citizens all doing their part,” said Governor John Hoeven. “We truly appreciate everyone’s hard work as well as their cooperation and commitment which is necessary to save lives and property.”

Hoeven, a Republican, has been under fire by his own party since he released his 2009 – 2011 budget. It was larger than its predecessors and including funding for such items as infrastructure improvements. He also refused to join grandstanders like Bobby Jindal who made a show of declining Pres. Obama’s stimulus assistance.

We will keep the residents of North Dakota and neighboring Minnesota in our thoughts this weekend. The waters are currently above predicted levels, which at 41 feet were higher than ever recorded, and expected to rise, possibly to 43 feet, and stay well above normal all week. This is truly a devastating event for the people in that area. The Red Cross is accepting donations and has an online database (and 1-800-REDCROSS hotline for those without computer access) to record their whereabouts and status so loved ones can locate them. Hang tough, North Dakota!

Cuba’s Hurting

Trish

Ike arrives in Cuba

Hurricane Ike devastated parts of Cuba and money is needed now to help people as they struggle to survive. Because of our country’s idiotic stance toward the aging and ailing Fidel Castro, it’s hard to get relief to those who need it.

The State Department allows only a very few organizations to assist, and one is the Friendship Association. What their web site lacks in professional glitz, its members make up in heart. In normal times, they provide dental care and hygiene, prenatal care and education, bicycles, wheelchairs, eye care, gardening assistance, sewing supplies, cultural projects, and more. They take no sides in the ongoing conflict between our two governments. And every dollar given actually goes to help.

St. Augustine resident Jo McIntire started the Friendship Association with his wife, Soledad, and now there are hundreds of members, including some in Colorado, Philadelphia and Chicago. It is one of the few groups in the United States to have such a long-standing license to travel to Cuba despite the embargo between the two countries…

McIntire said the group plans to fill a large container with items to send to Baracoa, a province of Guantanamo, to give aid in the wake of Ike…

“People can give checks to the Association, and we will buy items to put in the container,” he said. “We’ve sent more than 20 containers over the years. … We take trips every year to follow up on (the items we send).

“We monitor it to make sure it’s distributed to where it’s supposed to be.”

Here’s a link to a PayPal donation account and more pix. I hope you can help.

Nearly 1 Mil Evacuated in California – Limbaugh Says Crisis Is ‘Hyped’

Jon Ponder

Local news here in Southern California is reporting that upwards of 1 million people have been evacuated because of the fire storms. Last night, when the number was about half that, Keith Olbermann suggested that this could be the largest forced migration of Americans since the Civil War.

“I am very confident in our ability to do just about anything. You said not on to get overconfident but, I’ll tell you what, the Republican Party is more, gosh, we’re stronger than God Almighty himself.”
— Dittohead caller on Limbaugh’s show yesterday

But yesterday Rush Limbaugh told his easily deluded listeners that the mainstream media is “hyping” the wildfires — and the poor semi-retarded Dittoheads are believing it:

RUSH: No, I’ve been wondering about this, having not been out there. I know how media works. They love this kind of stuff. The worse they can make it sound, the better. The more crisis-prone, the more disaster-certain it is, the more excited by it they are — and I’ve been e-mailing people in Los Angeles. I’ve been e-mailing friends in Southern California. “Are you in trouble from the fires?”

“No, not really. It’s not anywhere near us.”
In fact, a couple people I e-mailed on Sunday didn’t even know about it ’til they got back home Sunday night, even though the fire has been raging through the weekend. You’re right. A lot of people are losing a lot of property here, but the idea that it may not be quite as bad as it is, is an interesting media study.

This is standard Limbaugh. “Global warming can’t real because it’s chilly in my living room. And if I can’t feel it, it is not happening.”

And who’s to blame for the fires — that, as Big Dan pointed out — he says are not happening? Take a guess:

RUSH: [And] these environmental groups, they are to blame for this … They are the ones that are making these fires.

Gotta love this from a caller — a Dittohead who is a Christian but apparently hasn’t gotten the word from church central that you’re not supposed to put mankind above the Almighty:

DITTOHEAD: I am very confident in our ability to do just about anything. You said not on to get overconfident but, I’ll tell you what, the Republican Party is more, gosh, we’re stronger than God Almighty himself.

I’ll bet God is pissed and She will smite this sinner very soon.

H/t: Big Dan

Why We Can’t Ignore the Termites in the Basement

Trish

How can governments, including ours, say it would hurt their economies to fix climate change? Don’t they realize, as Al Gore pointed out in the scene in An Inconvenient Truth with the gold bricks, that losing life as we know it not only costs more but trumps, well, everything?

PAX World Mutual Funds’ Julie Gorte, senior vice president of sustainable investing, explains the attitudes of those who think we have the luxury to ignore, or postpone dealing with, global warming.

The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later

I sort of divide all problems into two types. There’s a wolf-at-the-door problem, which is how we think about things like terrorism and taxes, and then there’s the termites-in-the-basement problem, which is what climate change is. The termites will destroy your house much more quickly and much more surely than some of those wolf-at-the-door problems, but you always have the feeling that you can get to them later — that we can cut our energy consumption, that we can replace fossil fuels, that we can cut emissions next year or the year after that, when we can afford it.

And we end up never getting to those problems, and then we wind up in a world where the sea level rises not 35 millimeters but 35 feet, and the disease vectors have expanded so that tropical diseases are all over North America and they affect our food supply and everything else. There are so many things that climate change can do that will make this world something we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes that I think it’s the most important thing that we need to focus on.

Why You Should Care About New Orleans

Trish

On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall near New Orleans, all the ink was about the progress, and lack thereof, in restoring the city and the rest of the Gulf coast.

We live in an era of failed leadership. Corrupt and incompetent politicians. Thieving CEOs. Priests as pedophiles. Media monopolies. A president’s unpopular, intractable war. Steroid-enhanced sluggers.

Two years later, Ron Fournier says it’s time to start learning the real lessons of Katrina, and they’re not about wind or water.

We need to wake up to the fact that we are all just one big storm or disaster away from being one of those people whose calls for help were answered by voice mail.

Katrina is old news, right? New Orleans — who cares? It’s just another big city with big problems, bad luck and bad weather. Get over it.

Actually, please don’t.

Don’t ever get over the tragedy of New Orleans. It’s your tragedy, too.

What happened to this historic city two years ago is more than the obvious cautionary tale of what might befall your community after a natural disaster or a terrorist strike. It’s also a sad reflection of what’s happening now — today, in your hometown and across an anxious and ailing nation…

If this country can’t help New Orleans rebound — if we and our leaders break the promises made to its citizens — what are the odds your health care will ever get cheaper? Your bridges safer? Your schools better?

“New Orleans is an incubator for all our nation’s ills,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Great Deluge,” a book about Katrina.

“If you study what’s going on in New Orleans, it’s just an exaggerated version of what’s hitting us in many areas of the country,” he said. “Just pick your topic.”

OK, let’s start from the top.

[…]

Good News and Bad News for Hurricane Victims — FEMA’s Outsourcing Emergency Relief

Buck Banks

One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration has been its willingness to outsource everything from IRS tax collections to intelligence agency functions to Social Security to the Iraq War. Now we find out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is skipping down the outsourcing path as well.

The state of Texas has already given up on FEMA and has instead arranged for Home Depot and Wal-Mart to provide water, ice and other supplies in case of an emergency. And FEMA is OK with that, as it fits perfectly with the agency’s new approach to emergency management:

So, if it’s no longer handling disaster logistics or disaster planning, what do we need FEMA for?

The most salient change is an increased reliance on the private sector — the outsourcing of much of the agency’s logistics to a contractor or contractors that will be in charge of acquiring, storing and moving emergency supplies. This arrangement, known as third-party logistics, is common in many industries and should make FEMA’s supply lines shorter and quicker, says Marco Bourne, FEMA’s director of policy and program analysis. Companies that specialize in third-party logistics are very good at what they do.

Well in that respect — being good at what they do — third-party logistics firms have a leg up on the feds. But wait, what is the recurring challenge with subcontractors? Oversight. Right, and FEMA has proven none too swift about that, too.

“It doesn’t make sense for FEMA to store commodities when [Defense Logistics Agency] does it and in quantities far greater than what we’d ever need,” Bourne says. “They do in a month what FEMA might do in a couple of years.”

The same could be said for large retailers. Bourne says FEMA always has encouraged state and local governments and emergency responders to work out agreements with the private sector, as Texas has done. But he admits that Hurricane Katrina — during which Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other companies contributed supplies — highlighted that need.

So, if it’s no longer handling disaster logistics or disaster planning, what do we need FEMA for?

When Will Bush Wake Up on Global Warming? Stardate Unknown

Trish

“The market-based approach seems to work.” — White House Spokesperson Tony Snow, commenting on the anti-strategy employed so far by the Bush Administration to fight global warming, which has brought natural systems around the world to the brink of collapse.

Remember the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise crew is in an alternate universe and everyone is lusty and mean, wears midriff t-shirts, and Spock has a beard?

Is Tony Snow living there? Because back here in this universe, I cannot conceive how anyone could look at the market-based approach to global warming and see something that comes anywhere close to “working.”

First Day of Hurricane Season — Three Weeks Early

Trish


By all indications, 2007 will be the year frogs rain down from the sky and sinkholes swallow the Rockies.

My area is under a tropical storm watch. The first named storm of the season is here. She is Tropical Storm Andrea, with top sustained winds of 45 mph. This is huge.

For those of you who don’t know the dates of hurricane season like you know your own phone number, it’s June 1 through Nov. 30.

June 1 — as in three weeks from now — is the official start. The earliest hurricane in our country’s history was Alma, which hit the Florida panhandle on June 9, 1966.

But don’t worry, the federal government is on it. They will release their predictions for the 2007 hurricane season on May 22. I wonder if they’ll predict the season will start on May 9.

By the time they release their forecast, we will have probably had two more storms, four or five more tornados, and the Georgia wildfires will have spread to Washington, D.C. where Bush will give a speech about how it would adversely affect the economy if we were to try to do anything about global warming.

Spoiling Everything Else Just to Use More Energy

Trish

The Sierra Club is reporting even more depressing news on a day that included the devastation of honeybees and no end to problems with the nation’s food supply.

Get a load of this:

Have any doubts about the motivation for this treachery? It doesn’t apply to Texas. Nuff said.

Jaws dropped last week when the DOE proposed its first two so-called “National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.” They covered the entirety of [Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey] and vast swaths of southern California, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and New York. Under everyone’s favorite bill, the Energy Policy Act of the 2005, the DOE can designate such corridors for new pipelines and powerlines. And if local or state officials want to protect their wilderness area, wetland, tribal burial ground, or Civil War battlefield — TOO BAD! The federal government can approve transmission lines over local objection and even if they conflict with other federal laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act.

Best of all, once they’re approved, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has been granted sweeping powers of eminent domain. So FERC can then swoop in, take your property from you, and turn it over Energy Company X so they can pad their bottom line.

Have any doubts about the motivation for this treachery? Wait, there’s more.

This provision of EPACT 2005 — never debated on the floor of the House — does include one Texas-sized loophole. As in, the whole state of Texas is excluded from this vast and likely unconstitutional power grab by the federal government.

Nuff said.

States Put at Risk from Bush Rip-off

Trish

How is the Bush government providing equipment for its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why, stealing it from the states of course.

What I want to know is where the billions of dollars of emergency appropriations for “the troops” have gone.

Florida has about 600 to 700 soldiers in Iraq. Members were sent overseas with their equipment, but when they come back, the gear often stays in the war zones.

The Florida Guard was down 500 Humvees and 600 trucks, short 4,000 pairs of night vision goggle and needed 30 more wreckers, spokesman Lt. Col. Ron Tittle said…

The Florida National Guard has only 53 percent of the dual-use equipment it once had for responding to a storm or domestic disturbance, a recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office found. Texas, California and Louisiana also have about half of their dual-use equipment available to non-deployed Army National Guard forces.

In light of the pilfering, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is worried about the Guard’s ability to respond to stateside disasters.

“Problems from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Florida National Guard further than ever before, leaving it without all the resources it should have for responding to a domestic crisis,” Nelson said. “Hurricane season is coming fast and we need to make sure the Guard has what it needs.”

The Guard is being a good soldier and saying it will be O.K.

…Tittle said sufficient manpower and equipment remained to respond to a major hurricane, and additional supplies could be borrowed from other states or rented if needed.

Rented? In the devastation, flooding, power outages, and chaos of a major storm, we’ll just trot off to the nearest open Rent-All and come back with a generator or a backhoe? I’m not seeing it.

What I want to know is where the billions of dollars of emergency appropriations for “the troops” have gone. I would not be surprised to hear that government equipment ended up in the hands of the private contractors in Iraq, or that fistfuls of that emergency money went there too.